EDLD 5363 Week 2 post

This week was interesting in trying to find a good video editing tool that is also free for everyone to use. This is very important as budget issues became more complicated to deal with in the present and future. I noticed that we had a few suggestions in our readings but I wanted to try using CNET to find some good programs to use. I tried to use a couple of programs that I am not familiar with but I did not have any luck in using them, they were not user friendly. In addition, like myself, students want to spend a few minutes in trying to figure out how to use it and the programs I played with were not very user friendly. I decided to create a podcast about Windows Movie Maker 11, as it is very user friendly and easy to use. I know that many people are using this as their assignment too, but there is a reason why so many people seem to like it. I have used the older version before to make music videos in the past, but I think this version is a lot better. The one thing I wish this did better was to show the timeline to see how everything lines up. This feature seemed to disappear with the new version but overall I think the program works out better this time around in general.

Week 1 EDLD 5363

This was a fun week so far as I was able to create a story about my dog for this week's assignment. I tried to keep a theme of all her crazy disaster stories and found some good pictures that we have taken to document the incident. I did try to put more of a fun twist with my pictures as I would put a caption for each pic to create a smile for the reader. Through the planning process, I wrote out a script that I would like to follow and inserting the pictures when I would like them to appear. I used Photo Story 3 to create the pictures and I did not like the lack of allowing the user to determine when the picture comes into play. In my rough draft, I had the correct picture number for easy retrieval and a description of the picture. After I had created my script, I emailed a copy of it to my partner and allowed him to review it. It was suggested that time could be a factor and this was confirmed as I timed a silent read through the script and found that I would be at about a minute and a half. I decided to go add more to the story to set up the crime scene for the viewer. After I added more story and a couple more pictures, I was ready to create the project. I made sure that my transitions were smooth and they would reveal the way I would want the viewer to see the picture, not just a random transition. I decided to add a music background to my story but I made sure that it stayed very low in the background so you can still hear the story. I was also disappointed in the program as it started every recording with a loud popping noise and I did not have the ability to edit that part out.