Weblog Entry by: Group Ocotillo In Weblog David's Hodge Podge modified at Nov 29, 2006 01:01 PM
Published on Nov 29,2006 01:01 PM
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Video distribution and hive computing

I videotape portions of almost every class and I like to make the footage (do you still call it that in the world of digital video?) available to students for their podcasts and multimedia presentations. In the old days (say... last month or so) I would have to download the video into iMovie, do some rough editing, export the project as a movie and post it to the class eport site. There were lots of days that I captured the video and got it into iMovie and that was it.

Then, I had a conversation with our computer and video wizards and they devised a scheme in which I drop the iMovie project into a folder on the instructor station. Every minute or so a script "looks" in the folder and starts a process to modify the iMovie project to be cleaner and smaller. When the processing is done, it is put in another folder that is automatically shared with each of the student computers so they can use iMovie to grab the bits they need.

Work is underway to also introduce a script that will share processor time from each of the student computers so that the instructor computer can complete the processing more quickly (hive computing). Another enhancement will be to add Windows-compatible clips so students can copy those to their USB sticks directly (without having to go through iMovie) to use on Movie Maker at home.

Cool stuff, huh?
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