Technology. Journalism. Tea
The iLife for multimedia journalists
I have just recovered from helping to run “convergence” for nearly 80 MA journalism students here at Sheffield University, all producing WordPress web pages with video, audio slide shows and images.
With 90 PCs, not one of them can do a good job when producing multimedia content! It’s silly, but despite the endless Windows 7 (that was my idea, by the way, to have an over-complicated operating system) and PC World adverts for multimedia PCs, I don’t think PCs and MS Windows are made for doing media.
Multimedia is now becoming so important in journalism practice, and has been a big struggle to find systems that work together and keep things going.
My ethos is that web and multimedia should be for everyone who wants to give it a try and it should be cheap. I don’t advocate expensive software or equipment; buy a camera from Dixons or Fred’s Discount Media-Mart, shoot, put on a computer and edit it with whatever you can find or afford.
So, we give the students typical cameras found in high street shops at affordable prices; JVC Everio, Sony Handycam and Kodak Zi8, all shooting on different codecs. Stick em in a PC and… nothing but randomness. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but with one constant: it’s always slow. We used Adobe Premiere Elements 3 and 8, due to version 3 not knowing what H.246 is. My verdict: I wouldn’t wipe my bum on it.
With all that, the students managed magnificently!
iMovie
So, during all that I made the decision to try and go Mac. I love macs and have used them for years.
We already have 6 iMacs for broadcast journalism work and I made iMovie available. So I shot video on all camera models, plugged them in, fired up iMovie and.. It worked and it was fast. But hang on! This is much too simplistic! You can’t do anything with iMovie but stick clips together.
WRONG! The reason I love iMovie is that at first glance, to the novice movie maker, it’s dead simple: you stick clips together. As you grow with confidence (and open up help) you find you can unlock the hidden levels.
One student tried out iMovie and commented that you cant do overlay edits. Not by default, as this would scare a novice editor or a granddad with a cam. But if you go into Preferences > General and tick Show advanced tools, this unlocks everything.
Here’s a great website detailing iMovie’s features
So, we had students spending days editing 2 minutes of video on PC with Premiere while others spent maybe 2 hours editing on iMovie.
True integration
iMovie is part of the iLife suite. They are mostly integrated with each other and allow access to each others’ libraries (where appropriate) from within the applications.
Example:
Add and organise photos with iPhoto, create albums. Add audio to iTunes, organise in albums/artist/playlists etc. Within iMovie are tools that let you browse iPhoto and iTunes libraries and insert media into a project.
And for the rest of the suite, here’s a brief lowdown:
iPhoto- Organise images, add meta data (including location), comprehensive image editing including crop, resize and colour editing.
iTunes- Organise audio, add ID3 tags, convert format, buy music, download podcasts.
Garageband- Record and edit audio, edit interviews, podcasts features etc. A bit fiddly to start with, but very powerful fully functional multitrack audio editor.
iDVD – Make DVDs!
iWeb – Good for making quick small websites if you have a .mac or .me account, but not very customisable and the code is a bit flabby.
iMovie- Organise video, edit video with sophisticated yet simple tools. Can be used to make audio slide shows from audio/images. Export for variety of formats including iPod, iDVD and Youtube (uploads directly to Youtube).
Oh, and if you didn’t know, this all comes bundled with a new Mac. Now, where’s my commission Apple?
2 Responses to “The iLife for multimedia journalists”
Leave a Reply
This is not my real name – just thought you had to have a badtag to be allowed on here. I actually train people on Presentation Skills and lately they asked me to do more on PowerPoint content rather than how you should work with slides in general.
Although I know my way around PP pretty much, I’m not too good at dropping things into slides – especially video stuff, graphs etc. so I was interested in Hads’ approach along the lines of simplicity, cheapness – I mean great value, etc.
What I picked up here is that I shouldn’t be scared to just try some of this. I liked that bit about ‘unlocking the hidden levels’ Thanks for the advice, Hads, I’m gonna try some stuff this week.
As continually, i really enjoy to study all your post. *;;*