I’ve come across corrupted QT files a number of times… don’t know why I finally decided to see if there was anything I could do about them… I’d always considered them a lost cause. Now there’s reason for hope!

A few weeks ago I participated in a three-camera shoot of a concert using two 7Ds and a 550D. When I tried to transfer the files to a computer, I was shocked to discover that two of the files were corrupt. Worse still, they happened in the same scene from two different cameras, which also happened to be the most important song of the concert. What horrible luck. I have been shooting with DSLRs for quite some time, and I have never had a corrupt file, much less two on the same night, at the same time, on two different cameras! I immediatly began to research how to fix them, but found the info on the internet to be a bit lacking. I hope this post will give someone with the same problem a slightly easier time. CONTINUED…

Here’s another possibility with a lot of other useful aps bundled in: 

Pro Maintenance Tools (formerly FCS Maintenance Pack) is a utility pack designed to keep your Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer or Adobe Premiere Pro Mac running at optimal performance and help resolve problems when they arise.

The suite contains tools to repair corrupt QuickTime movies, locate corrupt clips within a timeline, diagnose crash logs, manage plugins, repair Final Cut Pro projects, manage autosaves, salvage movie data from corrupt files, and much more.

Show-stopping problems always seem to occur on a deadline – Pro Maintenance Tools is designed to rapidly diagnose and fix common issues, ensuring users get back on track as quickly as possible. With the Task Scheduler utility, maintenance tasks can even be scheduled to run in the background for convenience.

The state of artificial intelligence has really evolved. This video features too “chatbots” conversing with each other after they each learned responses and conversation patterns from thousands of chats with people (you can try that out by clicking here.) The story was profiled on NPR, but ended abruptly when host Robert Siegel couldn’t produce a suitable response to the robot and was overcome with laughter.

As I’ve learned from my 7-year old, graphic novels are tremendously appealing to young minds. Here’s a novel way to engage kids in the classroom by creating their own illustrated stories using digital tools.

A few years ago I put together a really rudimentary teaching guide to using Comic Life in the classroom. It was thrown together as a series of test lessons but I was asked for a copy and thus made it public. 

Last December I have it a little refresh to cover Comic Life 2 although it is still patchy around the corners. The unit covers the idea of visual story telling and communicating a narrative with only 6 photos. You can obviously adjust the rules according to age group, for example you might allow some text direction in the comic frames.

Comic Life is a digital story telling application with a difference. The simple graphical user interface and intuitive drag and drop workflow makes it a perfect tool for classrooms both at primary and secondary level. The Comic Life Application is intuitive and fun to use, it simply removes any ICT barrier and allows pupils to focus on creative communication.

Comic Life is particularly affordable but if you are unsure of its benefits in the classroom situation a trial version is available via the www.plasq.com website.

I first devised this short unit for use with the original version of Comic Life and keystage 3 level students.

To build in a slightly deeper ICT dimension I only allowed photos to be taken with a mobile device that offered bluetooth file transfer (sadly not an iPhone). The students would take the photos, bluetooth them across to the Mac, create the comic and bluetooth the final document to their friends.

The workflow from mobile phone photos to Comic Life and then back to the phone demonstrates just how possible a paperless classroom could be and how much students enjoy capturing and processing images from mobile devices. Zero paper, maximum fun.

TASK

In small groups pupils will write and communicate a story using only eight photos and the Comic Life Application. For older students you may want to limit the number of photos to six and if you really want to challenge the students then you could forbid them using any text in their story.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

• On successful completion of this task pupils will be able to use bluetooth to transfer files to and from am computer.
• On successful completion of the task pupils will be able use photos taken with a mobile phone in their own documents / coursework etc.
• On successful completion of the task pupils will be able to manipulate / resize and filter their photographs.
• On successful completion of the task pupils will be able to use suitable software applications to communicate in a range of different ways.

TRANSFERABLE SKILLS

The transferable skills covered in the unit include : Working with others, Organising oneself, Communication, Critical and discriminating skills, Reflection and decision making skills.

 

The zip file contains a PDF of the document as well an ePub version ready for your favourite ebook reader. The ePub version has been tested in iBooks and works pretty well.

 

Conditions

Please do not redistribute the ebook or link to the file directly. Do though, feel free to link to this page and spread the word. Any comments? please post them below.

 

Transmedia: Entertainment reimagined

By Tom Cheshire and Charlie Burton

08 July 10

Esther Robinson got off the R train in Astoria, Queens, and started walking to the American Museum of the Moving Image. It was a warm July evening in 2007 and Robinson, then 37 years old and a filmmaker, had come with a friend to see a movie, Head Trauma. As they approached the cinema, she noticed that the payphones were ringing — all four of them. “You forget payphones exist,” recalls Robinson. “That was the first thing I noticed.” She picked one up: all she could hear were fragments of a conversation, “sounds of madness”. Outside the cinema, a preacher in short sleeves and a tie was raving, handing out apocalyptic comic books to passers-by. He pressed one into Robinson’s hand as she hurried past, anxious to get to the film. The opening credits prompted the audience to send in a text to a given number. As the film rolled, they started receiving “weird text messages”; phones were ringing.

The film was about a drifter who inherits his mother’s house and starts to lose his mind. The next day, back in Brooklyn, Robinson found the comic in her handbag. On the back was written: “Do you want to play a game?”, along with an address, headtraumamovie.com. She typed it in to her computer. What she found was an online game that continued the story. “In the middle of it, the phone rang,” she says. She recognised the voice. It was the film’s “hooded villain”. He started asking questions: “Do you feel guilty? Have you ever lost consciousness?” Last, he asked Robinson to tell him her darkest secret. Her answer started playing back on a loop through her computer speakers. Robinson clicked on the exit box. She kept clicking, but nothing happened. Her phone buzzed with a text: “Where are you going? We’re not finished yet…” At that point, Robinson was dumped into a conference call with other cinema goers who had just gone through the same experience. “We were all like, ‘What the fuck was that?’ It was totally nuts.”

Unwittingly, she had just participated in an emerging form of mainstream entertainment. Lance Weiler, the creator of Head Trauma, had programmed software to make all the payphones on the block ring. The preacher was an actor, a lead in the feature. Based on the participants’ responses to the automated phone calls, audio and video launched on the desktop screen. The exit box was a fake. Clicking on it sent that last text. For Weiler, a 41-year-old New Yorker, the experience “demonstrated the fluidity of an audience. After the movie ended, it followed people home.”

continued…

It has been a long haul getting the Skatopia DVD completed. As we near the end, I can say I’ve learned stuff about the FCP-Compressor-DVD Studio Pro workflow that I’ve never known. Thanks to frequent visits to Creative Cow and some other forums, we’re about to deliver a really classy product.

First I made some layered menus using a couple tuturials including this video intro and Larry Jordan’s text walk-through. Then I found a free plug-in for photoshop that made nice chroma-based smoothing for my overlay graphics.

Next I learned Compressor’s nasty little secret: the default setting for DVD audio compression uses a Dolby audio preset to create an .ac3 file. Compressor’s preset both adds extra audio compression AND messes with your levels. If you’ve paid for (or slavishly created) a mix with lots of dynamic range and accurate levels… count on Compressor to squash the range and lower the volume.

1. Simply make a button that links to track one but set the audio stream to A2.
2. Use this cool script to allow someone to toggle it on & off with a button on their remote

Finally we mastered to Verbatim dual layer DVD+R disks that let us put the 97 minute feature up with the highest quality encode (90 Minute Best 2-pass). DVD Studio Pro’s manual pretty much walked us through our first dual layer workflow. It came out great, though some players add a noticeable “hitch” to the video at the layer break point.