I wasn’t surprised at the negative comments that appeared in the story write-up about the Waterloo Region Public school board planning to open its firewall to Facebook this September. Any time anything “new” is explored in education, wide-spread skepticism and reservation become rampant. I do find it hard to believe that not one student The Record spoke with felt that Facebook should be openly welcome in the schools. Or, maybe students weren’t asked about the potential benefits at all. Certainly, the experts in social media were not consulted.
I just returned this week from Scotland where I interviewed Dr. Tracey Alloway of Stirling University about using Facebook as a learning tool. Alloway has completed extensive research in the area and is currently meeting with her research team to write up and publish the results of her findings. What she told me was that social media, particularly Facebook, builds and exercises working memory –an important part of processing and managing incoming information. She likens working memory to a series of post-it notes that are sorted and pieced together to develop comprehension of a greater concept. Her studies also showed that using Facebook can actually increase the IQs of teens, improve multi-tasking skills, and raise Oxytocin levels –a chemical in the brain that helps us feel pleasure and fight depression.
While it is likely that students will continue to use Facebook to socialize, the novelty will wear off and with some guidance, they will find academically productive uses for the social media tool as well. Cyberbullying will become much less of a concern as teachers and parents become a guiding presence. Study groups, peer tutoring, and career networks will continue to develop as learning continues during and after school hours. With some lessons in digital literacy and digital citizenship, students will have a safe and empowering forum in which to communicate in the anytime, anyplace world they have created for themselves.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Sunday, March 14, 2010
The Lone Shooter
I miss having my friend Mike with me on shoots. We were a great team. Mike took the stills and looked after the audio while I operated the camera. This year I have been filming on my own a lot. I feel like one of those one-man bands with a drum attached to my front and a drumstick rigged to my arm, harmonica at my lips, tambourines in between my knees and a horn on my belt. I often wonder if that's kind of how I look to people when I go out on shoots.
I find it tough to have to think about and monitor all the equipment myself. I've been interviewing people while having an ear bud placed in my ear to monitor for interfering background sounds. I am constantly scanning the camera viewer for proper headroom, noseroom, leadroom, light balance, tonal mergers and the audio v/u levels. My mic stand holds the boom now and I'm constantly checking it so that it's not in my shot, so that it's pointed in the right direction, so that it's not placed where someone will trip over it.
Over the next two months I will be flying solo to Boston, Vancouver and the U.K. to shoot my documentary. I'm having nightmares already of forgetting to white balance, charge my batteries, put a battery in the boom, plug my XLR in all the way, forgetting to check for stereo sound and failing to format my SDHC card properly. There's a lot that can go wrong on a shoot, especially when there's no one else looking out for you. Just as the airplane pilots will be doing before taking me away to shoot my doc, I'm going to follow a standard checklist. I'll post it once it's finished, though it's specific to my equipment set-up. Maybe I'll even have a story later on about how the checklist saved a shoot.
I find it tough to have to think about and monitor all the equipment myself. I've been interviewing people while having an ear bud placed in my ear to monitor for interfering background sounds. I am constantly scanning the camera viewer for proper headroom, noseroom, leadroom, light balance, tonal mergers and the audio v/u levels. My mic stand holds the boom now and I'm constantly checking it so that it's not in my shot, so that it's pointed in the right direction, so that it's not placed where someone will trip over it.
Over the next two months I will be flying solo to Boston, Vancouver and the U.K. to shoot my documentary. I'm having nightmares already of forgetting to white balance, charge my batteries, put a battery in the boom, plug my XLR in all the way, forgetting to check for stereo sound and failing to format my SDHC card properly. There's a lot that can go wrong on a shoot, especially when there's no one else looking out for you. Just as the airplane pilots will be doing before taking me away to shoot my doc, I'm going to follow a standard checklist. I'll post it once it's finished, though it's specific to my equipment set-up. Maybe I'll even have a story later on about how the checklist saved a shoot.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Music for Documentary Production
So I asked around to find a couple of good places for musical scoring of documentaries to save my time in compiling some huge list. DeWolfe out of the U.K. has some great tracks. I've been told Andy Quin is a favourite artist. The cost is 500 dollars for corporate videos and 50 dollars for student productions. Westar Music charges 59 dollars for corporate use of music tracks.
The Stock Footage Issue
If you've never looked at the price of stock footage before, you would be surprised by the varying prices and quality out there. Recently I was asked to do a corporate video that would feature some shots from news broadcasters mixed in with some transportation shots and archived shots. Here's what I found.
1. News footage is extremely expensive. A colleague told me that CTV is the least expensive. When I checked on-line I found that it costs a minimum of 100 dollars an hour in search fees and a minimum of 200 dollars an hour in transfer fees. For Educational non-broadcast (Internet-purposed) videos the footage is cheapest at 10 dollars a second with a 20 second minimum. It's 15 dollars a second for Educational broadcast TV. Home video is actually higher at 20 dollars a second. Corporate one-country fees are 25 dollars a second. Just for fun, I'll add in the cost for commercial promo spots. Viewed world-wide, the cost is 100 dollars a second. Here's the CTV rate card and again, I've been told this is the cheapest place to go for footage.
2. Although rights run out on older archived footage entering the public domain, it can be difficult to get a hold of the footage. You can go-online at the Internet Archive to find footage that has entered the public domain and can be used for free but it's difficult to search through their database for archived footage. I would suggest monitoring Miro for works that are constantly entering the public domain. As for obtaining archived footage for a fee I found a great shot of a Ford T model car at Getty Images for 700 dollars for use by corporate videos. Clearly, I will have to do more research in this area.
3. Royalty free footage comes in all kinds of qualities and prices. For the most part, you get what you pay for. Revostock has great SD footage for around 20 dollars and HD for 30 dollars. Corbis Motion has high quality shots that can get pricey. I found an F-16 fighter jet for 349 dollars. Productiontrax has some shots in the 10 dollar range (they also have audio tracks). Pond5 has over 325 000 shots starting at 5 dollars a shot and also carries sound effects and music tracks starting at 2 dollars. A Luna Blue has HD shots that start at 40 dollars and SD NTSC shots at 30. Artbeats has beautiful nature scenes and time lapses. The company charges a 30 dollar service fee on every order. My favourite site for anyone getting started in collecting royalty free shots is Footage Firm. They don't have a huge variety and seem to specialize in computer generated backgrounds but they often have free footage on their site. You can also get bulk shots on DVDs for reasonable prices. Another fairly reasonably priced site for footage is Apex Stock. Shutterstock does some interesting work with wide angle and fish eye lenses.
For even more links to stock footage suppliers, a fantastic site with lots of links is Stock Footage Online.
1. News footage is extremely expensive. A colleague told me that CTV is the least expensive. When I checked on-line I found that it costs a minimum of 100 dollars an hour in search fees and a minimum of 200 dollars an hour in transfer fees. For Educational non-broadcast (Internet-purposed) videos the footage is cheapest at 10 dollars a second with a 20 second minimum. It's 15 dollars a second for Educational broadcast TV. Home video is actually higher at 20 dollars a second. Corporate one-country fees are 25 dollars a second. Just for fun, I'll add in the cost for commercial promo spots. Viewed world-wide, the cost is 100 dollars a second. Here's the CTV rate card and again, I've been told this is the cheapest place to go for footage.
2. Although rights run out on older archived footage entering the public domain, it can be difficult to get a hold of the footage. You can go-online at the Internet Archive to find footage that has entered the public domain and can be used for free but it's difficult to search through their database for archived footage. I would suggest monitoring Miro for works that are constantly entering the public domain. As for obtaining archived footage for a fee I found a great shot of a Ford T model car at Getty Images for 700 dollars for use by corporate videos. Clearly, I will have to do more research in this area.
3. Royalty free footage comes in all kinds of qualities and prices. For the most part, you get what you pay for. Revostock has great SD footage for around 20 dollars and HD for 30 dollars. Corbis Motion has high quality shots that can get pricey. I found an F-16 fighter jet for 349 dollars. Productiontrax has some shots in the 10 dollar range (they also have audio tracks). Pond5 has over 325 000 shots starting at 5 dollars a shot and also carries sound effects and music tracks starting at 2 dollars. A Luna Blue has HD shots that start at 40 dollars and SD NTSC shots at 30. Artbeats has beautiful nature scenes and time lapses. The company charges a 30 dollar service fee on every order. My favourite site for anyone getting started in collecting royalty free shots is Footage Firm. They don't have a huge variety and seem to specialize in computer generated backgrounds but they often have free footage on their site. You can also get bulk shots on DVDs for reasonable prices. Another fairly reasonably priced site for footage is Apex Stock. Shutterstock does some interesting work with wide angle and fish eye lenses.
For even more links to stock footage suppliers, a fantastic site with lots of links is Stock Footage Online.
Affordable HD camera with audio input!
Could it be true? Is Canon releasing a true HD camera with a mic input? I can hear Comm Tech teachers across the province cheering already. I've rounded up some of the details I found on the release of the new Canon Vixia HF R100. The camera is due to arrive this month, though I've noticed several web stores are still taking advance orders for the camera. The cam sells for about 500 dollars U.S.
PC World did an article on the camera a short while ago.
The Vixia HF R100 records to an SDHC/SDXC slot and records in MPEG4-AVC/H.264. Like its higher-end cousins, the dual-storage-format R series camcorder offers the Relay Recording feature. It also employs manual controls and a mini input for mic and an output for headphones.
Here are some more specs for the HF R100.
Because of its one-chip CCD, the camera also works great in low-lighting conditions.
PC World did an article on the camera a short while ago.
The Vixia HF R100 records to an SDHC/SDXC slot and records in MPEG4-AVC/H.264. Like its higher-end cousins, the dual-storage-format R series camcorder offers the Relay Recording feature. It also employs manual controls and a mini input for mic and an output for headphones.
Here are some more specs for the HF R100.
Because of its one-chip CCD, the camera also works great in low-lighting conditions.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
SDHC cards and speed class
Thought I got a great deal on SDHC cards the other day, and I did; it's just that I can't use them for what I had hoped to use them for. I bought 2 16 gig SDHC cards for use in the Panasonic HMC-150. They are class 4, the minimum requirement for use in the camera as outlined in the manual. I have since read posts and heard from others in the field that Panasonic recommends class 6. I'd like to know what the use is of writing in a manual that the camera will work with class 4 but neglect to write in that class 6 is recommended in order to avoid drop-outs in video recording.
I also ran some tests to compare class 6 and class 10 on the Panasonic yesterday. I didn't notice any difference. No dropouts in either class and the file transfer rate between card and computer was exactly the same. (1 minute for a gig total of 16 files) Not sure there's any use to going up to class 10 with this card.
I also ran some tests to compare class 6 and class 10 on the Panasonic yesterday. I didn't notice any difference. No dropouts in either class and the file transfer rate between card and computer was exactly the same. (1 minute for a gig total of 16 files) Not sure there's any use to going up to class 10 with this card.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Using DimDim for Webinars
What I really like about DimDim is that you don't have to download any software on your computer, except for the occasional plug-in if your computer is missing a feature (I had to download a plug-in to enable the whiteboard technology). You can create an account and sign in from anywhere.
DimDim has great collaborative tools as well. Users can switch to a shared whiteboard and flip to Internet web pages, as well as share PowerPoint presentations and other files.
The screen capture that it comes with is not as convenient to use, so I would suggest using a separate program if you are after video quality and you need the file right away. The company emails you a link after your recorded session so that you can download it. However, it is difficult to say how long you may have to wait. I waited for over an hour and decided to go to bed. The email had come to me the next day. The other difficulty I had was while using my MacBook Pro. It really had a hard time recognizing the webcam and then keeping it hooked up was also a problem. My Toshiba Satellite had no problems. One caution is that when you go to full screen on the web cam feeds, the program has to go through the process of re-recognizing the device again, which can cause a bit of an interruption in the connection.
When sending e-vites out for people to join you in a web room, it can take up to half an hour to receive, so it is best to use your own email or tell your guests in advance what your room name is so they can find you that way instead. I experienced that as a test between two computers in the same home. I'm wondering if it's because I was using a free account. Dr. Tracey Alloway sent me an e-vite form Stirling University in Scotland and it was immediately in my mailbox.
DimDim has great collaborative tools as well. Users can switch to a shared whiteboard and flip to Internet web pages, as well as share PowerPoint presentations and other files.
The screen capture that it comes with is not as convenient to use, so I would suggest using a separate program if you are after video quality and you need the file right away. The company emails you a link after your recorded session so that you can download it. However, it is difficult to say how long you may have to wait. I waited for over an hour and decided to go to bed. The email had come to me the next day. The other difficulty I had was while using my MacBook Pro. It really had a hard time recognizing the webcam and then keeping it hooked up was also a problem. My Toshiba Satellite had no problems. One caution is that when you go to full screen on the web cam feeds, the program has to go through the process of re-recognizing the device again, which can cause a bit of an interruption in the connection.
When sending e-vites out for people to join you in a web room, it can take up to half an hour to receive, so it is best to use your own email or tell your guests in advance what your room name is so they can find you that way instead. I experienced that as a test between two computers in the same home. I'm wondering if it's because I was using a free account. Dr. Tracey Alloway sent me an e-vite form Stirling University in Scotland and it was immediately in my mailbox.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
