DMS Help: The DMS Welcomes the iGrabber

Geniatech's iGrabber is one of the more revolutionary gadgets to come to the DMS in a while.

The iGrabber is a video capture device which allows users to capture video from camcorders, VHS tapes, DVD titles and TV. Simple to use, it will make class clip-mash up projects simpler than they ever have been.

These excellent little devices have been, along with their easy to use software package, installed on all 8 DMS macs.

Stop by and try one out for yourself. You won't be disappointed.

Also, for those of you who are less familiar with video capture technology in general, here's a handy video tutorial which will show you exactly how to use it.

DMS Help: Need to edit and image? Don't have photoshop?

Not a problem. Just hop on over to Aviary and use their online image editing software, Phoenix.

No, really. Basic Photoshop functions in a Flash app. And the quality is outstanding.

All you need to do is upload a photo and get right to work. Obviously it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of photoshop, but if you're in a pinch or just need to make some minor adjustments I highly recommend it.

There are also a couple of other neat online editing products they offer:

Talon - for screen capturing

Raven - for vector editing

Toucan - for color palette editing

Todd's Tips: Best Place for Free Stock Images

Google the term "stock exchange" and the first response that comes up is the New York Stock Exchange. However, the second is NOT the NASDAQ, nor the Nikkei, nor even the London Stock Exchange. It's a website called stock.xchng, the largest free stock photo site on the web. Seriously.

And it really is free. All you need to do is create an account and you're in.

There are nearly 400,000 images available on the site, most of them taken by experienced Pro-Am photographers. The only thing you need to pay attention to the various rights the different artists attach to the images. Most of the time all they want is credit. Not a bad deal for access to a ton of VERY HIGH QUALITY images. Check them out.

Todd's Tips: Stock Footage for Free!

Sometimes there's footage you need that you just can't get.

Suppose you're making a PSA and need a shot of a woman rollerblading near the beach. Or maybe and airplane taking off. Or a horse and buggy riding by.

Well, I have a solution for you: Stock Footage for Free.

Stock Footage for Free is an awesome online repository of stock footage. Their catalog boasts 1,000's of clips and you can download as much as you want for NO COST. None at all.

The only hitch is that you have to register an account. That's free too. So there really is no hitch. Check them out and get the footage you need now.

DMS Help: Free Music for your Video Projects

Need some music for a film project? Finding your production budget a bit short?

No problem. Just visit musopen.com and solve your problem. Musopen is an online repository of free, royalty-free, public domain music. It's mostly classical pieces performed by university orchestras, but by and large the quality is excellent.

All you need to do is create an account and log in to download the mp3s.

DMS Help: Getting Started in Adobe?

Just getting started with using Adobe's creative suite? Always wanted to learn Photoshop?

Here's a way you can get some lessons for free.

Around the time Adobe released CS3 there was a huge boom in tutorials on the internet aimed at Adobe beginners. One site, TechTutor TV is still up and running.

While the tutorials are done in Adobe CS3, the techniques, and in many cases even the application layout, is still the same in CS5, Adobe's current version.

So check out the site. There are a huge number of tutorials available and they are all free!

Media Services Produced Video Now on Library Homepage!

Media Services assisted in creating a short video which documented some of the excitement of this spring's Final Perk out in front of the library. It can now be found on the American University Library homepage. The video captures the large number of students who take a study break to gather for free cookies and beverages given out by the library. The video also captures students responses to the following questions:
Why do you come to Final Perk?
How many hours do you spend in the library each week?
What is your favorite resource in the library?

Check it out below!

DMS Help: Media Services Serves Up Math Help. O rly??

Ok, so math tutorials are not really DMS Help, but this particular website certainly is worth knowing about for a couple of reasons.

For those who don't know, Salman Khan is the MIT-educated creator of the not-for-profit educational website Khan Academy.

Salman, or "Sal" as he likes to be called, began developing video tutorials to help his nephew with math. His site now houses more than 2,100 tutorials on a wide variety of subjects both in and out of the mathematical realm: basic algebra, calculus, differential equations, biology, chemistry, astronomy and physics to name a few.

While Khan Academy is certainly a great place to get help with your homework and study for exams (there are a huge number of practice problems on the site as well), there's something relevant here for media-makers as well.

One of the things one notices right off is that these are LOW-tech videos. He's using a simple screen-capture software and hand-writing all of the work he does. And despite this, his website has amassed over 58 million video views. Some schools are even using Khan's videos as supplements to their instruction. With that in mind it's worth considering the notion that a simple and solid concept is often much more effective than a sparkling execution.

Todd's Tips: External Hard Drive Suddenly Not-Writeable on a Mac?

This is a problem that comes up in the DMS from time to time. Patrons come in and say, "I've been using this external hard drive on a mac for a long time and suddenly it won't work; I can't put files on it." My first question is always the same: "Did you use it on a PC?" They usually shrug and look at the floor, "yes."

This is a problem and it can create some misleading assumptions. Flash drives (thumb drives) can move fairly effortlessly between Mac and PC since they are basically solid-state memory. External hard drives, on the other hand, are an entity unto themselves. As such, they live by different rules.

When a Mac-formatted external hard drive is plugged into a PC, the Windows OS can sometimes attempt to appropriate the drive's file system for its own. Then, when the hard drive is plugged back into a Mac the Mac is unable to write to the disk. There are two solutions to this problem:

1) Prevention - DON'T use your Mac external hard drive on a PC. Just don't. There's a very low chance that your disk will become unwritable if you do this.

2) Cure - If it comes to the point where your Mac-formatted hard drive has become unwritable on a Mac your only option is to reformat the drive. Some folks will tell you that you can "repair the permissions," but this is almost never possible. BEFORE you do this make sure you backup all your data; once you tell a Mac to reformat there's NO WAY to recover any data left on the drive. Here's a video tutorial on how to format an external hard drive on a Mac.

One option you have, if you insist on your drive being useable on both systems, is to partition the drive with some percentage reserved for Mac and some percentage reserved for PC. Here's a video tutorial on how to partition a drive.

If you decide to take this route, make sure that you set the formats as follows:

Mac partition - Mac OS Journaled (extended)

PC partition - NTFS

DO NOT USE Fat32 for any reason. This file system was intended to be a cross-platform solution. Unfortunately it will not allow the transfer of files larger than 4Gb. If you're doing video work or some other heavy multimedia lifting Fat32 will only complicate your life.

Todd's Tips: Choosing an External Hard Drive

It seems like choosing an external hard drive would be little more than a question of price. But this is far from the case. There are a number of important considerations one needs to take into account when choosing an external hard drive.

1) Purpose - The answer to "why do I need an external hard drive" is going to drive the rest of the considerations when choosing a drive. If it's just to store your documents and work or school stuff, then you probably don't need a very large or very fast drive. On the other hand if you are planning on using it for media projects you speed and capacity are important things to think about.

2) Capacity - Most external hard drives range from 500 to 2000 Gb these days. The more space you want, the larger and heavier the drive will be.

3) Connection - The choices here are USB and Firewire. USB will work just fine for a PC or casual use on a Mac, but if you intend to do any sort of media work at all you need a Firewire connection. This will make file transfer much faster. Some external hard drives actually come with both Firewire and USB connections. You should know that Firewire connections are much more common on Macs than on PCs.

4) Format - When you buy an external hard drive it will be formatted for either Mac or PC. It is important you purchase a drive with the format of the system you plan to use most often. While, depending on the format, one may work on the other system, problems can and do occur with cross-use. Be warned.

Interactive Media: iPhone Development - Updates

Since my last post on this topic a few things have changed. Some good, some not so much...

Let's get the bad news out of the way first.

The new iOS SDK is no longer free. That's right, XCode 4 now costs $5.00 on the AppStore. Oh, and it only runs on Snow Leopard. There seem to be a few places where you can get older versions of XCode for free, but Apple seems to be sweeping this into a corner. Oh well. I will say though that the new XCode is worth the five bucks. It has a lot of new features that make development much easier. So if you have Snow Leopard you should certainly drop the dough and get XCode 4.

On the upside we have two bits of very good news.

The first is that Apple is really pushing resources for folks to develop Apps for iOS. One example of this is that they have compiled a whole page of iTunes U and podcast resources for development, marketing and business management. There's some really good stuff here including full courses for iOS development from Stanford and UCDavis. It's worth your time.

And finally, this Fall Apple will be releasing iOS5. Check out this video on the new features to be introduced.

Selected New Home Use Titles

Check out these Home Use titles that we've recently added to the collection:

Casanova – HU DVD 4075
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 – HU DVD 6047
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 – HU BLU RAY DVD 6047
30 for 30: Volume 2, DVD 7 – HU DVD 7907
30 for 30: Volume 2, DVD 8 – HU DVD 7908
30 for 30: Volume 2, DVD 9 – HU DVD 7909
30 for 30: Volume 2, DVD 10 – HU DVD 7910
30 for 30: Volume 2, DVD 11 – HU DVD 7911
30 for 30: Volume 2, DVD 12 – HU DVD 7912
The Night of Truth – HU DVD 8046, copy 1
The Night of Truth – HU DVD 8046, copy 2
Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume Six – HU DVD 8181 – 8184
Army of Crime – HU DVD 8291
Cemetery Junction – HU DVD 8292
Bhutto – HU DVD 8293
127 Hours – HU DVD 8294
Burlesque – HU DVD 8295
Blue Valentine – HU DVD 8296
Брат 2 – HU DVD 8297
Colony – HU DVD 8299
Black Swan – HU DVD 8300
For Colored Girls – BLU-RAY DVD 8311
For Colored Girls – HU DVD 8311
The Blind Side – HU DVD 8312
Fantastic Planet – HU DVD 8313
Attack the Gas Station! – HU DVD 8314
The Chosen – HU DVD 8315
Billy Elliot – HU DVD 8316
Enter the Void – HU DVD 8317
Freakonomics – HU DVD 8318
A Film Unfinished – HU DVD 8319
Henri Cartier-Bresson – HU DVD 8320
Defiance – HU DVD 8334
Casino Jack – HU DVD 8335
Fair Game – HU DVD 8336
Cadillac Records – HU DVD 8337
Biutiful – HU DVD 8338
The Girl = Flickan – HU DVD 8339
Mesrine: Killer Instinct – HU DVD 8341
Delirious – HU DVD 8343
Senso – HU DVD 8344
Intruder – HU DVD 8345
Ironweed – HU DVD 8356
I Love You Philip Morris – HU DVD 8357
The King's Speech – HU DVD 8358
Rabbit Hole – HU DVD 8359
The Fighter – HU DVD 8360
The Fighter – HU BLU RAY DVD 8360
Stone – HU DVD 8365
Made in Dagenham – HU DVD 8366
The Way Back – HU DVD 8367

Bill Introduced to Make Streaming a Criminal Offense

Senators Amy Klobuchar, John Cornyn, and Christopher Coons have introduced a bill amending Copyright Act by making public performance of [infringed] media a criminal offense, in addition to the current civil penalties. There are provisions within the amendment that would especially apply to electronic contexts. See Bill full text.
See Techdirt story.

300+ Free movies Online: Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns...

Where to watch free movies online? This may be too good to be true, but it appears to be a site attempting to be a gateway to legitimate streams of feature films online.

OpenCulture.com has put together a list of 300+ quality films that you can watch online. The collection is divided into the following categories: Comedy & Drama; Film Noir, Horror & Hitchcock; Westerns & John Wayne; Silent Films; Documentaries, and Animation.

Here are a few titles:

COMEDY & DRAMA
A Farewell to Arms - Free - Buy DVD - Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes star in film based on famous novel by Ernest Hemingway. (1932)

Alexander Nevsky - Free - Buy DVD - A historical drama film directed by the great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. (1938)

All Quiet on the Western Front - Free - Buy DVD - This is a classic based on a novel by German author Erich Maria Remarque. (1930)

Angel on My Shoulder - Free - Buy DVD - A gangster comedy starring Claude Rains and Paul Muni. (1946)

To see the full list, go here.

[As seen on OpenCulture.com]

Lost-Films.eu Identifies Missing Films Through Crowdsourcing

Lost Films is a collaborative effort among film societies in Germany, France, Poland, New Zealand and several other countries to help identify and locate some 3,500 lost or missing films through crowdsourcing. Anyone can become a member and then upload clips and images from "mystery movies" to the site and also comment on as-yet-untitled stills and images that have already been uploaded. The site also contains a heartening list of films that have recently been recovered. So far, 56 films have been found, and 72 have been identified.

The project is funded by the German Federal Cultural Association

Thanks to deg farrelly at Arizona State University for bringing this to our attention.

[As seen at openculture.com and psfk.com]

64th Annual Cannes Film Festival - Wrap Up

The 64th Annual Cannes Film Festival ran from May 11 - 22, 2011 and there have been quite a few good re-caps popping up in the news and a number blogs in the past couple days. Here's a little bit of what's out there.

ArtInfo.com has this to say.

CBS News.com is highlighting a rather large photo gallery of the event.

This LA Times article links to several other interesting Cannes Film Festival related articles, as it briefly summarizes most of what took place.

The Festival de Cannes site lists all the winners here.

Director, Terrence Malick walked away with the Palme d'Or for his film, "Tree of Life"

Here are some other films directed by Terrence Malick, which are available for Home Use in Media Services:

TERRENCE MALICK

The New World - HOME USE COLLECTION DVD 1963
Days of Heaven - HOME USE COLLECTION DVD 1964
The Thin Red Line - HOME USE COLLECTION DVD 2264
Badlands - HOME USE COLLECTION DVD 361

Adobe Acrobat Pro is available in Media Services!

Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 is indeed available here in Media Services. It can be found on four of our Macs in the Digital Media Studio: DMS workstations 5 - 8. It can also be found for PC next door to Media Services in the Library's E-Classroom at the standing scan scanner station in corner. Feel free to stop by the Media Services desk to inquire about any of these stations and we'll be happy to assist you.

Book and Media Swap Moved to Bender Arena - Thursday, May 19

Due to an anticipation of rain, this year's Book and Media Swap will be taking place in Bender Arena, not on the Quad. Don't miss it!

People Buying Even Fewer DVDs Than Before

Check out what Consumerist.com has to say about this Deadline article on the decreasing popularity of DVDs.

Hindi Language and Bollywood Films

Here's a list of some recommended Hindi language films, hand picked by a Media Services staff member who is an avid watcher of Hindi language films. The best part is that all the following films are part of the Media Services Home Use Collection. Take one home today!

Recent (1990-present):

3 Idiots (2009) HU DVD 7996

Bombay (1995) HU DVD 235

Chak de! India (2007) HU DVD 3688

Devdas (2002) HU DVD 8087

Hey! Ram (2000) HU DVD 226

Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999) HU DVD 232

Hum Aapke Hain Koun (1994) HU DVD 241

In Custody (1994) HU DVD 3649

Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar (1992) HU DVD 3743

Lagaan (2001) HU DVD 312

Mission Kashmir (2000) HU DVD 321

Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008) HU DVD 8088

Rang De Basanti (2006) HU DVD 3140

Satya (1998) HU DVD 224

Veer-Zaara (2004) HU DVD 8086

Directed by Karan Johar:

All of Karan Johar films star Shahrukh Khan and have been major box office hits, making him one of the most popular directors of the past decade.

My Name Is Khan (2010) HU DVD 7380

Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003) HU DVD 742

Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001) HU DVD 3690

Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) HU DVD 228

Classics:

Shree 420 (1955) HU DVD 7997

Mother India (1957) HU DVD 3178

Pyaasa (1957) HU DVD 238

Mughal-e-Azam (1960) HU DVD 3756

Bandini (1963) HU DVD 233

Guide (1965) HU DVD 236

Yaadon Ki Baarat (1973) HU DVD 3695

Umrao Jaan (1981) HU DVD 322

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) HU DVD 3693

Amitabh Bachchan Films:

Amitabh Bachchan is one of the most famous actors of the 70’s, and a number of his films are considered classics.

Sholay (1975) HU DVD 6009

Deewaar (1975) HU DVD 225

Amar, Akbar, Anthony (1979) HU DVD 3696

Art Films&Independent Films:

Water (2005) HU DVD 3498

Earth (1998) HU DVD 4675

Ankur (1974) HU DVD 223

Gaja Gamini (2000) HU DVD 315

Junoon (1979) HU DVD 7129

Gulabi Aaina/The Pink Mirror (2003) HU DVD 3692

Salaam Bombay (1988) HU DVD 4789

New Streaming Video Collection - Media Education Foundation

Media Services now has streaming video versions of 43 of the best documentaries from Media Education Foundation. This makes them available to watch for AU students and faculty, directly from the ALADIN catalog. Media Services also has DVD or VHS copies of all of these as well as over 60 other MEF titles.

MEF is a leading source of documentaries about media studies, social and cultural issues with such titles as Killing Us Softly, Toxic Sludge is Good for You, and Edward Said On Orientalism. For a full list of Media Services' MEF holdings do a keyword search in ALADIN, keyword = "media education foundation".

Streaming MEF titles:

Advertising and the end of the world
Beauty mark

Behind the screens
Big Bucks Big Pharma
Class Dismissed

Codes Of Gender- full version

Codes Of Gender- abridged version

Constructing public opinion
Consuming Kids
Dreamworlds 3
Framing An Execution
Further Off The Straight And Narrow
Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes
Game Over
Generation M

Killing Screens
Killing Us Softly 4
Mean World Syndrome

Mickey Mouse Monopoly
Militainment

Money For Nothing
Myth Of The Clash Of Civilizations

Myth Of The Liberal Media

No Logo
Not Just A Game
Off The Straight And Narrow
On Orientalism

Overspent American
Playing Unfair
Plunder
Price Of Pleasure
Race The Floating Signifier
Reel Bad Arabs
Representation And The Media

Reviving Ophelia
Rich Media Poor Democracy
Shop Til You Drop

Slim Hopes
Spin The Bottle
Tough Guise
Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
War Made Easy

War Zone

The New TVs Are In!!

BEFORE

AFTER

That's right, we've said goodbye to our little old televisions and now each viewing station is equipped with a brand new 22" LCD HD TV. The photo doesn't quite capture the improvement of the picture quality at our viewing stations. You'll have to come and see for yourself!

A Zombie History by Eileen Keegan

Check out this cool video created by Media Services alum, Eileen Keegan.

A Zombie History by Eileen Keegan

A Zombie History from Eileen Keegan on Vimeo.