Timberland

Timberland, the boots, shoes, clothes and gear company has recently updated its presence on the Internet. The company has employed some interesting multimedia elements to create a very active and interactive website. Check it out:

http://www.timberland.com/

of special interest is this page:

http://earthkeepers.timberland.com/

Career Services Video Contest

Consider submitting a video to the second annual Career Services Center Video contest. This year’s theme is What Can Blue Hen Jobs do for U. The deadline for submission is Friday, November 5, 2010, and there are prizes for the first, second, and third place winners ($600, $300, and $100 cash cards, respectively). The top three videos will be posted on YouTube and the Career Services website. For more information about the contest, including instructions on how to enter, go to: http://www.udel.edu/CSC/videocontest.html.

If you don't have video equipment or editing software, no worries-- just come to the Student Multimedia Design Center and we'll help you with every stage of the video editing process. Check out a video camera, tripod, microphone, and external hard drive, and use one of the studios or computer labs to edit your video in iMovie, Final Cut Pro, or Windows MovieMaker. If you have questions, come to the service desk and we'd be happy to help.

For the curious, here are the winning videos from last year's contest...

A Fair(y) Use Tale

A Fair(y) Use Tale, a very short film by Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University, takes an informative and humorous look at fair use and copyright using clips from Disney movies.

Camera Reviews

If you are looking to purchase some new multimedia equipment check out these great sites for reviews/comparisons.

http://snapsort.com/
http://www.testfreaks.com/

Nitro PDF

Looking for a great way to create PDFs without spending a lot of money? Try Nitro PDF Reader . . . it's free.

http://www.nitroreader.com/

Free Audio Links

In light of the last post on copyright, fair use, and online video, I've put together a list of some free audio links that may be helpful for your multimedia projects. Many of the links contain music that have Creative Commons licenses- a "copyleft," if you will. Most of the sites provide free downloads of music that you can then remix and reuse in your projects.

ccMixter is a "community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want." Download a clip or two, sample and remix it, and upload it back into ccMixter so that others can hear-- and potentially remix-- your work.

If you're looking for music to include in your film, podcast, or other multimedia project, also check out dig.ccMixter. There's music geared for podcasts, film, dance, and even commercial projects. Because all of the clips are liberally licensed under Creative Commons, "you already have permission" to use them in your projects. According to the site, "one out of six uploads to ccMixter are used in a YouTube video, flickr moving image, podcast, compilation album and thousands of other places all over the web."

The Free Music Archive contains a compilation of high quality legal downloads that you can use in your multimedia projects. What makes the site unique is that all of the musical selections have been hand-picked by established audio curators.

The Free Sound Project is a collaborative database of sounds that are licensed under Creative Commons. Unlike the other sites listed here, the Free Sound Project focuses on sounds, not songs. So, if the audio that you captured of the buzzing bee, cityscape, woman's laugh, or any number of sounds just isn't cutting it, you can check this site out to see if there's something that could work with your project.

Jamendo is another collaborative database of songs that are licensed under Creative Commons. The songs are "free, legal, and unlimited" and are arranged by artist, album, genre, etc.

Open Source Music contains a compilation of soundtracks from various contributors who make their music available as Public Domain MP3's. The site views music as a "programming language to be used in an open source context."

Like Open Source Music and the other sites listed here, Opsound is "an experiment in applying the model of free software to music." Contributors are encouraged to upload their musical work to the site, licensing their work under Creative Commons. People are invited to download, share, remix, and reimagine.

A Simple Sound includes a library of "original sound scores to accompany works of film, choreography, theater, radio and all other mediums, and music made specifically for dance educators to use in the classroom." Although the sound tracks are not free, they are reasonably priced and are geared toward the type of video or other multimedia projects you may be working on.


Although the copyright landscape might look dire at times, especially in regards to music and video, there is a growing movement of musicians and creators who realize the value in sharing their work and making it free for others to build upon-- which is at the heart of any creative impulse. So go ahead--check these sites out, download a few tracks, and start creating. Or better yet, create your own soundtrack using sound editing software such as Garageband or Audacity-- but that's another post for another day...

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video

Knowing when and how you can use copyrighted materials can be complicated and unclear-- which is why it's so important to understand what your rights are and how you can use fair use to your best advantage. The Center for Social Media at American University's School of Communication has put together a clear and informative document explaining the principles of fair use as they apply to online videos. They also give examples of videos that make good use of fair use principles in incorporating copyrighted materials.

As a rule of thumb: when using copyrighted works, make sure that your use is transformative (you're using the copyrighted work to critique, comment, or otherwise make something new out of something old), proportional (you're not inserting an entire film in your video), and credited (make sure you give credit to the original source).

Using Squared 5 to convert video file formats

Squared 5 is a free video conversion software program for Mac and PC that can convert many types of video file formats to other video file formats-- great if you have video files that you want to view on your iPhone, for example. It's also a useful tool to download and convert YouTube or Google videos, which are often .flv (Flash Video) files that some video editing software programs may not recognize. You can easily convert the video files to Quicktime so that you can edit them using iMovie, for example.

Stroome: "Mix it up. Mash it out."

Stroome is an online video editing tool that's a mix of YouTube with editing capabilities, social networking, and mash ups. It's a new site that went up this summer, so it's still relatively untested, but it has exciting possibilities. You can sign up for a free account, upload video clips, and edit them all within your web browser-- there's no need to download any software. You can also find collaborators to share your work with and edit and add to existing videos. According to the site, it's the world's most collaborative video editing community. If you have a moment, check it out!