Electric Chalk

Well, top marks for a speedy answer from the previous post. Here’s what they said…

“We have some disabled (because buggy and limited) development code that permitted upload of already exported files to a FTP server. This was last available in 1.3.3 Beta:

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/audacity/audacity-win-1.3.3.zip

We have longer term aims to improve this and allow direct exporting from the Audacity window to a server but this is not a current priority.

Also the FTP implementation has a number of potential security issues to be worked out. 

I don’t personally use SharePoint so I can’t advise you whether a FTP solution would work or something else is needed. Web searches are not all that helpful, but there is an article here about uploading files to Sharepoint:

http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/sharepoint-blog/windows-service-to-upload-documents-into-sharepoint-2007-14358

Audacity projects require the .aup file and the _data folder to be present, so those would have to be put in a zip file. If the project includes imported files, they must be copied into the _data folder if they cannot be accessed locally or on the network:

http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Sending_your_work_to_others     

If you can advise more about the Open Office feature to export to web folders, we can certainly log it as an Audacity feature request. 

Thanks 

Gale 

Audacity Team“ 

I’m shattered! 

We’re working with one of our partnerships schools on a project with some 11-year olds where they record a desert-island diary entry in Audacity and create an mp3 out of it.

We want to be able to then put the mp3 onto the VLE but have hit a real snag.

Far from making the process of saving and sharing work easier, having the learning platform involved makes it harder.

The issue is that when you log into the VLE (MS Sharepoint in our case) where there is a document folder for saved work in some applications like Open Office and MS Office you can see these folders when you click on “Save Project As…” 

The problem with Audacity is that it can’t see these web-based folders so at the moment we have to go through a lengthy process of saving the work in progress to either a document folder or the local machine and then copying and pasting into the web folder.

This is harder than it sounds when you have a reluctant, stroppy group of Y11’s and understandably the partner teachers are anxious about taking the project on themselves as it seems too complicated.

I have a dual plan of attack on this and I’ll keep you updated on the outcome.

I’m going to BETT this year so will accost the Microsoft stand for their advice but I’ve also emailed the Audacity developer team with the suggestion that they include the ability to sve to web folders in a future release.

It’ll be interesting to see how much value they developers put on finding a solution and whether a pleb like me can influence development of a piece of open-source software.

NOTE: Here’s an update… (10th Dec 2008)

I want to showcase some work that one of our partnership schools has done with our help.

Tom Gardiner at Birley Community College in Sheffield finished this project this week. It’s part of a wider module on character archetypes and comparing Batman Begins with the 1960’s Batman movie. For this exercise a group of Y9’s storyboarded a trailer about a superhero character they had developed. With our help they Photoshopped themselves into various environments and then put the movies in a photostory with a soundtrack of their choice. 

It was an interesting group being all boys and being neither high or low achievers they rarely get a chance to do special activities. We did it over 2 stages, the first at the school taking the pictures and the second at our City Learning Centre completing the Photoshopping and then putting the photostory together using Logotron’s Revelation Sight and Sound. As a side note, their behaviour  was excellent despite being locked into one activity for a whole school day.

This is the example we used as inspiration to get the students thinking about what they could achieve technically. (I did it - I don’t mind if you think it’s crap!)

This is the work of 2 groups.

 I really wish there was a film called “I, Penguin”. Genius!

I think the real effectiveness of this project came not from the use of IT but because of the choice of group by Tom and the focus on the preparation and writing that happened before any student got near a computer or camera.

NOTE: All the images (apart from the students’ own) come from the Creative Commons section of Flickr. I meant to give credit for them but neglected to keep the URL’s. My apologies to the owners. If the images are yours and you would like credit please leave a comment and I will amend the post.

The music was taken from the Audio Network Production Library (on schools’ broadband package.

A wee while ago the Guardian newspaper did one of their excellent little guides to making video. I had a paper copy but just came across it online here.

If you are about to venture into the murky world of digital video you could do a lot worse than start here. There are a bunch of very accessible articles on a wide range of issues.

Particularly good are:

• How to make a bloody awful video
• Making sound effects
• Filming a horror movie (great for those ubiquitous media projects that always seem to turn into horror trailers!)

Hope you find it useful…

This is quite a tough decision for schools especially if no one has much experience of digital video work. I’m assuming here that the software is going to be used for KS3 (11+) and above and mainly for media and IT projects, specialist stuff in other words. I’ll talk about choices for primary and non-specialist at some point in the future.

The default position should be to ask if you can get by with Windows Moviemaker (WMM) which comes free with XP and Vista. (If you are lucky enough to have Macs then you have the joys of iMovie to look forward to - a much better option and I bear you no ill will). Be careful though. We had a situation where we helped one of our schools buy some SD card video cameras only find that XP Moviemaker throws a hissy fit if you try and import the MPEGs off the card. Really MMW is only good for sequencing clips and adding rudimentary text and audio.

If you want to do something a bit more adventurous though you’ll need to bother the bursar for some cash. By adventurous I mean things like chroma key work, proper visual effects and proper sound editing (much overlooked in media work.)

There are 4 main options open to you if you want to keep your costs south of £200 a license:

• Sony Vegas
• Pinnacle Studio
• Ulead VideoStudio
• Adobe Premiere Elements

I’ll come right out and say I’d recommend Adobe any time but actually any will do the job. The functions are pretty similar so it’s just a question of interface and user-friendliness.

I’ll also be honest and say I loathe Sony. They make expensive and over-designed baubles and a bit like Apple they kind of demand you commit to a Sony world if you buy their stuff. At least Apple make it fun. The Vegas software is popular, feature-rich and I know that some people absolutely swear by it but it is too idiosyncratic for my liking. You want things to fall under your mouse when editing. It requires so much patience anyway that what you don’t want is to search for things that have been put in counter-intuitive places and given funny names.

Pinnacle is the probably the biggest seller and comes from the people that make the professional Avid software which is world-class. However, both Pinnacle and it’s clone Ulead Video Studio are aimed squarely at home-consumers who, let’s face it, mostly aren’t bothered about doing cutaways, green screening or colour grading. The 2 suites can do it but I suspect the functions are there just to make it look good on the specification sheet. They are just too darn tricky to use. I was doing a project with a drama teacher last year using green screening on Videostudio 10 to create effective dream sequences and not having full editing function on the overlay track was such a nightmare I wanted to stab myself in the face! (Note to self: Have just re-read that sentence and realised it makes me sound like an over-opinionated geek, oh well…). Both interfaces look friendly enough but, like Sony Vegas, when you start to get more creative things get complicated and frustrating, not good if you have a bunch of rebellious Year 10’s in your classroom. If you choose Pinnacle make sure you get the right package - the basic one can’t do green screening for example.

Adobe Premiere Elements is a stripped down version of their excellent Premiere Pro offering and at first look it can seem dark and intimidating. The main benefits are that organising clips is much more straightforward (try making and searching folders in Ulead) and you can have as many video tracks as you like and they all edit the same way. This might seem trivial but one of the learning objectives in the OCR iMedia qualification is the ability to arrange and name clips which I tried doing in Ulead and it wasn’t a nice experience. Adobe’s organiser is more like Windows Explorer therefore much more intuitive. Also, you can archive whole projects which makes backing up a classes work over a network possible in a couple of clicks.

If your students are going on to do film or media at college or uni, the Adobe package will give them a much better start in the world of non-linear editing as it has more in common with the high end systems they will come across.

There’s more reasons to love it but this is ablog post, not a thesis.

Whatever you choose, do 2 things:

• Download an evaluation version and test it first. Tricky with Pinnacle as they don’t let you.
• Shop around with Educational suppliers. We got Adobe’s Premiere and Photoshop Elements bundle for £25 a user from our supplier.

Got that? Good.