it takes little work to get people to divulge their passwords over the phone. One survey, by security consultants PentaSafe, found that two-thirds of commuters at Victoria Station in London would give their password to a pollster in exchange for a promotional pen.

[From One, two, three factor security? - at ZDNet.co.uk]

For a pen? Are you serious?

We video chat a fair bit in our household. Both sets of my son’s Grandparents live interstate but through Skype we can have “virtual visits” at least once a week. Super nice. As the “Little Ticket” (as he is known) has become more mobile however the issue of keeping him in front of a webcam so he can interact with his Grandparents becomes a bit of a logistical challenge.
Enter CamTwist. It was a pick of the week by Liana Lehua on MacBreak Weekly back in May so I tried it and it’s absolutely wild! You can add special effects to your video chats, stream the desktop, still images, slideshows but most importantly for me you can use multiple video inputs.

In my minds eye I see you all nodding and smiling politely. Let me explain…

So I have the MacBook with built-in camera and my old Panasonic MX-1 DV camera plugged into the Firewire port. I fire up CamTwist highlight “webcam” as my video source and click the Select button (Cam Twist Step 1). I then get an option of which video input I would like to use. I then go back to Step 1, highlight “webcam” again but this time click PIP (for picture-in-picture).

Cam Twist Settings
Originally uploaded by coach_robbo

Over in the settings section (Cam Twist Step 2) You can adjust the size and placement of the PIP as well as the inputs. There is a very convenient button that switches the two sources. Once you have things just the way you like them you can save it all as a preset for next time. So I have the DV camera providing a wide shot of the living room for when the “Little Ticket” gets busy and the MacBook webcam for upclose and personal. Absolutely totally sweet. It’s like having a TriCaster on the desktop. All for the sum total cost of $0.

WebcamMax is suggested for the Windows platform but it will sting you for $49.95.

We chose Skype because it provides the best cross platform video solution at the moment doing a fairly good job of maintaining a picture even on the most average broadband connection.

It wasn’t by choice initially to move to iMovie ‘08. I was very comfortable with iMovie 6HD thank you very much. But my newest piece of kit (being the Panasonic SD5) demanded it. iMovie HD6 doesn’t recognise it so my hand was forced and I’m kind of glad it was. The simplicity of iMovie ‘08 has meant that I focus on the content more than ever and it has some super nice features for publishing to Dot Mac (which I do regularly due to a certain someone). The crop and colour correction features are super nice too. Some things are not so cool though such as the ability to extract audio and do B-roll edits. It wasn’t intuitive at all. I was prepping some teacher reflection footage for an Education.au symposium I’m presenting at this week and wanted to overlay some student footage to compliment what was being said and for the life of me couldn’t figure out how to do it. Atomic Learning was not helpful (for a change) so a web search it was and I uncovered a gem.

Unlocking iMovie ‘08

You may be like me. You may need help figuring out how this new iMovie
actually works, especially if you spent a lot of time in previous
versions. Here you can find tips, information, and commentary all about
the newest version of the flagship iLife application.

Told me exactly what to do to achieve the B-roll edits I wanted and a bit more besides. A great resource, one I highly recommend for those whose first foray into editing is iMovie ‘08 and one I would mandate for anyone switching up.