Picture by Matti Mattlila per creative commons at:
Today I went through the tutorials for streaming movies, etc. The first area was video hosting resources. Most of these were sites that we have heard of and used. They were places like You Tube, Teacher Tube, Viddler and Blip. I had not used Viddler before being in this program and found it to be faster for uploads than You Tube by a mile. Since it was faster and easier to use as far as my experience went I switched my student film account to Viddler. Unforeseen consequence, my students were not happy with that decision. In their view, You Tube is the dominating supreme commander that leads the market. Therefore they believe that their films will have more exposure and more viewings on You Tube. I was not sure how to respond to that and am still not. I asked them to research the various sites and find which ones will not only create a viral effect, but will actually allow their work to be seen and responded to in a more critical light. They are still getting back to me.
The next area was video streaming tools. Here there were a few I had heard of and an few I had not. One I had heard of was Ustream. Come on, these are the people that brought you the sickly sweet puppy-cam. One I had not heard of was Stickam, another version of the Ustream idea. I played with both for a while and found that I tend to prefer Ustream for live vodcasting with the Ustream producer tool, but I found group chat to be much easier with Stickam. Both were very fun to play with and gave me an idea to have students try both and write a compare and contrast review and then vodcast it.
The second part of this section was tools like Screenflow. I have been looking for a good Screenflow alternative, but have found few until Jing. This was really fun and worked great on my PC, which is all the district is ever going to buy. The only limitation is that it is limited to five-minute sequences. The upside is that it is limited to five-minute sequences. This will be a great tool for my students to create projects with showing their work on the farm or their latest Spore creation.
The third area was on YouTube download tools. As a class we played with a few of these previously but the extra references for other types of video downloads, plus some other great features for adding video into a blog. The one site that I found missing from all of these references was Youddl.com I really like this site because you have the option of downloading the video as an mp4 or an flv. When using tools like Udutu, being able to download as a flash file means a very fast upload and no conversion time. This tool saved me many hours on my project.
The final section is video creation tools and one area that I feel I can comment the least about. You see I am some what of a snob in this area. I was trained to edit film using Avid and video using Canopus. Tools like Movie Creator, imovie, Premier Express and Final Cut Express are so inferior and useless to me that I abhor using them. I will freely admit that tools like Adobe Premier are extremely complicated. However, they are complicated in the same way as Microsoft Excel. There are hundreds of tools in Excel that most people do not use, but they can still get it to add columns of numbers. Same with Premier. You may never use all the functions but you can still crank out a good quality, well edited media piece with just the basic knowledge. Overall this was a great batch of resources and tools that I intend to keep and use.
Great summary of the tools. Thanks.
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