What Software Does Your Media Department Use On Student Computers?

[Fazza]

We have Microsoft Movie Maker, Adobe Master Suite CS4 (in all out computer suites (including the media room)) and the Serif Suite in 3 computer suites (oddly enough not in the media room).

 

We cant afford to buy/subscribe to Adobe and although you can still buy licenses from Serif for their software, it's a few years old now and not ever going to be updated as they too have gone to a subscription model so I'm interested to see what other schools use for teaching media - so, what software do you have to install for your Media departments student computers?

[CHiLL]

We have Windows Live Movie Maker 2012 and Adobe CC Suite in three IT suites. We also have Serif licenses for all of our IT suites, however it's no longer supported and we've depreciated it in favour of Adobe. Serif is only in use by some of our KS4 students at the moment who started using it. I believe that from September all media and ICT students will be using Adobe, so I can remove Serif. We've had a bunch of problems submitting course work that was created in Serif WebPlus X8 due to the way it compiles web pages. Moving to Dreamweaver fixed most of those, but it was too late to switch our Year 11s to Adobe and get them to learn it.

 

I'll be having another chat with the heads of IT and media to see exactly where we are at for the start of the next school year.

[TechMonkey]

As a disclaimer we don't have a media department but deal with the requests for Adobe, which everyone asks for.

 

For Photoshop we suggest GIMP. We also push out Paint.Net and InkScape for vector graphics.

For video editing we are looking around as this is a more recent thing but I'm currently looking at ShotCut which seems good. There is also Da Vinci Resolve, which I haven't got working yet but not spent much time on. We looked at WeVideo but it was going to work out expensive, though compared to Adobe products it may be a good idea.

DTP we have started using Scribus and I found it good for a very small project I was doing, better than Publisher! I've never used InDesign before though so can't comment on a comparison.

 

Depends on what else you need to cover.