- Khan Academy has already done it. Are you sure you can do anything to make it better?
- Ok, you've found the one topic that Khan hasn't done yet. Remember, you should write a script and go over it a couple of times. Not everyone can ad-lib well.
- NOOOOO! That was too many rehearsals. Now you look bored with what you're saying.
- Make sure that you're set up without something embarassing in the background.
- Make sure that the camera angle doesn't turn an innocent gesture into something unfortunate.
- NOOOOO! Now you're thinking about being taped. You're no longer living in the moment.
- Moving your frame of reference can give your film the feeling of motion, even when nothing interesting is happening.
- You don't have a professional cameraman, so you're out of focus now.
- You have a camera with really good software, so you're in focus. Unfortunately, it's not a steadi-cam, so your audience is getting seasick.
- No wonder Charlie Rose just sits at a table with a black background.
Ok, here is something that I am happy to know now.
- Adobe Premiere is incredibly powerful, and moderately confusing. But with a few minutes watching videos, you can get to the point where you are actually doing something. Anything that you can figure out how to do will be done with the greatest of ease.
- Westminster College only: although the people in Bassis believe that Adobe Premiere is available on the computers in the portfolio lab, I see no evidence of this. If you want to use Premiere, you should go to the photo lab. (It looks like it's a restricted area, but they never kicked me out.)
- Every video editing software has some file formats that it recognizes and some that it doesn't. This is especially annoying when you deal with Windows MovieMaker, which produces .wmv files, which nobody else can understand, and with Apple's IMovie. Apple pretends that there is no such thing as a file format, because it doesn't want to confuse its users. But it also refuses to widen the set of files that it recognizes, to be helpful to those easily confused users. Their model is to segregate their users, and prevent them from being able to operate in a universe that contains anything other than Apple. It works pretty well from their marketing perspective.
- Youtube, on the other hand, will recognize any kind of movie file format known to man. They have a business model that encourages everybody to upload their videos, even if that person uses a minority file format. Youtube also allows the person who uploads a video to download that video, in the process translating it into Mp4 format, which Premiere can comprehend.
- Adobe Photoshop is incredibly powerful, and extremely confusing. I don't know of a good procedure for learning to do anything with the program, despite hours watching artists working miracles with this program.
When I first learned Quark and FreeHand, in 1994, my employer had really fabulous tutorial packages — a diskette of little graphics and text files to work with, and a cassette tape of instructions on what to do with them. It took me several days to work through them, and it was an incredibly effective, and I've been looking for something equivalent for Photoshop ever since.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.photoshopessentials.com/basics/ is not everything I've dreamed of, but it beats 99% of the online Photoshop tutorials I've played with, which are cute tricks to make surreal art and assume you already know the basics. Currently, I'm working on http://www.photoshopessentials.com/basics/layers/layer-masks/.