May 03 2006
Workflow
Just like the students who are shouting with glee about finishing their exams, I want to celebrate being done with the editing and posting of the 19 videos in the Great Lives Series Webcasts. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the editing, however, I was a bit rushed in trying to get them done. And I’ll just say that I’ve got some workflow issues to work out still. What I can say is that the Adobe Video Bundle is a wonderful example of good workflow in software. I used Premiere Pro 2, Photoshop CS2, and Audition 2. Taking advantage of “Dynamic Link” I was able to use these three programs rather seemlessly. The bottleneck is my relatively slow computer. Truth is, it’s normally a fast computer (Dell Workstation Pentium 4 HT 2.8GHz, 1 GB RAM), but it’s now bogged down in program bloat, and the Adobe Bundle really pushes the limits of even the fastest computers. But I like the workflow – edit in Premiere, but tweak the audio in Audition and automatically update the title slides in Photoshop.
So here’s the part where I put in my wish list for a Dual Core or Dual Xeon workstation . . . oh, and lots of hard disk space, RAID 0 preferably. Gardner, be quick about it 
Gardner (41)
Jim (34)
Shannon (32)
Alan Levine (10)
Jerry (9)
Martha (9)
Brian (8)
D'Arcy Norman (7)
Steve (7)
Abject Learning (4)
[...] At this point in the school year, it is final exam time. I guess you could consider the Great Lives Webcasts to be my final exam. What have I learned over the past year about supporting this type of communication? With no intention of being trite, the answer is, a lot. Video on the web is one of those areas of specialization in computers that has a world of its own, with its own community and language. The next step in the learning process is to begin to synthesize my knowledge of web video into new modes of presenting information, and hopefully, new modes of learning. What I’ve also learned is that it’s all about the workflow. [...]
Andy – the site looks GREAT! Excellent work!
Now we just need to get the HIST folks to see that they could have a discussion happening in the blog that expands beyond the class to include the local community as well.
If you add podpress and add the audio MP3 files, we could have a podcasting site too, right?
I swear, I don’t know when any of my colleagues sleep.
Podpress is all set up. We’re ready when they are!
Key point here in Andy’s last line: we must entice, encourage, bribe, (insert verb here) our colleagues into expanding this conversation. All of us profs are used to one-offs, and we all have to expand our minds to understand that each lecture, each class meeting, each guest speaker, each event can be the start of a long tail of Web 2.0 goodness. In other words, UMW has a library, and it also is a library–a library it writes every day.
Why not invite the patrons in?
One more thought: I love the blog format and don’t want to mess it up, but I think there needs to be an index of the complete season on the blog site as well, maybe (probably) under a different tab. Something like the FA blog site?