iDVD

Over this past summer I became addicted to Expert Village, so much so that I even reccomended that it be placed in an online high school couse that I had created! You can learn how to do pretty much anything on there, from riding a bike to cooking Knocchi. (I am impressed if you can tell me what Knocchi is. it's a Servant family staple.)

Anyway, Expert Village put up a tutorial on how to play with iDVD. While i'm not totally enamored with the user interface of the MAC (sorry Dr. Nich!) I think thier software is pretty out there in a cool way.

anyway, IDVD is a a pretty cool yet simple program that you can upload projects and iPhoto slideshows and export them to DVD. iMovie projects, scene selection menus are automatically created with chapter markers that are set in a Movie. iDVD also has a Media section that provides an iTunes library, iPhoto library and Movies folder. There is a map view, which shows the current project's menu system in a graphical form. You can also hide or show the 'TV safe area' (because old televisions often cut off some of a video's outer areas). iDVD can also upload to Final Cut Express and Final Cut Pro.

It's actually a pretty cool program to play around with if you have a Mac. One thing you can do is Creating intro Animations to play with homemade movies or other mash-ups.

Matt Nichols has a pretty cool tuotial on how to do just that.

Creating Introduction Animation in iDVD

Sorry about the post order Dr. N. I forgot my own last name. :)

Mashups (somewhat) Simplified

About 2 years ago I saw a brief presentation that mentioned Yahoo! Pipes ( http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ )as an easy way to create mashups. I proceeded to log on, think "wow this is cool," and seconds later managed to follow that thought with "this really isn't simple." I consider myself "tech savvy," but I am not a coder.

This past spring I attended a technology seminar at which there was a presentation on setting up simple mashups using--yup--Yahoo! Pipes. I just had to attend. What I learned was that I was right, to a point. If you are not "shown the way" in terms of what to do there it can be daunting. Even if you do have the basics down there are some really advanced features there. But after being shown only a couple of things to get started I had created a simple mashup of news and images relating to the Philadelphia Phillies (check it out)before the session was 3/4 over. Yes, I probably missed something because I was multi-tasking.

At any rate, Yahoo! Pipes is a pretty cool mashup application for those of us that really aren't going to learn to hard-code any time soon. That being said, it isn't exactly intuitive. With a little demo, though, it isn't too hard to get started.

Check it out to get a bit of an understanding of what mashups are and can do.

Carl