 The 2001-02 Grade 10 Communications Technology class has been making short videos, using both an 8mm video camcorder and a Sony Digital Mavica F83 (which records 'mpg' movies as well as stills). Students write and edit their own scripts for commercials, interviews, math lessons, and other projects, and then film them as scripted. Students do their own in-camera editing, and then the finished scenes are imported to the computer for clean-up editing and joining.
  
 See our page describing our filming of the Titanic love scene, our version of Snow White, and our final class production of Cinderfella, which includes some amazing special effects. Scenes filmed on the Sony digital camera are already in mpg format on a floppy, so can be transferred immediately to a computer. A Dazzle Digital Video Creator (version 3.6) input device is used to import movies from a VCR (transferred from the camera in VHS format); these are turned into digital mpg videos. We can also use this device to capture scenes and music from real videos, to insert into our own.  We use a program called MGI VideoWave to edit the digital video files. Students have complete control over what goes into their final production. Every scene can be trimmed, almost frame by frame. As well as editing scenes, they can add music, sound effects, and fades, and then output the results in mpg format.The program is simple to use, easy to learn, and everybody is editing videos on their own after about one class. The program will also export videos in other formats, and will even create a full-screen video on a VHS cassette, using the Dazzle interface (although this requires massive amounts of RAM and a huge hard drive). Completed computer videos range in size from just over 1MB to some which are 20MB or larger. (Our class production of Snow White runs seven and a half minutes, and is 45 MB, while our final class project for that year, Cinderfella, came in at 82 MB, with a running time of 15 minutes. More recently we did The Werewolf, which was over 100 MB). Most videos are produced at 160 by 120 pixels; a few are larger. We produce the videos in this small format in order to limit the file size; students can keep their work in their school computer folders, and share it with others. Short videos can be taken home on floppies, but a CD burner is used to transfer and store the larger ones. Final movies are in 'mpg' format, which not all computers can play by default. However, simply renaming them with the file ending 'mpeg' allows them to play on any PC using the default Windows Media player.
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Working on scripts
Reviewing and editing