Distance Education (Week 11)

The whole idea of distance technology is to provide educational services to students off site that is comparable to the education given to students on site.  Many private as well as public institutions offer distance learning including almost all universities.  The types of distance education varies and can include correspondence through regular mail, internet correspondence, courses over the television or radio, courses downloaded from a CD as well as courses offered over a mobile device.  However in recent years, distance education has come to blend the many forms.  The benefits of distance learning include the ability to learn at your own pace.  It also allows for adults to continue their education in situations where they are unable to attend classes regularly.  The draw backs of distance education include; the students enrolled in the course have to be very motivated in order to get the benefits out of the programs.  Since there are no ways of forcing people to watch materials or participate, students have to motivate themselves or they can fall very behind in the course. 

I don't see distance learning really helping me personally in any way but I could see how it could help other people wanting to get into the film industry.  Many of the programs that do things like editing, compositing or music composition are extremely elaborate and very technical programs.  I could definitely see benefits the makers of the programs to provide online courses that help get users started using their products.  There are many websites that already exist that post forums where users help each other out but I think a company issued distance learning program would still help out a person just adopting a new technology or program emensely.

LINK: http://www.mediacollege.com/video/editing/

I found a very interesting website that provides tutorials on some of the popular video editing programs as well as other technological tutorials.  The website mediacollege.com seems to give out the basic tutorials for free but requires a payment to see more advanced examples.  The way the website works is that it allows you to select the specific program you want to use, then it gives you a list of topics that you might be interested in learning and then explains how each is done.  I think this form of distance learning is unique in that it doesn't make content once students are enrolled, it makes the content before it has students and then waits for interest to grow.  I have seen that there are tutorials on the internet but haven't really thought of them as distance education until now.  I think that this is the most practical form of distance education for people in the film industry.

Week 8 Material Blog Part 1

The first part of week 8's material focused on digital technology as a subcategory of digital storytelling.  Digital technology uses representative data consisting of 1's and 0's to represent what either a picture, video or audio clip is that can be later translated and reconverted to its original medium.  Analog technology is a pure physical representation of the source.  The advantage to digital is a much smaller less expensive result that, for most purposes, suites the need of the application.  Digital has been improving and coming closer to being indistinguishable from analog by utilizing higher resolutions with more mega pixels or faster sampling rates for audio at high bit rates.  However analog is still way ahead when it comes to pure quality.

This all is very relevant to my major as camera's and sound are the most important tools for film production.  Knowing what decisions to make regarding the use of digital and analog is very important as it determines costs and quality.  Where it is much cheaper to use digital, analog sources, like film, offer much higher quality.  Having directed and worked on both analog productions using 35mm and 16mm film, as well as digital medium in the form of uncompressed HD it is clear that both mediums have their pros and cons.  Understanding the differences is crucial to making your final product effective whether its a commercial production or a film.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/tg-daily-hands-4k-red-camera-unwrapping-lamborghini-video-cameras,5156.html

The website I found is a description and review of a very interesting relatively new digital technology for a camera called RED.  Where HD uses 1080p resolution, RED uses 4000p resolution.  This is important as it is a big step for digital in approaching analog quality.  Where film is still unmatched in its contrast and technical factors, digital is getting very close and to the common viewer is virtually identical.  This means lower cost for films and an easier more fluid shooting environment.  On a production using film, time has to be taken out every 10 minutes of filming time to load new film into the cameras.  With digital it is possible to continuously film uninterrupted.