FIN Commons

Photo by: Tom Lothian

THANKS for taking time out of your busy summer to help get the Network back together. We hope your time spent with your team and with other members of the Faculty Inquiry Network will serve as a positive catalyst for your inquiry projects as we move through the summer and into the fall. We here in the FIN offices are so impressed with and proud of the amazing FIN teams!

“…Be seein’ you, in all the familiar places…”

The FIN leadership team

As most of you know by now, we have created and linked to a number of tutorials covering everything from camera and interview techniques, camera specs, Final Cut and Mac Laptop ins-and-outs, etc. They are “stored” under the TUTORIALS pull-down menu located on the banner at the top of each FIN Commons page. 

Because many of you are beginning to dive into Final Cut Express, we thought it would be a good time to highlight one particular set of tutorials that we think are absolutely stellar. They are created by a guy named Izzy and they do a fabulous job of demystifying the potentially intimidating FCE interface. Here is the link to Izzy’s tutorials. (Of course you can also find them inside our TUTORIALS pull-down menu.)

Comprehensive Set of Final Cut Express Tutorials

(Below is a an excerpt from an email written by one of our FINNERS, Michele from Santa Barbara. She offers an excellent summary to a colleague about how to use the Izzy videos. I thought it might be instructive to include it here.)

…All you need to read/watch for our current purposes is the first four chapters.   It takes time to listen to the chapters but not that much–maybe an hour and fifteen minutes–for the four chapters we need to know for the Marconi conference.  It’s quite amazing.  I’m going to listen to them all again tomorrow but this time I’m going to follow along on my computer, so I can do everything Izzy teaches.  The next day, I’m going to mess with one of the copies of the tape we made to see if I can edit something per Izzy’s  instructions.

All told, there are only really four things we need to learn to do for now and they’re on the first four “movies” that you’ll download from Izzy.  All the other stuff gets fancy and sophisticated.  I wish I could remember the names of the four things but basically they’re 1) break the tape into clips; 2) find the in and out point of each and get it from the browser to the canvas and there’s lots of cool stuff to learn re. doing this because each clip also includes the attached audio; 3) add text; and, 4) add transitions.  I hate to say it but this work reminds me of sewing, which I used to be quite good at.  It was like a meditation for me….

This tutorial is to be done only after you have captured footage. Here is the link for the tutorial on how to capture footage.

http://fincommons.net/2009/04/10/capturing-your-video-footage-into-final-cut-express/

If we use the analogy of doing a research paper, we can recall all those books and journals and Xeroxed essays sitting on our desk. Long before we were ready to actually write the paper, we had to go through all this raw material, think about what we were reading, and then find some way to keep track of the bits that we find important so that we could incorporate them when it came time to write the paper.  We would annotate, use post-its, etc.

What this tutorial aims to do is give you a technique for keeping track of all the many individual moments that you are bound to have in a video clip that can run as long as 60 minutes if you filled up an entire tape. In FCE the way to track and name your raw footage is to use the “Make Subclips” feature, and it is really quite simple. Let’s do this! Read the rest of this entry »

Your FIN Commons is now password free!

This makes it much easier for you to share your team’s work and the site’s links, tutorials and resources with interested colleagues and with student workers. 

And no more worrying about forgotten passwords!

Speaking of passwords, you will still need to use a password to get into Dashboard where posts are created and published.