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I just spent a bit of time going through the iTunes, Pandora, Last.fm, Audible and Garage Band tutorials. I have a Pandora account so I was familiar with how it worked and it seems that Last .fm is the same sort of system. I also am savvy enough to figure out how to use iTunes to find a podcast. What struck me was that these guys at MacMost have a job. The one guy that review Pandora and Last.fm spoke so fast that you could hardly understand him and the person doing the iTunes demo must think that he is JJ Abrams using shaky cam. Seriously, after about a minute of the demo I was getting nausea from bouncing all around his screen. I realize he was trying to show us where things were on the screen, but using mouse follow was not the best way to do that.
The tutorial on how to use Last.fm was just horrible. Quiet mumbling does not a good video make. The mumbling was interspersed with long periods of silence while we once again bounced around the screen Abrams style. Seriously, can we please let go of the Blair Witch camera style? On top of the bad camera and sound work you really couldn’t see anything on his screen. You are better off going to the website and figuring it out yourself.
The Garage Band 101 tutorial showed about 5 seconds of the program, the rest was the host jamming to the rhythm that he created, but at least the camera was stable and the sound was good. However, If I was trying to learn Garage Band this video would have taught me nothing.
Once back to the audacity tutorial we were back to nausea cam. Being that it jumped around so much I found I could not watch this.
Overall, I would say this is a group of tutorials that are great examples of what not to do if you are trying to teach someone using video. The Lynda videos and several of the ones that our instructors have made through this course are much better examples of what you should do. If I had to give one rule it would be hold the camera still!
The tutorial on how to use Last.fm was just horrible. Quiet mumbling does not a good video make. The mumbling was interspersed with long periods of silence while we once again bounced around the screen Abrams style. Seriously, can we please let go of the Blair Witch camera style? On top of the bad camera and sound work you really couldn’t see anything on his screen. You are better off going to the website and figuring it out yourself.
The Garage Band 101 tutorial showed about 5 seconds of the program, the rest was the host jamming to the rhythm that he created, but at least the camera was stable and the sound was good. However, If I was trying to learn Garage Band this video would have taught me nothing.
Once back to the audacity tutorial we were back to nausea cam. Being that it jumped around so much I found I could not watch this.
Overall, I would say this is a group of tutorials that are great examples of what not to do if you are trying to teach someone using video. The Lynda videos and several of the ones that our instructors have made through this course are much better examples of what you should do. If I had to give one rule it would be hold the camera still!
I went through all of the tutorials and I basically had the same opinion. In my multimedia class I could actually use these as examples of what quality looks like and then how not to settle in their own podcasts. I teach my students all the time that they must have quality video and audio if they expect anyone to hear or watch what they have to say. For making podcasts the best set of tutorials can be found through iTunes. Although it is made specifically for GarageBand the tutorials still have great points that anyone can learn from. They are titled “Learn to Podcast” if you want to search for them.
ReplyDeleteouch... update tutorials, check!
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