BP5_Link_to_Elemental_Learning

Over at Elemental Learning, my friend Tiffany Hansen has created a stunning collage of photos from a family trip to the tide pools at Point Loma in San Diego, CA.


Here, you can check out my comment on the project.

PE3_Premiere_Pro

After an intense week of tutorials, training and music production, I'm glad to be finished with the effect demo reel embedded above.  For this video, I experiment with a variety of basic functions in Premiere Pro, including opacity, color correction, saturation, as well as time remapping and acceleration.  Although one minute only really allows me to scratch the surface of Premiere's power, the opportunity to learn my way around the interface and take a project from its original blank state to a completed product was well worth the time invested.

While working with the Title Creation Tool, I found (to the contrary of my last post) that Premiere contains an impressive collection of preset titles, upper and lower thirds, and font effects that weren't covered in the brevity of Lynda's Essential Training Series.  Throughout the process of creating the project, I also stumbled across other presets, such as different text effects, transitions, and animations.   Although the presets were great, I went with a simple set of custom titles.

One of Premiere's greatest strengths is that if it is unable to do what you need, its most likely that you can accomplish the effect you are looking for in another Adobe program, such as After Effects or Photoshop, and the files are completely compatible.  Although Premiere's tools are sufficient for basic effects and design, I think in future projects, I might prefer to use Illustrator or After Effects to create footage to be edited and rendered in Premiere. 

Well, for now, its back to the world of Web 2.0 tools, so thanks for stopping by, and check back for more videos and reviews! 

Premiere Pro Certificate from Lynda.com

PE2_Premiere_Pro

The first of Premiere Pro's two new project dialogues

After completing the Premiere Pro Essential Training Series on Lynda.com, I am both excited to unleash its power, and somewhat in awe of its complexity.  As I progressed through the end of the course I realized that between Premiere Pro, After Effects, and the other programs in the Adobe Creative Suite, it is possible to do nearly anything you can imagine with video footage.  And, if there's something you can't do, there's likely a plug-in to make it possible.

The second new project dialogue in Premiere Pro

Starting out with Premiere can seem a bit intimidating at first, as you start your project from a completely blank slate.  When you create a new project, you are met with not one, but two reasonably complicated document setup dialogues, each containing several tabs of settings. As well, Premiere doesn't include any preset themes, titles or overlays to get you going.  On the other hand Premiere does contain document presets for nearly every video format imaginable, from the NTSC format used in North America, northern South America, and Japan, to PAL format, all the way to Digital SLR and mobile devices.  Even though I might not need to use most of these formats any time in the near future, Premiere Pro contains the functionality to produce video for nearly any audience, on nearly any platform, which would be needed by media professionals with a vastly diverse worldwide audience.


Although the Premiere Pro Essential Training Series covers some complex concepts in video editing, it is clear that its five and a half hours of training only scratches the surface of the program's power.  Now that I've studied the conceptual workings of Premiere, it is time to get to work on putting that theory into practice by creating a video.  Check back in later today to show you a bit of what I've learned, and if you have any advice or recommendations for beginner users of Premiere Pro, feel free to comment below.

PE1_Premiere_Pro

Although not very flashy at first glance, Premiere Pro's drab panes hide a plethora of professional video editing functions. 

This week for the Emerging Technologies in a Collaborative Culture (ETC) course at Full Sail, I'll be learning my way around Premiere Pro, Adobe's video editing tool in their well-known Creative Suite.  Originally, this week's assignment was based on iMovie, but my professor noted in the assignment that if you already knew iMovie well, there would be the possibility of an alternative assignment.  Since I had already explored most of the functions in iMovie, I inquired, and she suggested that I complete the assignment using Premiere.  As I had already explored some of the other applications in CS5, I thought it would be a great idea.

So, step one of the process was to dive into the Premiere Pro Essential Training Series on Lynda.com, by Chad Perkins.  Like many of the other series on Lynda, Premiere Pro starts with some basic background information, spending a good hour explaining the interface (pictured above), how to set up projects and handle footage, as well as the basics of editing.  After a bit of the technical, the focus of the series shifts to the artistic, and demonstrates how to make good decisions about cuts, pacing, and scene choices.

Soon after, its back to the technical where some of the real power of Premiere Pro is unveiled.  Playing with time is discussed, and not only can clips be accelerated or played in slow motion, but reversing clips can even be done with just a few clicks.  Transitions and titles are also discussed, and although very powerful, seem to be a bit complicated to deal with.

The last page of tutorials

Although you can't see what I've completed above, you can see what I've got left to complete in the Essential Training series.  At this point, I'm happy to find that many of the functions are similar to those in After Effects and other Adobe programs, so it isn't a completely foreign environment.  As well, nearly every aspect of the video is dynamic, which allows amazing creative flexibility.  Overall, Premiere looks like an amazing program, so its back to the tutorials for me!

BP2_Toonti

Toonti allows you to build customizable and personal social networks

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Toonti is a Web 2.0 tool that provides a platform to build personalized social networks on any topic imaginable.  Since my Challenge Based Research (CBR) project will deal with motivating elementary band students to practice at home, I decided to give Toonti a test run by setting up a social group that the students in my cohort might choose to use in the process.

My iPractice Community home.

One great thing about Toonti is that its basic layout and typesetting is reminiscent of an old version of Facebook, which students of all ages certainly love to use.  As well, creating the iPractice home overall was reasonably simple.  I was happy with the default setup, which included functional bulletins, journals, blogs, event calendars, and even a suggestion box, so for now rather than rearranging the site, I added posts to a number of the areas.  As you can see in the photo, the bulletins section can be used to distribute practice assignments, while the journal area will allow students to create a practice journal to chart their weekly practice habits.  The group also included a blog area, where questions and important topics can be posted for student discussion.  Adding a custom banner proved to be the only difficult part, as it isn't readily stated anywhere that the default size for a custom banner should be 1000 x 300, and the crop function in the Design Wizard was a bit awkward to resize and move around.

Toonti's management options provide administrative control.

As I was setting up the social network with the intent of it being used by students, I was naturally concerned about the site's privacy settings and administrative controls.  Fortunately, the group can be set to private, as can user profiles.  Also, the management menu allows restrictions to be placed on what content users can upload and edit, and offers notifications for when comments or posts are made.

Further exploration showed that the social networks Toonti creates are fully customizable, from colors, to fonts, menus, layout and more.  Or, if the included options aren't enough, Toonti is also compatible with both embedded HTML snippets and custom CSS.

The only drawback of Toonti was that it is still in its beta phase, so sometimes a few buttons didn't function as expected, and some of the functions were difficult to find.  But even though it is still young, Toonti opens the door to a number of options for designing a social network for students to use at home in conjunction with practicing an instrument.  I'm aware that there are a number of other Web 2.0 tools that exist to create social networks for students, so if you know of one that may offer more, or a cleaner interface, feel free to leave a message in the comments.

BP3_iGoogleScreenshots

iGoogle's modest mask

At first glance, iGoogle doesn't appear to be anything terribly new or very much of a powerhouse.  But a bit of exploration shows that iGoogle's basic login screen and simple default appearance is a modest mask for a powerful tool in creating customizable homepages, including time-saving Personalized Learning Environments (PLE's).  Completely customizable tabs allow users to create a series of layered homepages that bring a massive amount of information together with just a few clicks.  As well, a multitude of gadgets allow two-way interaction with to widely used sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs, Blogger, TED, and more.  Also, a number of utilities like calculators, calendars, news and video widgets allow one to set up an efficient digital workspace, while iGoogle's ready selection of games might make the process less simple of a task.  Below, you can take a look at how my PLE is set up for use throughout the Education Media Design and Technology Course at Full Sail University.

First, my Home Tab houses widgets for Google Docs, Twitter, Facebook, and Todoist.  Also, there's a box of links to a few resources I use frequently.  Take a look:

My FSO tab houses resources related to Full Sail University, including Viddler, morgueFile, Creative Commons, and Wimba.

The CBR tab houses information pertaining to my Challenge Based Research project at Full Sail.  This page also houses another Todoist widget, as well as a widget for Diigo and links to my teammates' CBR websites.

Links to resources for my Emergent Technologies in a Collaborative Culture course are housed in the ETC tab.  These include widgets for Blogger, Flickr, Google Reader, Google Docs, and other useful sites.

Although I haven't used iGoogle much yet, now that I've set up a thorough PLE I can see how much time and how many clicks I'll be able to save.  In the future, I plan to set up a few more tabs including a set of utilities and tab of links to sites I use outside of my M.S. program.

BP1_Welcome to my blog

Welcome!  Blogging is new to me, so I feel like I'm at the beginning of a yet another road that leads somewhere bright and new.  Although I've read a number of blogs and thought about blogging before, I've never actually had the inspiration to start one.  As all of the new technologies I've studied through Full Sail University's EMDT program have, I'm sure that blogging will prove to be as useful and compelling.

Over the course of the month, I hope to be able to provide valuable insight into a number of interesting Web 2.0 tools, videos, technologies and other topics.  You happen to already taking a look at the first new tool that I will be exploring, Blogger.  Setting up a user account through Blogger was quick and simple, as I already had a Gmail account set up that could easily be activated as a blog account.  Choosing a domain name and theme was also nearly effortless, requiring only a few clicks.  I was also pleased to find that the preset themes were easily customizable, so I replaced the default header with a simple text banner in just a matter of minutes.  Looking around the settings and design options also looks like it has a number of easily usable presets that will prove to be useful as this blog develops.

Future post topics will include using iGoogle as a Personalized Learning Environment, varied software and Web 2.0 tools and links to comments on my colleagues' blogs.  So, please check back and feel free to comment, and we'll see where this road takes us.