Monthly Archives: November 2006

Continued Learning

adult learning, documentary film, final cut studio

I’ve been working on my final project for Adult Education…a video that reflects on my own learning and learning in general.  I started, as I usually would, with about four pages of single spaced text.  Something just felt wrong…too many words for a movie.  So, the first step was to start thinking visually…what pictures and video clips was I going to use to tell the story of my learning this semester.  How could they tell the story along with fewer words from me.  I think I have accomplished that.  Once I had the script, I could start collecting the materials which mostly consist of clips from films I’ve watched this semester.  I took care of that on Thursday.   And here’s the secret:  with a clean script and all the materials in one place, putting the film together has gone relatively smoothly.  I still have a ways to go, but writing and editing the script and thinking about the clips as I captured them really put the film in my head before I ever opened Final Cut Pro.  It’s funny in a way because it is very similar to the process I use for writing.  I read, I jot notes, I blog a bit, I start constructing sentences in my head, so that by the time I get to the actual writing, the paper is almost done.  The biggest difference here is that I started putting the visuals together in my head.

My only concern is that I am using single, lengthy clips from the films rather than several shorter pieces.  It seems to work but it isn’t typical from what I’ve seen.  I would like to do one sequence of short, quick shots.  I’ve seen that in some movies and it looks cool.  I dropped in a quote from Knowles at the beginning and I’ve got a great one from Eartha Kitt for the end but dropped the idea of splicing in quotes throughout the film.  I may go back to that but for now I like the transitions between sections.

As with each project I’ve done, I’m experimenting…in this case, it’s using music or the soundtrack of the films along with a voice over.  I may need to redo the voice overs at the end and figure out how to make the films quieter when I’m talking but for a first step, it’s not too bad.  All in all, it’s been a productive film day.

And I keep learning:

1.  After spending about an hour trying to copy the captured clips from the computer in the media center to my hard drive, I discovered that because my hard drive is Windows formatted, I can only copy about 3 gigs at a time.  Since I didn’t want to reformat the drive, I borrowed one from Troy, but I may need to invest in another one. They are so small now.

2. I needed some soundtrack music so I bought a couple songs from iTunes.  (Remember when you had to go to a store?)  After downloading them, I discovered they weren’t in a format that FCP can use and because they were purchased, I couldn’t convert them.  (That seems like a violation of my rights as a buyer.  I would be able to convert them if I bought them on CD.)  So, undaunted, I went to the web and in just a few minutes discovered the work around:  burn them to CD and then re-import them into iTunes and you can convert them.

King Rail at Assateague

adult learning, final cut studio, Video

Can’t believe it’s been a week since I’ve posted…working on my field-based research project as well as thinking about my final project for adult education. More on that later…meanwhile, I am trying to start a weekly schedule of posting little videos. Here’s one of a King Rail hunting in the marshes at Assateague National Wildlife Refuge. I wanted to play around more with titles so there’s no voice over.

An Early Morning Revelation

adult learning

I have been waking up at 5:10 AM every morning for the past week. For the past two mornings, I’ve decided to get up. And, it’s amazing how much you can get done while it is still dark outside and everyone else is in bed. This morning, I decided to get some reading done for my ed tech pro dev class. We’re reading about andragogy, which overlaps with my adult learning class. In an article by Sharan Merriam that I had already read for the adult learning class , Andragogy and Self-Directed Learning: Pillars of Adult Learning Theory, the opening sentences struck me in a way they did not the first time I read them: “The central question of how adults learn has occupied the attention of scholars and practitioners since the founding of adult education as a professional field of practice in the 1920s. Some eighty years later, we have no single answer, no one theory or model of adult learning that explains all that we know about adult learners, the various contexts where learning takes place, and the process of learning itself. What we do have is a mosaic of theories, models, sets of principles, and explanations that, combined, compose the knowledge base of adult learning. Two important pieces of that mosaic are andragogy and self-directed learning.”

It occured to me that you could substitute children, student and pedagogy, and this would describe all educational endeavors! And, as I scanned the article again, I was struck more and more by this notion of the artificial divide between children and adults that leads to assumptions about adult learners that simply may not apply to all adults and assumptions about child learners that simply may not apply to all children. In the post-modern educational world in which we know so much more about how the brain works, I think the only assumption you can make is that we are each individual learners who may ourselves differ in the ways we want to learn depending on the circumstance and content of the learning. I would not have wanted to be a self-directed learner of statistics but I am happy to be a self-directed learner of Final Cut Pro.

The Saga

final cut studio, Video, YouTube

So, I created a video in about two hours but have now spent almost that much time trying to get it to show up correctly in YouTube! I thought I had solved the problem before I took a break for dinner with a guest. I figured I hadn’t rendered the title correctly. (In fact, I thought maybe rendering was the issue with the graininess of my early video but that’s another story and it didn’t seem to be since I re-exported it, too, this evening.) Anyway, I tried rendering the title and re-uploading but still just got five seconds of a grey screen where the title should have been. Now, back at it, I have tried saving it as a quicktime movie rather than an mpeg-4. But that seems to be causing trouble for YouTube in terms of doing its own converting. YouTube does suggest using an mpeg-4 format.

So, I just went ahead and put it on my own server. And after another 10 minutes have discovered that WordPress doesn’t allow the embed tag so here’s the link: Whimbrel video.

It DOES allow you to embed video from YouTube and Google, but I’ve already given up on YouTube. Maybe I should try adding my video to Google while we sit and watch election returns since YouTube still has not processed my video! I am NOT impressed.

NB: I put it on Google in the mpeg-4 format and lost my titles again! I am trying the Quicktime version now since Google says it will recognize that. Just going to leave this edit window open. This is the last chance and then I am going to bed. Add another hour worth of time to trying to figure this out!

A few minutes later…good news…in Quicktime format, Google shows the titles. So, here’s the embedded video:

Video Production Time

adult learning, Video

After doing the update, I actually re-read my learning contract where I said I was going to create a weekly vodcast of videos. In retrospect, I was underestimating the amount of time it takes to create even a short video. The Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary movie must have taken 20 hours or more. Of course, I was learning how to use Final Cut Pro so that explains some of the time. But creating videos that tell a real story takes time: importing, reviewing, choosing, adding audio, adding titles, applying the “Ken Burns” effect.

So, I asked myself, what could you do on a weekly basis? In just about two hours, I was able to create this 30 second video of a whimbrel and upload it to YouTube. It includes a voice over, opening title, and transitions. The footage was already imported so it was just a matter of identifying which clips I wanted. I also had to look up the directions for how to create the fade to black transition. (Basically, you just add a cross-dissolve transition to the end of the clip.) I also spent 10 or 15 minutes fooling around with export options and decided on using m-peg 4 with the pre-set for broadband high.

NB: Add another 15 minutes and who knows how much more time since I uploaded the video to YouTube only to discover that when they converted it, the opening title is gone.  So I’ve got some research to do.  I did discover that YouTube has a video guide that looks helpful.  Unfortunately, it didn’t answer my question about what happened to my title?