Video Copilot - Blog #7

The Internet is an amazing tool. A quick search on YouTube will provide you with almost anything you need to know. Or it could provide you with hours of distraction. For example: watching all of the All State "Mayhem" commercials here.

In my pre-teaching days, I interned for a video production department. Fresh out of college and with little experience outside of classroom assignments, Andrew Kramer became one of my best friends.

Andrew Kramer is the genius behind videocopilot.net. To date, Video Copilot has over 120 tutorials which are both infinitely entertaining and helpful to a motion graphics designer or video compositer. Wait. You never imagined you could be a special effects artist? Think again.

If you get to know Andrew and his website, you are going to start noticing some familiar things.

"Hey...Wasn't that explosion in a Nike commercial?" or "Those titles look just like the opening sequence to the latest Star Trek movie..." Yep. That's right. Video Copilot reaches pretty far. And Kramer takes the simple screen capture and voiceover to a new level.

Now, these tutorials are not for the faint of heart.

Target Audience: Intermediate and Advanced Adobe After Effects (and other compositing/effects programs) users who are comfortable with the interface and tools. No idea what After Effects is? Video Copilot has provided a FREE basic training series to get you up to speed with what you need to know to master some of the tasks in these tutorials (Kramer, 2007).

Strengths:

• Starting with the end in mind: you see an example of the finished product before the tutorial begins.
  
• Step-by-step instructions with visual and auditory cues.
• Entertaining anecdotes.
  
• Examples of the right and wrong ways to accomplish a task.
  
• Project files are included with many tutorials so the viewer can work alongside.
  
• Comments are enabled on each tutorial to allow viewer feedback.

Weaknesses:

• Assuming availability of non-standard elements. Some of the tutorials rely on third-party plugins that do not come standard with the software.

Xmarks reports Video Copilot as 5/5 stars, ranked #1 in AE, After Effects, and After Effect Tutorials (Xmarks, 2011). I'd add my 5 star rating right along with the rest.

What does this mean for educators? If you want to know how to do something, you have at your fingertips the means to learn how to do it. Specifically with Video Copilot, you can learn how to make professional-looking animated text or record a Google Earth-type zoom without having to pay for Google Earth Pro, as well as 120 other possibilities. Why would you need to know how to do any of that? For your website, developing curricula, a presentation, a unit, a lesson...

What does this mean for students? See above. Knowledge at your fingertips. Infinite possibilities.

Sky's the limit.

"Earth Zoom" (Kramer, 2007)

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Kramer, A. (Producer). (2007). Earth zoom. [Web Video]. Retrieved from http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/earth_zoom/

Kramer, A. (2007, September 24). [Web log message]. Retrieved from http://www.videocopilot.net/blog/2007/09/basic-training/

Xmarks. (2011). Xmarks reviews. Retrieved from http://www.xmarks.com/site/www.videocopilot.net/tutorials

In the Cloud - Blog #6

We hear a lot today about "the Cloud". It sounds a little ominous to me. I instantly visualize some sort of fluffy white utopia where everything I could ever need is stored and accessible. Among other features, the new iPhone 4S was advertised to include the pre-installed iCloud (Apple, 2011). I confess, I ended up making the switch from my Blackberry.




Combining Web 2.0 technologies and Cloud computing could mean endless possibilities for education.

TechTalk reports, "Cloud computing...posits a view of computing in which all data and all the applications to create and manipulate that data exist in the “cloud”; that is, on the Internet in various online services" (Holschuh & Caverly, 2010).

If you use:

• Flickr
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google Docs
• Wikis
• Blogs...

...you are already utilizing the "cloud" to some extent.

Services like these mean reduced costs for schools when it comes to hardware and software alike. Applications like Photoshop (photoshop.com) and Microsoft Office (Google docs) have their online counterparts. And with the storage capabilities of the "cloud", smaller, inexpensive netbooks can be as powerful as the latest, fastest desktop computer (Holschuh & Caverly, 2010).

Of course, there can be drawbacks. How much hubbub have we heard about the privacy and ownership issues on social networking sites? Those kinds of issues need close attention. There is always a chance of losing data, and online services have been known to go down for periods of time. TechTalk points out that "it is far more likely that an individual computer user will lose data than, say, Google, with their multiple servers and consistent backups" (Holschuh & Caverly, 2010).

What do you think about the big fluffy wireless hard drive floating above our heads? Can it drive education forward? Between the accessibility and affordability it offers, I'd vote yes.

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Apple. (2011, October). Apple - icloud - your content. on all your devices. Retrieved from http://www.apple.com/icloud/

Holschuh, D., & Caverly, D. (2010). Techtalk: Cloud computing and developmental education. Journal of Developmental Education, 33(3), 38-39. Retrieved from http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?accno=EJ942874