Digital Video Productions

Making videos can be wonderful learning experiences. Although the process is most times more important than the final product, there are many tips and tricks that can really help videos shine.

If you're producing digital videos, you're probably using Apple's iMovie. The audio podcast, iLifeZone Episode 18, explains a lot of ins and outs of digital video you should know. Much of the episode is spent talking about shooting the video and many of the tips apply to Windows Movie Maker as well. If you don't have time to listen to the 40 minute program, check out iLifeZone's detailed show notes.

Earlier this month I presented the workshop Make Marvelous Movies at the Minnesota TIES conference. There are a lot of good reasons to make movies and so many great ideas for student-made videos. I showed plenty of example movies during the workshop to demonstrate the video concepts I was teaching. Several of the examples came from videos I have made in the past few years with students, including Explorer Interviews and Character Counts Clips. You can read about some of the information from the workshop in this handout.

Once a video is complete, there are certainly a number of options for sharing it. It can be played for an audience, put on school web site, posted to services like Google Video, or exported to a format for handheld computers and iPods. I like to export my videos as MPEG-4 (.mp4) because this is a standard format that can be played by many software applications and devices. And like audio productions, video productions can be put into an RSS feed and become a video podcast.