Tutorial: Avid Studio for the iPad (Part 1)

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Think you need special equipment, expensive software, and special skills to create a video about your work?  Well, if you already have an iPad 2, for just an additional $4.99 for a movie editing app for the iPad, you can shoot and create a professional-looking video. To help you along, I’ve also done a tutorial, linked below, showing how to use Avid Studio.

Previously, I did a tutorial series on the iMovie app for the iPad.  In this post, I talk about another excellent movie editing app for the iPad that you can use.  Avid Studio has more bells and whistles than iMovie, but is a bit more challenging to master and use.  But with this tutorial, you should be able to begin using Avid Studio immediately to edit your science videos.

Take a look at Part 1 (for best viewing, select the HD version and full-screen options (see menu bar at bottom of player window):

How to Remove the Background from an Image (Part 2)

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This is the second part of the Adobe Photoshop (CS5) tutorial in which I show how to remove the background from an image when that background is not a solid color but is instead a more complex image.  I provide several examples of images with different types of backgrounds and then show different techniques for handling these situations.

Once you master these very easy techniques, you will then be poised to create more professional looking montages in your videos or even to begin creating some simple animations.

Here is the video tutorial (for best viewing, select the HD version and full-screen options (see menu bar at bottom of player window):

How to Remove the Background from an Image (Part 1)

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In this post, I introduce a tutorial I created to show how to use Adobe Photoshop (CS5) to remove the background from an image.

Have you ever wondered how people superimpose graphs, isolated images, clip art, and other graphics onto another image so that they both have the same background?  You might wish to layer a series of images of plants or animals, for example, onto a map or a diagram so that they all share a common background.  To do this, you will have to delete the background of the original photographs (left-hand image below) so that when you layer the images onto a base photograph, they all have the same background (right-hand image below):

How is this done?  In the following tutorial, I show how easy it is to remove the background from this type of image in Photoshop.  This technique is a precursor to developing animations and montages of images in a video….so that the result looks professional.

Take a look (for best viewing, select the HD version and full-screen options (see menu bar at bottom of player window):

More on Fair Use and YouTube

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Continuing with the topic of fair use, I would like to point you to a video by Margaret Stewart, YouTube’s head of “user experience” who spoke to a TED audience.  She provides a (very general) look behind the curtain of how YouTube identifies matches between original material and videos that duplicate (or contain portions of) copyrighted originals.  What happens next depends on what restrictions the content owner has set for their work.

What’s impressive is the massive amount of information that YouTube handles daily.  It’s not just a few videos of people’s weddings or pets being uploaded, it’s the equivalent of 100 years of video being added each day….and being compared to millions of reference files.  It’s understandably an automated process, which leads to some mismatches and user complaints (you’ll get a feel for this by reading the comments to this video).

YouTube clearly strives to protect content owners, but also recognizes the value of content creators allowing the use of their work by others…in mashups, etc.  Stewart provides an example of how a content owner allowed the reuse of their work by a fan and later by a couple in their wedding video.  The wedding video went viral, getting over 40 million hits, which prompted renewed downloads of the original work from iTunes.  The lesson being that by allowing others to use their work, the original content owners benefited from the added exposure.

Anyway, here’s the TED talk:

Who’s That In the Mirror?

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Here’s a great example of a creative video shot by Mark Rober who wanted to get some footage of monkeys and orangutans at his local zoo but saw that they ignored humans banging on the exhibit glass.  So he held up his phone to the glass and lured the primates over to look at themselves on the phone’s camera.  Not entirely happy with these results, Rober fabricated a mirror-cam so that his subjects would be centered in his shots as they investigated their reflections.  Great idea and one that worked well to get some amazing footage of primates exhibiting self-awareness.  One of the orangutans even brought over its baby, which proceeded to investigate its reflection.

Anyway, those of you who study animals might find this approach useful or inspirational to develop creative methods to film animals.  And the rest of you can just enjoy the interesting video: