Final Products

Recap of today’s discussion:

1. A paper that reflects on the relationships between the readings and  your project — thoughtful, and in depth!

2. A multimedia product of about 5 minutes.   Doesn’t have to be perfect.  Part of your paper may well be a reflection on what you would do differently.  For those doing iSchool final projects, you can use your final project presentation for this part of this class (assuming, of course, that it’s relevant — i.e., you’re not just going to stand in front of some PPT slides covered with words).

I would rather you spent more time thinking and reading than fiddling with making your product absolutely perfect. (Though perfection on both parts of the final product is to be aspired to.)

We’ll collectively view and discuss your media products/presentations.

Useful Discussion of Video, especially Web Video

From Bob Sacha.

Very interesting points from Bob and others about why we don’t need to follow the conventions of TV news footage.

Especially interesting:

Web video has the distinct advantage of being embedded on a page where it’s literally surrounded by a web of information: text that can describe, summarize and tease, still photos, links to more information or other points of view, graphs, charts, maps, etc, etc.

Power of Video Editing and Distorting the Truth

Great article on NPR about Ron Shiller, the NPR executive who resigned left after an embarrassing undercover video came out about him last week. This story talks about exactly how the video editing manipulated what was said through simple non truths or withholding information.

http://www.npr.org/2011/03/14/134525412/Segments-Of-NPR-Gotcha-Video-Taken-Out-Of-Context?ft=1&f=3&sc=17

Misc info from the Calumet sound workshop with Richard Newman

Note that most of this is correct terminology but some is, well, my paraphrases with terms that make more sense to me.

He says that the chain Guitar Workshop has good audio equipment at good prices.  In SF and El Cerrito.

His workflow for video editing:

1-complete the editing in Final Cut – do all the cuts, etc, that you’re going to do before you move on.  [You can do this in iMovie, too.]

2-export the sound from the video to Garage Band [or other audio editing software] where you fix the sound quality,  add sound effects, etc.  [iMovie, obviously, is designed to do this.]  You can’t cut (or expand) either of these or they won’t sync any more, so it’s critical that you don’t do this until you’re completely finished with edits.

3-then re-combine the new sound and the video in Final Cut.  [If you can’t remove  the original audio track in whatever software you use, you can turn the volume down all the way and add the new audio track.]

He uses a dog clicker and keeps the click on both sound and video tracks till the very end –so that he can use it to sync the sound and video.

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