Video Clips
Most digital stills cameras these days have video functionality, many of them with sound. With a camera that is able to take video clips, it is possible to take a collection of clips and splice them together to make a longer movie.
There are advantages and disadvantages of using a camera that only takes short clips. There is a limit to the use of cameras that take only very short clips, of around ten seconds. Ideally the camera should be able to record clips of thirty seconds of more at its highest resolution. The short clips can focus the starting material down into a manageable amount of material. Most first timers end up with mostly ‘dead time’ on their recording. Working within a thirty second window means that the content has to be trim and focussed. There should be very little waste to trim away in the editing stage.
The quality of your final video is obviously dependent on the quality and the resolution of the video captured. Cameras that can capture at least 640x480 pixels will be of most use, as this still looks a reasonable size even when viewed on a high resolution monitor.
It needs some thought when filming within set time scales for each clip. When recording someone that is speaking for example, the speaker must be finished within the thirty seconds otherwise their speech will be clipped. This makes editing very difficult, as it is usually the sound that is most noticeable if it is badly cut together. The picture transitions are less noticeable.
Video, of any time takes a large amount of storage space. To overcome this cameras compress the video files as they are recorded. A camera that is very compression heavy will give a very blocky, patchy looking picture quality. This is particularly true of cameras that save to floppy disk or to a small amount of onboard flash memory. For best results the largest card affordable should be used. A 256Mb card should be considered an absolute minimum when shooting at 640x480 pixels. Be prepared to have bigger cards than this and more of them. The contents of the cards can of course be copied onto a computer and the card reused, but that is not always convenient when you are filming.
Using Video Clips in education
There are a number of ideas at the end of this section explaining how digital video clips can be used to support the curriculum. Ultimately however, anything that you can film within the limitations of the short time frame and the limited resolution can be captured and used.
Publishing the video clips
Once you have got the clips copied onto the computer they can be published directly as individual clips or joined together in a video editing package. There are many packages available for both Windows PCs and the Apple Mac. Most of these will happily work with the digital video clips that have been saved by the camera.
Movie Maker
For the most basic of tasks, Movie Maker on Windows XP can be used. The advantage is that it is free and most likely readily available. As it is the most basic of programs, there are a number of disadvantages. It is important to realise also that the source material for the video project must not be moved or deleted or your video cannot be viewed, edited or saved. The thumbnails for the clips will still be on screen but the actual files are not available. Take care to organise and name your clips carefully.
QuickTime Pro
Another inexpensive method of editing clips together is QuickTime Pro. This allows a number of special effects to be applied such as altering the colours, adding an old film look, giving the picture a solarised look or adding lens flare. Used with care these special effect filters can make a basic movie look much more special.
QuickTime Pro allows you to copy sections from a number of clips and paste them into a new movie file. There is no clutter from past projects as only the clips you are working on at the time need to be open. As you are working with the actual saved video clips rather than thumbnail representations of them, it is also easier to organise clips and keep tabs on them.
Sound can also be lifted from one video clip to another or replaced with a new recording. You need to consider the length of the clips when applying sound as there is no direct control of the volume of sound, to fade out at the end of a clip for example. You should also ensure that the clips are all of the same resolution, otherwise the smaller clips will not fill the movie player screen if there are a mixture of formats. This should be easy to monitor though at the shooting stage.
Exporting from QuickTime Pro is of course in QuickTime format. This is generally a high quality and is portable to computers of any operating system, be it Windows, Mac or Linux.
Editing with more sophistication and flexibility
There are a multitude of other packages for Windows that can edit video and offer more sophisticated features than Movie Maker. Not all of these can work with the movie clips directly from a digital stills camera, so you should check before purchasing software.
The best, and most scalable solution, one that works with simple video clips, with DV from a DV camcorder, and HD DV from the new breed of broadcast quality HD DV camcorders, is iMovie. iMovie is an Apple application that is written solely for the Apple Mac operating system. I give a more detailed overview of this package, and the reasons why I would recommend it over other DV editing software, in the Editing Solutions section later in this guide.
Ideas for using captured video clips in the classroom.
Geography - Email back a selection of short edited movies from a residential trip.Design TechnologyChildren capture the process of making a model and show the working mechanisms of the finished product. Clips could also include statements of evaluation of the model.
Science - Children film each stage of an investigation from planning, taking measurements and recording the outcome. Tables and graphs can be added to the finished movie. As can simple titles to explain what is happening at each stage.
Science - Record the movement of captured minibeasts or water creatures
Literacy - Record the children’s responses to a book they have read.
Literacy - Children use the video clips to record their ideas for a story. This really focuses their mind on what they want to write and improves the creativity and the structure. It’s like having an audience without having the anxiety of speaking in front of one.
Literacy - Music / computer game / video / book review
PSHE - Children give their views about the topic being discussed by the class.