Episode 15: Analysis of Video Documents, My New Snowball

My "Rig"

In case you were wondering what my recording setup looks like, here it is. I've got a MacBook Pro and a Blue Snowball microphone. The Snowball is a new purchase; before that I was just using the microphone built into the laptop. This is the first episode recorded with the new microphone. For this episode, I used iChat, Apple's instant messaging tool to connect with my interview subject, and Garageband to record the session. When I clicked on the record button in GB, it announced that it saw that I had an audioconferencing session going, and asked if I wanted to record it. Then it put myself and my subject on individual tracks, allowing for adjustments to either side without affecting the other, and panning one person to the left, the other to the right for a stereo effect. The Blue microphone looks cool, don't you think? It requires the download of a firmware update in order to record podcasts, as it comes set up to record things at a louder volume, like musical instruments, but once you've installed the firmware update, it seems to work fine. The audio quality of iChat doesn't seem to be quite as good as Skype, which I have used in the past in conjunction with Audio Hijack to record the session--GB doesn't recognize that you are in a Skype session the way it does with iChat. But hopefully, the sound quality is good enough.

Episode 15: Video Analysis Software

Episode 15 has been recorded and may even be online before the day (Friday) is over. This episode features an interview, the first interview I have done with a software developer. This developer is also an educational researcher, which provides him with unique insights into the creation of his software package--he's a user as well as a developer. His name is Jon Tapp, from the Kennedy Center at Vanderbilt University, and he's the man behind ProcoderDV.

It seems like every semester, my office gets more and more requests to help faculty as they work with digital video. Sometimes the faculty member just wants to record a lecture, or capture an existing clip for use in a PowerPoint, but often the faculty member is involved in a research project that incorporates video documents of child behavior, classroom interactions or counseling sessions. Sometimes they have hours and hours of this sort of raw video data to process. Usually this involves identifying types of behavior and then noting when and for how long the behavior takes place. Doing this sort of analysis manually can be quite time-consuming and the resulting data hard to work with. But a tool like Procoder DV makes this type of qualitative data analysis much easier. Which is why I decided to interview Jon Tapp for Episode 15. I thought that many "Teach with Tech" listeners would be interested in hearing about this type of software. Let me know what you think. And if there are other pieces of education-related software that I should focus on, let me know.

Well, back to editing Episode 15. Thanks for reading this!

Chris