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?

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?

As a graphic designer for the Ottawa Chamber Music Society, created a series of ads for the Ottawa Citizen; produced promotional brochures. Tasks: graphic design, photography.

While working at the Graphic Advocate, organized the production of four monthly publications: Atlantic Fisherman, Southender, Bedford Magazine and Dartmouth Laker. Tasks: managing freelancers, editing, photography, writing.

At the Halifax Daily News, worked to strict deadlines in a high-pressure newsroom. Tasks: page layout, headline writing, copy editing and choosing stories and photos for publication.

For Xtra.ca, created a series of news stories with quick turnarounds. Tasks: research, storyboarding, shooting and editing.

Work in Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Flash.

Arctic Apocalypse Zombie Walk 2009

Folk on the Rocks 2009

George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary, B.C.

Vancouver Pride 2008

Developed/redesigned/implemented:

• Mailchimp email marketing system
• Redesigned bloggers page and added dynamic content using RSS feeds and various social media channels
• Designed Ad Contests page
• Created and maintained page for Yellowknife’s 2009 civic election (page no longer live). Coding/design and creation of 20+ Flash videos with interviews of candidates.
• Designed alancoatm.ca
• Portfolio website ehargreaves.com

View recent work on Flickr channel.

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!

A few of her key points are:

• Keep the camera still. Try to use a tripod – or natural support – whenever possible
• Hold each shot for at least 10 seconds
• Shoot from different distances – wide to establish, medium gives more detail, and a close up
• Avoid zooms and pans
• Try to get in close and find quiet spot for best sound
• Avoid backlighting where possible

And special for those headed to music festivals this summer (Folk on the Rocks and Vancouver Folk Fest are next weekend!), check out the embed below to see how to shoot a video of a live music performance.

Tones of a colour can be easily matched, but just because a website has the colour red doesn’t mean you add any old red and expect design harmony.

So when a friend, who is creating a slideshow for a class reunioun, asked, “how do I match my school colours?,” I thought that would be a great topic for a post.

There are two easy ways to get the numbers you will need to match your colour to an existing colour. If the colour is online, I would highly recommend using Firefox’s ColorZilla extension.

With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program.

I use this handy extension frequently, it’s so easy to grab the RGB or hex colour values from a design element for use in Photoshop, or to use in your CSS.

Speaking of, there is an easy way to grab any colour anywhere on your screen using Photoshop.

Simply select the Eye Dropper tool and take a sample from an area by clicking and dragging from your Photosop document to where the colour is. This will load colour into the foreground colour box of the colour picker, for use in your design.

Once you have your colour, time to create a great palette using Adobe Kuler (as outlined in a previous post).

Free online screencasting tool

Note: this demo should really use a low constrast photo for dramatic effect, but I had trouble finding one because the north’s low-angled sun makes for a lot of great lighting!

You can’t always take photos during the magic hours of sunrise and sunset, and sometimes bad lighting makes colours washed out even monochrome.

For these photos, there is an easy fix: Lab colour. The method involves few steps:

• Go to drop down menu: Image>Mode>Lab Color
• Go to drop down menu: Image>Adjustments>Curves (Cmd M on Mac)
• Click Curve Display Options and make sure the grid of 10% increments is selected
• Find a and b channels (along with Brightness) under the Channels drop down – this is where the magic happens
• Adjust the Input levels along the bottom and top, either 10 or 20 per cent depending on how much colour boost needed
• Change your image back to RGB or CMYK once you are happy with the contrast. Lab colour files save as PSD, so’ll you’ll know if you forget this step.

This method can work wonders on washed out scenes for times when you can’t get reshoot and it takes 2 minutes.