Digital Media Collection

The Digital Media universe is filled with music, video, and still imagery. And to begin your exploration, you just need to learn a few basic techniques. This collection of tips, hacks, and tutorials is designed to accelerate your mastery of these media. We cover video, music, and photography because they're not isolated forms of expression--in fact their real power is unleashed when you combine these media to communicate your vision in new ways never before envisioned.

Even if you consider yourself a newbie right now, you're only steps away from discovering something new that will send you to a new level of creativity. Try the techniques outlined in this collection. They will spur other ideas. And if you're already experienced with these media, we hope you'll discover some new tricks to enhance your projects. And above all, experiment. Digital media lends itself to trial and error, often resulting in greater achievements than dreamed possible with traditional technologies.

The first two articles focus on digital video. The Top Ten Tips piece will help you improve the footage you capture with your DV camcorder, and the iSight article shows you how to use a webcam for movie making instead of an expensive camcorder.

The middle articles explore audio. Sound quality is just as important as the visuals, sometimes more. In "Sound is Half the Picture," you'll learn how to capture quality voiceovers to improve your productions. And if you're lucky enough to own an iPod for listening to digital music, our "Care and Feeding of Your iPod" piece will help extend both your listening pleasure and the life of your investment.

The last three articles focus on digital photography. Onceagain we start with a Top Ten Tips piece that will instantly improve your pictures. Then we explore the world of metadata, which is a distinct advantage that digital photography has compared to traditional picture taking. You can go back and analyze the information that your camera recorded along side your pictures to help you better understand what went wrong...or right.

The final photography piece shows you how you can share your pictures directly from a digital camera with others on a local computer network. That's right, they can open their web browser and see the images residing on your camera. If they wish, they can view an enlargement or even download the shots. To make this even more interesting, remote users can fire the camera to capture additional pictures-- all from a remote computer using Rendezvous technology.

So start with the area that interests you the most: music, video, or pictures. But read the other areas too, because proficiency in all three will enable you to choose the right expression for the job, and ultimately produce the best content possible.