Posts Tagged dvd
Film Camp. Watch a Stop Motion Movie made at DMA Summer Camp with Skittles!
Digital Media Academy News + Events | March 9th, 2009 by Philip Harding
See what teens made at Digital Media Academy film camp this summer in Chicago!
This video was made by shooting hundreds of individual JPEG photos and piecing/editing them together in Final Cut Pro. This was made during DMA Film Camp in Chicago this past summer in the Teen Film Editing and Filmmaking Course. Learn how to make a movie like this at a DMA course this summer!
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How to Make a Music Video : Learn the skills at a DMA Course
Digital Media Academy News + Events | February 26th, 2009 by Philip Harding
Have you ever wanted to know how to make a music video like professionals in the music industry?
Digital Media Academy is offering a week-long Music Video Production training course at many prestigious universities across the U.S. Get involved with the multi-billion dollar music industry. Get a jump start in your career! Mix beats, record samples, and create a sweet video production in just one week. This 5 day class will teach you the techniques of making music and making videos – then mixing the two skills together.
Learn the skills to make music videos like you’ll see on MTV and VH1. Work on the latest computer equipment, video equipment, audio recording equipment, production software and cameras. The only limit is your creativity at DMA summer camps!
Check out the Music and Video Production Course.
Digital Media Academy offers teen film camp experiences, film camps for kids, and professional level video production and digital filmmaking courses for adults.
Computer Camp for Teens
Computer Camp for Kids
Hands-On Digital Filmmaking: Collaboration is Key! Film Camp
Digital Media Academy News + Events | February 26th, 2009 by Instructor
By Katy Scoggin – Lead Instructor Hands On Digital Filmmaking for Teens
Last August, I taught Hands On Digital Filmmaking for Teens at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The class was a really successful exercise in collaboration and one of the highlights of my summer. I think everybody realized during that week that what you can accomplish as a group is a lot bigger than what you can create on your own.
It took me a lot of years to realize the value of teamwork. As a high school student, I loathed group projects because they always meant the same thing: I would end up doing all the work for several people. What a drag.
Since becoming a filmmaker, though, I’ve learned that teamwork is not about a bunch of slackers and the over-achievers who pick up after them. Real teamwork is about getting a bunch of creative minds together, bouncing ideas off one another, distributing work evenly and according to different folks’ strengths, and eventually coming up with a project that is bigger—and far cooler—than what any member of the group could have created alone.
That’s what my Philly students did last summer in the film camp course. They began by working individually on script ideas, which they later pitched to the class. Everybody got really excited about one student’s thriller idea. The story is about a girl who reveals the identity of a serial killer by posting a video of his latest murder on YouTube. After developing the script to suit everyone’s taste, we cast the project with some of our more performative members and broke the script down according to location.
Everyone who was interested in shooting—including the actors—had the opportunity to get behind the camera. Other students learned how to slate each take as camera assistants; lock the set down and watch for oncoming pedestrians as production assistants; and hold the boom pole as sound recordists. Everybody always had a job to do. And if each individual hadn’t held his or her own weight, we would not have completed the movie in such a short time span.
They say each movie is made three times: First you write it. Then you shoot it. Then you edit. After our two-day production period was over, we hunkered down and started to put the movie together. If you’ve ever written a paper, you understand that editing is basically rewriting. It’s the same in the cutting room: once you put the images you’ve captured into order, you can reorder them in a thousand different ways. Finding the best way to tell a visual story is one of the most challenging and, ultimately, most gratifying aspects of filmmaking.
In our digital film class, we decided to keep things collaborative through to the end: Each student picked one scene to edit, after which we cut the entire story together. At the end of the week, when we screened our short film for parents, I think everybody was happily surprised to see how much they’d been able to accomplish as a group in just one short week. The experience was a great one, and I look forward to having more like it this summer!
Learn more about DMA Teen Film Courses and Summer Computer Camps
Video Compression for Producers and Editors : How Big is It?
Digital Media Academy News + Events | February 19th, 2009 by Philip Harding
Written by Jeff Sobel of the John Lennon Bus
A video producer often needs to be able to estimate the size of a video file before that video has been recorded, imported or exported. Do you need a magic crystal ball to predict how large a video file will be before you hit that Export button? Nope. You just need a 5th grader’s grasp of basic math. Here’s how:
Let’s take the example of exporting a video using Apple’s Compressor which comes standard with Final Cut Studio 2.
The first thing you should know is that digital video is encoded at a certain datarate, commonly called the bitrate. Higher bitrates generally produce better quality video (less “pixelation” or graininess) but will create larger files. You need to be sure that you choose a bitrate that’s high enough to achieve satisfactory quality but not so high that the video can’t be streamed on the web, downloaded in a reasonable amount of time, emailed, or however you intend to get it to your audience. Compressor has presets which are great starting points for making this decision.
The screenshot below shows Compressor’s stock presets for iPod, iPhone, and AppleTV:
You’ll see that there are two different presets for iPod/iPhone. The 1st is “h.264 video @ 600kbps” and the 2nd is “h.264 video @ 1500kbps”. Now, it’s safe to assume that the 2nd preset will produce better quality video, but how big will the files be? Let say we have a 2min long video and we’re hoping to compress it to a small enough filesize to be able to email it. Will the 600kbps setting do that for us? Let’s figure it out.
The 1st thing you need to know is that “600kbps” stands for “600 kilobits per second”. Now, we’re all pretty used to hearing about kilobytes, megabytes, even terabytes. But what’s a kilobit? A bit is the smallest piece of data there is. We represent bit with a lowercase b and byte with an uppercase B. All you need to know is:
There are 8 bits in a byte.
There are 1024 bits in a kilobit.
There are 1024 kilobits in a kilobyte.
There are 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte.
It’s not nearly as complicated as it might seem at first. It’s just like measurements you make in a kitchen. You know, 16oz in a pint, 2 pints in a quart, 4 quarts in a gallon, etc…
So let’s figure out how big our 2min video is going to be after we compress it using the 600kbps preset in Compressor:
600kbps / 8 = 75 kilobytes per second
75KB/s * 60 = 4500 kilobytes per minute
4500KB/m / 1024 = 4.4 megabytes per minute
Our 2min video is going to be about 9megabytes when exported with this preset. Small enough that you might be able to email it.
Now what if we compressed it using the AppleTV preset? That’s a 5mbps bitrate (5 megabits per second) so:
5mbps * 1024 = 5120 kilobits per second
5120kbps / 8 = 640 kilobytes per second
640KB/s * 60 = 38,400KB per minute
38,400KB / 1024 = 37.5 megabytes per minute
At this setting our 2min video will be about 75 megabytes. Much larger. But it’s going to look much better as well, even on an HD TV.
In our next installment we’ll talk about how you can estimate how much disk space you’ll need before capturing or importing your footage from a video camera.
Digital Filmmaking Bootcamp @ Stanford University
Digital Media Academy News + Events | February 18th, 2009 by Travis
Last summer the Digital Media Academy offered a brand new filmmaking course and I was honored that they had chosen me to teach the class. The course was Digital Filmmaking Bootcamp and it was a huge success. We wanted to create a class where students could come in and learn every aspect of filmmaking in five action packed days. That’s exactly what we did and it resulted in one of the best screenings in any of my closing DMA film festivals.
The typical student that enrolls in Digital Filmmaking Bootcamp comes in with a little or no filmmaking experience, but leaves with a movie that they shot, edited, and compressed for DVD and web. We shoot with professional Sony HD cameras and edit with screaming fast Macs on Final Cut Pro. In fact, at times I found myself jealous that my students have better equipment to learn with, than the equipment I have at my studio to produce content with 
.
Before teaching the class, I knew it would be a busy 5 days but I had no idea how much fun I would have teaching it. When the screening came we had 20 students with 20 amazing films to watch. It was an incredibly rewarding experience to watch students learn how to plan, shoot, edit, and distribute their films in such a short amount of time. I invite you to watch a couple of the videos that I posted from this class.
Both of these videos were created from students that had no experience shooting or editing. They are definitely two different genres but both videos are an amazing success for students with no prior experience.
You can also check out the Teen Filmmaking Bootcamp Courses geared specifically to teens or the Kids Film & Movie Making Courses.
Till next time,
Travis Schlafmann
DMA Instructor/Cinematographer & Editor
HD and Blu-ray Quality Movies Getting Too Real?
Digital Media Academy News + Events | February 17th, 2009 by Philip Harding
There I am standing in front of the most beautiful high definition audio and visual setup money can buy. I have completely lost reality of where I am. I have totally forgotten what I am doing inside an electronics store. I am surrounded with the televisions, computers, cameras, gadgets and only the latest technology (at the best prices I’m told), but none of that matters to me now. I have completely lost touch with reality. I am completely transfixed with the 60″+ flat screen, crisp surround sound system with the super 1200 watt subwoofer, and the high definition blu-ray player in front of me. It seems nothing can suck me out of this odd technology trance I have been sucked into.
For a moment I feel as though I am a real pirate in the Caribbean on board with Captain Jack and the crew. I get kind of grossed out with Davy Jones squirming tentacles. Ewww. I never noticed his mouth moved like that when he talked! I have to turn away, but my eyes become glued to another 65″ flat plasma screen. Then I am suddenly on the back of a funny looking dragon flying down into a huge canyon. As silly as it sounds, I was momentarily scared. Then I stop and realize the 3d dragon looks…. fake. Lame. I turn to another huge LCD flat-screen to get pulled into an amazing live concert. Now this is great! The crowd is screaming. The music is pumping out of the awesome surround sound speakers, the lights are flashing. I feel like I am inside a Rock Band video game. I feel like I am on the front row at the concert…. and all of a sudden I realize how scratched and ugly Sting’s guitar is. Actually, the whole group looks really old. Look how much he is sweating. OK. That’s enough.
Then, all of a sudden I am pulled out of my technology trance and out of the home video and audio department. I need to go find the Apple computers. Do they have those new 17″ MacBook Pro laptops yet?
As I stroll back down the large aisles I begin to think about how quickly technology is moving. Can designers, digital artists, 3d animators, filmmakers, audio technicians, and creative programmers keep up? You better bring your best 3d models and animated characters if your viewers are going to be critiquing them on a ginormous flat screen TV with the highest of high definition disc players.
Think about it. I was snapped out of the movie by thinking about how fake the 3d character looked in the movie. If the the movie had been on a low resolution, old-school setup, I might have been able to pass over the poorly rendered and animated polygons. I wouldn’t have noticed. I’m just saying….
It’s time to flex your creative muscle at Digital Media Academy. Get in some of the computer courses this summer at any of the prestigious summer locations.
