Learning+Opportunities

Below are scheduled learning opportunities you may participate in. These are totally voluntary. If you would like to attend any (or all) of them, please add your name to the appropriate list (remember to use Firefox instead of Safari). If your plans change, please remove your name from the list so I have a reasonably accurate picture of what to expect. All sessions will be at the Birch Room (computer lab). They will go from 3:30-4:30. Because I want to be done on time, we'll start promptly at 3:30.

Tuesday, January 22. Animation Practice
This will be a one-hour independent study where you can practice making your clips grow, shrink, fly, fade, spin and more. I'll be available to help you over any hurdles you may encounter (but what are the chances of that?). I will have some printed recipes you can follow to duplicate what we did at the meeting, or you can just free play. Whatever works for you.

Tuesday, February 5. Chromakeying (Green Screen)
For this session, I will have set up a reasonably optimal shooting environment where we'll talk about how to get the best stuff on tape so your keys look as good as possible. Then we'll give you access to a couple of files shot under those conditions so you can practice using the VKey2 Filter to remove the green background (you should already have that filter installed; to chck go to Effects > Video Filters > QuickTime > VKey2 Filter). And we'll still try to be out by 4:30.

Thursday, February 21. Soundtrack Pro
In this session we will look at bringing audio files from your FCP Timeline into Soundtrack Pro where the file will be Normalized (adjusted to optimum volume and then remove a lot of the extraneous noise. The results can be pretty close to magic. Bring the best headphones you have access to. Of course, you'll need Soundtrack Pro installed on your laptop. Some of you opted for that but most will need to arrange with Jean Samaniego for the install prior to this date. It's a big install because there are a lot of sound loops (which can alsop be used in GarageBand). If you don't have the space, just ask her for the Application only. That's only a couple hundred megs, I think.