The Productive Scholar: Barbara McLaughlin on Video Editing

Bar­bara McLaugh­lin of the Human­i­ties Resource Cen­ter spoke to a Pro­duc­tive Scholar audi­ence on Thurs­day, Feb­ru­ary 28, 2013 regard­ing the var­i­ous tools avail­able for Video Edit­ing.  Com­mu­ni­cat­ing through the use of video is a pow­er­ful tool which can enhance the learn­ing expe­ri­ence in the class­room. With the use of video, stu­dents often make new con­nec­tions between cur­ricu­lum top­ics and dis­cover links between these top­ics and the world out­side the class­room. Dur­ing this talk she dis­cussed var­i­ous pro­grams avail­able for the Mac and Win­dows envi­ron­ment which allow you to import and edit films.

Want to know how to cre­ate tran­si­tions, add cap­tions, clip seg­ments from film?  Sup­pose you don’t need to show the entire film, only a 5 minute clip? Cre­at­ing clips allows instruc­tors to locate and present short, tar­geted clips of sev­eral min­utes in length enabling the instruc­tor to go directly to the main point of the film they want to dis­cuss.  Cre­at­ing and insert­ing video clips is easy to do, but there are some impor­tant points and options that must be considered.

Bar­bara also dis­cussed the tools needed to cre­ate and import video clips into a Pow­er­Point Pre­sen­ta­tion, what file for­mats Pow­er­Point will accept and the dif­fer­ence between embed­ding and link­ing to a file from the web within Pp.

Below is a list of a few of the soft­ware pro­grams Bar­bara spoke about.

Win­dows Movie Maker Live: Free down­load from Microsoft for Win­dows 7 & 8.  This pro­gram is pre­in­stalled with the Vista and XP oper­at­ing sys­tem.   Mul­ti­ple video for­mats can be inserted into the pro­gram for edit­ing along with direct import from DV cam­era.  Clip­ping scenes and adding tran­si­tions along with cap­tions are easy to do directly from the tool bar.

iMovie: Included in the MAC OS. Imports movie from cam­era or file. User can select var­i­ous Project Themes and cre­ate Movie Trail­ers. Options allow you to add slow motion, fast for­ward, var­i­ous tran­si­tions and cre­at­ing clips.  Shar­ing your file is easy by export­ing to dif­fer­ent for­mats, Quick­time,  iTunes, YouTube, Face­book and more.

iSkysoft Video Con­verter:  Avail­able for Win­dows and MAC, price under $50.00. This soft­ware is used pri­mar­ily for con­vert­ing files from one for­mat to another. Fea­tures cus­tomize pre­sets to fit iPad, iPod, iPhone, PSP, iMovie, YouTube, etc.  Drag and drop file from desk­top or import from cam­era. Edit­ing includes trim­ming, rotat­ing image, and crop­ping.  You can also down­load stream­ing web video.

MPEG Stream­clip:  Free down­load for Win­dows and MAC.  Quick, easy way to cre­ate video clips.

Any Video Con­verter:  Free down­load for Win­dows and Mac.  All-in-one video con­verter and YouTube video down­loader. Con­verts video from mul­ti­ple for­mats and cre­ate clips.  This soft­ware allows you to down­load videos from the inter­net and then con­vert to mp4 for­mat playable on your iPod, PSP or mobile phones.