Hardware
To practice making a movie you will need nothing more than a reasonably good PC (at least 512Mb RAM) installed with Windows XP service Pack 2. In addition, if you want to make your own movie projects, then you will need a digital (not analogue) video camera, a FireWire (IEEE 1394) cable and a FireWire adapter in your PC or laptop (many come with this as standard). If you don't have the FireWire connectivity on your video camera then you can use a USB connector but it is much slower. Most modern digital cameras will give adequate pictures for this type of work. In fact it is better to invest in a number of smaller cameras than one good camera for the following reasons; the picture quality will be less good but also give smaller file sizes, more children can take their own pictures; if you lose one or if one breaks, you still have others. Some digital stills cameras can also record movies (you will be limited by the size of the memory card) , some camcorders can also take stills. You will probably get a USB lead to connect your camera to a PC to get the pictures off but a separate card reader can be handy.
File sizes
Video files (and good quality stills images) can be very large, typically a one minute movie takes about 15Mb of storage. The issue of file storage needs to be considered before using digital video on a large scale. (It maybe necessary to archive students' work rather than leave it clogging up a server). There is also the issue of network traffic to address, as moving the files around a network may also cause problems for your network administrator.
Computer spec
Due to the size of video files and the complex rendering process, the time it takes to compile a movie can be up to 30 minutes. Key factors in the time taken for rendering are processor speed, available RAM and available storage space on the hard drive. For quality desktop video, modern PC's with large amounts of fast hard drive storage, good graphics cards and lots of memory are essential.
Software
There are many video-editing programs available (see links page). We used Microsoft Movie Maker 2 and PhotoStory in the classrooms because they are free and simple to use. The main limitations are that they only allows one audio track and that you can only produce videos in the WMV format. Movie Maker 2 is much improved from the original version 1 and Windows XP users should seriously look at upgrading to the newer version. We use Pinnacle software for more serious Movie editing such as capturing the video content already available in the school onto a centralised server. But Movie Make does for most applications such as making movies of school plays and so forth
Digitising all video resources
In addition to the development described above, we also have a dedicated network area storage server for disseminating our bank of captured video resources across the local areas network. All departments have been asked to submit videos and DVD's in order to be stored on the network. This means that teachers can access the video resource from any room in the College without having to worry about having the particular video or DVD to hand or having a suitable player. Students can access all of our digitised videos resources from home through remote desktop. So they can watch again a video shown in class in their own time. An additional advantage is that several different teachers can show the same video in different classrooms at the same time without having to make multiple copies of the same video.
Licensing issues
You will need to be licensed through the Educational Recording Agency for showing video content in your school as an educational resource
Setup costs of digitising all college video content
Although the setup cost of digitising all college video content was high, in the region of £1800 (dedicated NAS server, dedicated video capture equipment (Pinnacle) and dedicated workstation for video capture), the benefits easily outweigh the costs considering that we have already invested in digital projectors and speakers in most classrooms.
