Camera one! Camera three! Camera one…

Cam Twist Step 1
Originally uploaded by coach_robbo

We video chat a fair bit in our household. Both sets of my son’s Grandparents live interstate but through Skype we can have “virtual visits” at least once a week. Super nice. As the “Little Ticket” (as he is known) has become more mobile however the issue of keeping him in front of a webcam so he can interact with his Grandparents becomes a bit of a logistical challenge.
Enter CamTwist. It was a pick of the week by Liana Lehua on MacBreak Weekly back in May so I tried it and it’s absolutely wild! You can add special effects to your video chats, stream the desktop, still images, slideshows but most importantly for me you can use multiple video inputs.

In my minds eye I see you all nodding and smiling politely. Let me explain…

So I have the MacBook with built-in camera and my old Panasonic MX-1 DV camera plugged into the Firewire port. I fire up CamTwist highlight “webcam” as my video source and click the Select button (Cam Twist Step 1). I then get an option of which video input I would like to use. I then go back to Step 1, highlight “webcam” again but this time click PIP (for picture-in-picture).

Cam Twist Settings
Originally uploaded by coach_robbo

Over in the settings section (Cam Twist Step 2) You can adjust the size and placement of the PIP as well as the inputs. There is a very convenient button that switches the two sources. Once you have things just the way you like them you can save it all as a preset for next time. So I have the DV camera providing a wide shot of the living room for when the “Little Ticket” gets busy and the MacBook webcam for upclose and personal. Absolutely totally sweet. It’s like having a TriCaster on the desktop. All for the sum total cost of $0.

WebcamMax is suggested for the Windows platform but it will sting you for $49.95.

We chose Skype because it provides the best cross platform video solution at the moment doing a fairly good job of maintaining a picture even on the most average broadband connection.

iLife and iWork for schools

This little gem of a link popped up on a mailing list I subscribe to.

Apple – Education – iLife and iWork K-12 School Site License

To celebrate our 30-year commitment to education, Apple is introducing K-12 site licenses for both iLife and iWork. At just $319* for either suite, your students gain access to the best tools to prepare them for life and work using critical 21st century skills.

We already have Office 2008 for Mac so iWork may not be necessary but we’ll definitely upgrade our iLife suite. That said, I have been trialling Office 2008 on my machine and it has not been as responsive as I would have liked. I seriously have to have Excel so I will put up with some grief there but MSWord is unresponsive for the first 5 minutes of use which annoys the pants off me (metaphorically) somewhat.

We had machines delivered at the beginning of the year with iLife ’08 standard so it would be super nice to bring the 10.4.11 machines in line. GarageBand 4 is sweet!

iMovie ’08

It wasn’t by choice initially to move to iMovie ’08. I was very comfortable with iMovie 6HD thank you very much. But my newest piece of kit (being the Panasonic SD5) demanded it. iMovie HD6 doesn’t recognise it so my hand was forced and I’m kind of glad it was. The simplicity of iMovie ’08 has meant that I focus on the content more than ever and it has some super nice features for publishing to Dot Mac (which I do regularly due to a certain someone). The crop and colour correction features are super nice too. Some things are not so cool though such as the ability to extract audio and do B-roll edits. It wasn’t intuitive at all. I was prepping some teacher reflection footage for an Education.au symposium I’m presenting at this week and wanted to overlay some student footage to compliment what was being said and for the life of me couldn’t figure out how to do it. Atomic Learning was not helpful (for a change) so a web search it was and I uncovered a gem.

Unlocking iMovie ’08

You may be like me. You may need help figuring out how this new iMovie
actually works, especially if you spent a lot of time in previous
versions. Here you can find tips, information, and commentary all about
the newest version of the flagship iLife application.

Told me exactly what to do to achieve the B-roll edits I wanted and a bit more besides. A great resource, one I highly recommend for those whose first foray into editing is iMovie ’08 and one I would mandate for anyone switching up.

Post using ecto

ecto is another external blog editor for OSX. MarsEdit is quite good but unfortunately doesn’t work from behind the school proxy. I cannot find any proxy settings for ecto either but the interface for seems a bit nicer.

Technorati Tags: ecto

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It provides more WYSWYG stuff with rich text editing or html depending on your preference. You can browse iPhoto post current iTunes track and some other stuff with the click of a button from inside ecto and there are neat check boxes for categories and tags. I’m going to try both for a bit and see which one I settle on. My money is on ecto. It’s a bit cheaper too I think.

Post from MarsEdit

I was interested to find out if MarsEdit would work with Edublogs. I tried it at school and it wouldn’t hook up (kept giving a password error – more on that later) so I thought I would try from home. Bingo! Worked first time.

Got me to thinking…

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Maybe I didn’t read the password dialogue box very carefully. Maybe it was asking for my proxy password and I kept providing the blog credentials. i will try again tomorrow and post an update.

Above is the MarsEdit logo with a link to Red-Sweater (the peeps that make MarsEdit). Below is an image that I have added from my Flickr account just to test out the functionality of MarsEdit. The inline spell checking is nice and I have played around with the hotkeys to make the html tags easier. I guess going through the WordPress WYSIWYG input fields online means you can avoid all that but it can sometimes be a bit slow.