It’s ALWAYS a great feeling to complete a piece, although I have more and more under my belt, especially working on the ABC Collaboration with Kevin, where I had 4 pieces done in a few months. But this piece is always a work of the heart. My 3rd anthology pieces after a Summer Institute. I didn’t know if I would get to this one. I had a piece done for the group for the last day of the SI, recounting the life of a TC, but somehow, I changed my mind, especially when a new version of Ilife appeared on my birthday in August and I knew I’d be needing the really know the version for my upcoming inservice at Monroe Woodbury Schools.

Of course it took hours to select a piece for each participant(18) and then begin to use the software with the help of some one-on-one at the mac store with Gene and Ken. On Gene’s suggestion I created the voice over in Garageband where I had so much control of the editing. Control over audio is a real problem in Imovie. There is a VO option in Imovie, but I tried using it and it was clumsy. I created the full VO on one track (40 minutes) and the prepared it for use in Imovie. Little did I know but that preparation would totally take away any chance that I could edit it further, to fit with my individual sections in Imovie. UGH! Eventually, I redid the VO, creating 18 separate pieces. Okay, that’s what it’s all about, learning and experimenting and I love using my new mic, thanks to Kevin’s suggestion: Blue Snowball with a pop filter to avoid Pand T pops, thanks to Nevin. But at first I was holding the filter over the mic as I read my pieces, very awkward. I didn’t realize that there was a stand for hook onto the mic included in the box. FREEDOM for the hands, fantastic! My second attempt at the vo’s was even better than the first.

Now to the work on Imovie: bravo to the new duration for editing. Now you want to increase/decrease the length of for a photo, just click on the photo and change. Instantly it’s changed, immediate rendering. You can’t even begin to appreciate this feature unless you’ve lived without it on Imovie and Premiere Elements. What a pleasure! And the transitions work the same way. The Ken Burns Effect is also much improved.  Just leaving it up to the default setting provides for lovely movement with a subtle variety.  And when you want to adjust a photo that has become much easier as well.

The whole look of the workflow has changed and that’s basically cool although again, you can’t really see the volume controls with this format and that’s important. You can’t see the tracks in depth.

It’s easy to add a title but there aren’t yet, many choices. I’m sure that will change.

But you do have to move the whole piece all edited, back to Garageband to lay down the music for a soundtrack, again if you want control over the whole piece, if you want to adjust the volume of a piece to work with a VO, louder before, softer when the VO begins.

There’s also an issue with the video editing and that’s why this new version was created. If you want to separate the video from its voice, you have to do that in Garageband and then it’s impossible to sync the voice with the video. There’s only a trim function and that allows you to select all or a piece of the video piece and you can’t even have it all some footage at the start and end will be lost. I wanted the very end of one my clips and couldn’t get it. UGH!

Okay, then when it’s ready, you can bring it back to Garageband but this will take a while to prepare, because in this sharing you cant’ send it to Garageband. I sent it to disk and that took an hour, but my piece is 40 minutes. Once in GB I was able to use the music I had downloaded from Itunes and then burned to a CD. Thanks to my favorite FM station, WFUV, just the night before, I found a group, new to me and perfect for my piece: Zap Mama and some great Spanish singers. Perfect for the flavor of this SI and ideal for a VO in English. Music in another language doesn’t distract from the VO in English, unless you know the other language. I didn’t think of that. Anyway, once in GB it was great to see all the tracks and CONTROL the volume of for the music and moving the VO if I had to. But as for any changes to the Imovie piece, no way now unless you wanted to move it back to Imovie when the Soundtrack was completed and that would entail waiting the hour again to have it prepared for sharing. I did miss a title and would have liked to redo the end credits to include Zap Mama. Oh well…we are moving on.

It took very little time on GB to create the piece as a quicktime movie and now it’s ready to include with my SI DS on a DVD. On to the burning. IDVD, BTW is so much easier than previous versions. I hope it will work. More about that but I’m feeling good, ready to talk with Kevin about our upcoming collaborations.

 Yesterday, as I lived on my couch giving into my head cold that should be exiting today, I brought all my technology from my study to my living room and moved from one toy to the next by walking from one station on the couch to the other created by the window.  I worked on 3 pieces during the day in between naps and movies.  I finished an Ibook for my buddy Dana, a gift of photo memories for her daughter and new grandaughter.

I have been trying to get used to the new version of Imovie before I have to teach it in October for my inservice course coming up at Monroe Woodbury for middle and high school teachers.  I think it will be a great improvement from Imovie 06 once I get used to it, but at the moment, I am glad to have a session at the Apple store to support my learning and lessen the frustration.

I have been feeling my own guilt at leaving my ABC movie project with Kevin on the back burner.  Last night, just before I shut everything down for the night, I thought about how I could create title pages with Apple’s Keynote and then grab them and save them as jpgs.  I tried to use the Sketch software I recently got from my buddies at Comic Life, but I didn’t get how to create jpgs with it.  I’m sure I’m just missing something easy, but I opted for a process I’ve used before.  I sent the pages as photos first to Flickr and then I realized that wasn’t necessary, I could just upload them from the desktop to Jumpcut and they took the covers easily.  So now I want to play a bit more with the title page for each of the new movie combinations I create.  What fun when you make that eureka breakthrough.

I am still hooked on jigzone.com .  I’m not a computer gamer, but as a kid I was totally hooked on books and jigsaw puzzles.  I love play with jigzone competing with the clock established by the site.  I usually beat the average.  The fastest completion is absurd.

So what will today hold on my learning curve?  Here goes…

 I just read a new post from my tech buddy, Troy.  I can’t comment on his blog, but he might read mine.  I wonder, how do you use that track back and what is it all about?

He just recommended a ds website that I’ve seen before, DUSTY.  Added it right into my Bloglines. And I see that he’s set up a framework for upcoming Professional Development with technology.

I am starting to push my tech team to planning for the fall. I always want to get the team to the blog but that’s a challenge.  I think, given my work this summer at our SI, I pushed in a Tech Literacy Strand and got the group blogging once a week as a community and slowly and patiently the group got to feel more comfortable working in the lab on the web tools.  I’d like to see the team blog more.  I think that they also need to feel more like a group.

I want to hear more about what happens with Troys’ monthly meetings.  I am always taking advantage of his thoughts about all this web 2.0.  I can’t wait for more.

We are planning for a November Conference, just before the NWP conference in NYC, call it a dry run.  I am thinking about a model I experienced as a presenter: a keynote( maybe Kevin Hodgson), and then two sessions without lunch.  We just serve snacks all morning.

I’m already thinking about having some of the workshops that are doubles: wikis for one/DS another… and then maybe single… And keep the numbers set.

And then what comes after November??? But that’s down the line…

Maybe after November, how the team fits with rest of the site…

So far I’ve heard from Trace, Kirk, Kerri, Tracey and Julie Jee.

Still out there: Don, Steve, Laurie and Elyse.  Vacationing I hope.

Bring in a photo and see where this goes…

VoiceThread Experiment

By dogtrax on Technology Resources

James shows us how to use VoiceThread on Edublogs (I should have asked how to do this weeks ago) and other flash-based programs, so I am giving it a try. (here is the tutorial, by the way)

And you can try something too - add your voice to my thread (you will need to register for voicethread to do so, however). This was an experiment that I posted via Classroom 2.0.

Did it work?

Peace (with flash),
Kevin