Virtual Worlds at the Mayo Clinic

By dpearson

Second Life at the Mayo

Cool Article about using Second Life at the Mayo Clinic

Computer Animation Final Projects at SPC

By dpearson

Just finished up Computer Animation 1 at SPC for Spring Semester. Quickly put together a collection of student final projects below. I plan on modifying the video later but wanted to get a rough draft posted.

Mashup Collection

By dpearson

Thinking about having my students in Digital Video do a video mashup as part of their final project, so I put together a brief list of some of the better ones. Some of these are PG-13.

• Brokeback Mountain and Back To The Future
• Superfriends and Office Space
• Watchmen and Toy Story
• Xmen 3 and Office Space
• Charlie Brown and The Police
• Animal House and 300
• A Hard Days Night and Night of the Living Dead
• Magnum PI and Star Wars
• Monty Python and Star Trek
• Tom Hanks and James Bond
• The Shining – New Version
• Star Wars and Macgvyer

KeepVid – YouTube Downloader

By dpearson

Stumbled across another handy video website called keepvid.com. Basically, you can enter the URL of any YouTube video and it will give you a downloadable mp4 copy. Very nice if you want to do a little editting on something that has already been posted or if you want your own private copy. The cool part is that it’s OS independent. Very handy. I did an example with the Watchmen/Toy Story Mashup listed below and it worked like a charm.

DVDs to MPEGs

By dpearson

Found a great article about converting DVDs into mpeg files. You need to download and install VLC and Handbrake, both of which are free tools. Seems to work pretty slick.

Pazera Video Converter

By dpearson

Tried using Handbrake to convert an mp4 file back to avi for use in a older video editor tool and found out they quit supporting AVI conversion so I started searching around. Found the Pazera Video Conversion Suite, looks like it handles almost anything. (Flash, mov, avi, mpg, etc). Litte bit of a hassle to install but works great.

Colbert Video Challenge

By dpearson

Just saw there’s a “Create Your Own Interview w/Steven Colbert” video project over at the Colbert Nation. Think I might give it a try. Might also use the raw files HERE and HERE for examples in my Spring Video class.

Panzera

By dpearson

Love my new Flip Video Camera! Cheap, Easy to Use, Good Picture Quality. About the only drawback is it saves files in the MP4 format, which makes it difficult to import into various video editing programs I use like like WMM, Premiere Pro and Pinnacle VideoSpin. Found a nice free little tool called Panzera which converts MP4 to AVI formats. Very simple and easy to use.

Virtual Keyboard

By dpearson

Virtual Keyboard

HandBrake

By dpearson

Been using a great tool called HandBrake to move videos to my iTouch (they need to be in mp4 format to play on your iTouch/iPhone). Guess you can also use it to rip DVD content but haven’t got around to that yet. My only grumble is that it doesn’t support WMV as an input format, you have to have your video files in mpg format.

Oops. Forgot about VideoSpin from Pinnacle. This will convert all types of files formats to mp4.