The main reasons to transcode are to convert to a codec for editing purposes, and if you need to deliver in a specific codec iPhone, WMV, etc).
For editing, capture from tape creates few problems. But the rise of video-to-disc systems means most camera manufacturers record in codecs that that are highly compressed and not designed for editing.
Which means that a lot of times you could end up with video that doesn’t play so well in your Final Cut Pro and Avid editing systems.
So after coming across the article To Transcode and Not to Transcode? I started thinking that using Premier sounds pretty sweet.
For those of us not using Premier I recommend using Streamclip, which has a feature I find very handy – File>Show Stream Info (cmd, i) will give you all kinds of useful information for import, such as frame size, and kbps.
What is your workflow, do you transcode before editing? Will Premier capture a bigger market share because it’s so handy to edit using native file formats?
With so much upheaval in the news industry, it can be tough staying on top of new technologies. One of the biggest incentives for me to be on Twitter is to follow people and businesses that provide useful links for e-learning, and I have discovered many useful resources through Twitter.
So without further ado, here are a few of my favourite journalism sites on the web today.
Journalism coders
Hacks and Hackers is a digital community of people who seek to inspire each other, share information (and code) and collaborate to invent the future of media and journalism.
Sadly the meetups for this group are far away from where I live, but I follow its founders Burt Herman, Rich Gordon, and Aron Pilhofer on Twitter and find its Q&A site helpful. Have a question about media and technology, post it here and knowledgeable journalist/coders will jump in to help you out.
News University
Poynter’s newsu.org is a wonderful interactive journalism training site, and many of its courses are either free or cheap. (And we all know how much journalists love free stuff.)
I have taken some fantastic free courses such as Multimedia Reporting: Covering Breaking News, Video Storytelling for the Web and Online Project Development. I advise you to go and create an account, and to follow newsuniversity on Twitter.
The Nieman Journalism Lab
The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.
The J-lab’s Twitter stream is a great source of news about, well, news.
Recent stories include How The Guardian is pioneering data journalism with free tools, Calmness, curation, cat porn, and The NYT’s depressing list of most looked-up words
Lastly, a not-totally-journalistic site
I am going to throw in Read Write Web. I didn’t include it in the top 3 as it as more a general technology blog, but it has plenty of stories of interest to journalists and is well worth a follow on Twitter.
That’s my very unscientific list – what are your favourite journalism sites?
Zoomify lets you post high resolution photos to your website and creates panning style navigation.
Most times when you post photos online you try to make the files fairly small to ensure that viewers won’t wait too long to load the images.
But Photoshop’s Zoomify command lets you create pages with high resolution and panaromic images that are composites of smaller, faster loading jpegs, which greatly improves load time.
And it’s so simple to use.
Simply go to File>Export>Zoomify. The template field allows you to pick a colour for your interface.
The Base Name will be the name of the html file Photoshop creates for you.
Make a folder and select it to save your zoomified files in. Set jpeg quality – keep this high, you want your image to look good.
Set what size you want your browser interface to be (maximum width is 1000 pixels).
Make sure the Open in Web Browser box is checked to see your new creation immediately.
That’s all there is to it, just hit OK and your files will be created ready for upload – a zoomify viewer swf file, the tile group of small jpegs, an image properties xml file and the html file.
The interface will look something like this shot of a spring commute on Great Slave Lake. (You can zoom in and see a guy on the houseboat – is that Adrian?)
And lastly – don’t forget to add a target=”_blank” attribute unless you plan to add navigation to the page!
