Demonstrating my disposition for life-long learning and continuous professional development

I have been a multimedia professional for the past 10 years and was hired one year ago as a Multimedia Specialist in the Office of Communications at Princeton University. Apart from visiting trade websites and analyzing online tutorials on a regular basis, I’d like to demonstrate my disposition for life-long learning and continuous professional development by discussing my recent experience with the largest conference in the United States for video professionals, the NAB Show (National Association of Broadcasters). NAB hosts two shows each year, one in New York City and another, larger show in Las Vegas. This year I was able to attend the event in New York City. Although I could not make the Las Vegas show, I still followed the conference online and kept up on keynote speakers and presentations.

At the New York City NAB Show, I was able to be hands-on with the latest equipment and speak with representatives about how to improve my workflow and output. I built relationships that began at this show and was able to follow up with both Canon and Panasonic representatives to have them come to my office, evaluate our current inventory, and discuss options for improving the quality of my office’s multimedia presence online. From those meetings, I was introduced to local vendors to help implement the new equipment into our workflow.

The artifact that I included is one of many presentations that I viewed online from the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. This particular example demonstrated Clemson University’s athletic video production workflow, which not only produced web-ready content, but also expertly integrated with Adobe products to turn content around almost instantly for social media, which they referred to as “content velocity.” It was inspiring to see how they were able to organize a team of student videographers and a staff of content professionals to produce constant, and more importantly on-time and relevant, social media content during their football games. I was able to learn about new tools that Adobe had recently released and how Clemson was able to adopt them to streamline their production methods. Additionally, it was great to see their process for organization and retrieval and how efficient it was for a fast-paced environment. It is a presentation that I intend to share with my colleagues and social media team to see if my office could incorporate some of the tools they use so that we can produce better social media content and work more collaboratively as a whole.

I hope to continue to engage in these types of experiences to not only increase my own potential, but suggest new ideas and creative approaches to familiar situations within whatever working environment I find myself in the coming years.

Clemson Athletics: Social Media Video and Content Velocity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_i1V7ObJ58


This is a repost from a competency demonstration from my graduate work in Learning Design and Technology at Purdue University.

Adobe gives the Premiere an overhaul and how I plan to teach it

Adobe updates Premiere

Adobe released updates for 2017 to many of their Creative Cloud applications this past April.  To my daily editor, Adobe Premiere, they'd added some much appreciated updates, including a revision to the dated Title tool and updated audio mixing options.  While I haven't yet had a chance to work with the latest version yet (the update downloading as I type this blog post), I really look forward to the updated titles, which should speed up my workflow in adding motion graphics and animated lower-thirds to my projects directly rather than flipping between Premiere and After Effects.  However, DaVinci Resolve, a well-established color grading tool, has been slowly increasing the capabilities of the software and recently purchased and incorporated professional audio software.  This makes DaVinci significantly more appealing to someone like myself and its intuitive interface is certainly a welcome sight over Adobe's (though to Adobe's credit, they have gotten better with the inclusion of their workspace panels).  I plan to work in DaVinci Resolve for a smaller project to see how the workflow compares to Adobe's.

https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/the-latest-and-greatest-for-premiere-pro-cc-and-media-encoder/?segment=dva

http://www.newsshooter.com/2017/05/03/51093/

Teaching Adobe Premiere this coming Fall

I also came across this Adobe Live Stream Series - How to Make Great Videos.  I am currently working on developing my own Adobe Premiere workshop for the Digital Learning Lab at Princeton.  I always like to see how other instructors approach teaching software and what they emphasize compared to what I emphasize.  While my future students could simply watch a series such as this one, which is an excellent in-depth view of Premiere, I will need to take a more targeted approach.  Students who will be attending my workshop will more than likely be doing so to fulfill a video requirement for a class.  Many of these students are taking four or five courses at Princeton and won't have the time to dedicate to six hours to learning a software package for a single assignment.  However, as I mentioned in an earlier blog post, this is the type of new literacy that I believe students will need to be successful in their future careers.  Knowing this, my approach will be to provide them with the technical skills, abilities, and judgement to make the fundamental choices for crafting messages in a digital story.  Because Premiere now handles multiple video formats without transcoding, students won't need to understand more complex things like video codecs, at least not initially.  My hope is to guide them toward creating effective stories and instill an interest to further develop a 21st century means of communication.

https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/live-stream-series-how-to-make-great-videos/?segment=dva