Media studies

[rokeby]

we now offer media studies at the school!!
And guess who's lucky enough to set it up???

is anyone running video editing across the network and which software do you use? Any advise would be welcome.

cheers

[mark]

We use MS Movie Maker v2 [inc. with XP SP2]. Then we have 4 copies of Roxio DVD authoring S/W as well. All the movie editing etc though is done with Movie Maker. It's not bad - quite good on the file sizes it creates for the quality. Occasionall we've found it to be buggy.
We tried Premier and all other prorams around at the time, and found them to be either overkill or too hard for staff to learn.

[Netman]

Pinnacle Studio...

[andy]

I was asked to set up a machine for video editing, and as I had a little background in the subject I bought Avid XPress Pro and a nicely specced machine to run it on. 6 months later the machine is still sat on my desk (in fact I am typing this post on it) and one teacher who wanted to get into editing with the kids has been using MS movie maker! I'm not complaining tho - it is a nice machine (luvvin' the two monitors!) and they do on occasion ask me to make videos so I'm all set to go!

Editing videos over the network is a bit rubbish (to say the least) you're best well speccing a second hard drive (a really big one) and giving kids access to it. You can always allow them to sync files with their home drives at the beginning and end of sessions etc., but beware of your space on your servers!!



Andy.

[mark]

Size and space were concers of mine. For the standard set tasks in class it only involes a 10mb file to edit which is a lot less strain on the system than some publisher sessions. I also have a locked down local account for one off projects as they arise, with a select few PC's with extra hard drives up to 200Gb.

[kingswood]

Our media department has about 8 emacs and a G5 tower, as well as two PowerBooks; I'm sure they run Final Cut Express as their main software for video editing, but don't quote me on that. If you want to talk to our head of media I can put you in touch if you like?

Have fun!

Paul

[Roberto]

We run our media labs on macs, using Final Cut Pro. We looked at lots of different PC based packages but none of them really cut it with us. The attitude amoung our media teachers and technicians is that anyone who thinks a PC solution is a good idea obviously hasn't been properly shown what Final Cut Pro can do.

I'm not qualified to judge the relative merits of the different editing software, but I will say that there is a very low support burden on my department based on their current solution, with every camera and what have you that they plug into the macs simply working without any problems or support calls.

Whatever platform you choose, I second the post about not editing over the network, you'll want your resources local during the composition part of the project, even if you plan to save the results back to the network once you are finished.