Journalists' Toolkit

The new Video Resources page has been added to this site.

This is a carefully curated page with links to good tutorials for video editing software, video shooting tips, and the like. It’s intended for beginners, particularly journalism students and journalism educators who are teaching video in their classes.

The second “how to edit audio with Audacity” video screencast tutorial is finished: Multitrack Audio Editing (Audacity Part 2). This is a 15-minute self-guided tutorial with lots of comments and a detailed table of contents.

The first video screencast tutorial for Audacity is an introduction: Audacity Basics: Getting Started in Audio Editing. At 17 minutes, it’s an ideal starting point for journalists or journalism students. I have added a detailed table of contents to this one as well.

These tutorials were built with Adobe Captivate, so once they are downloaded, you can skip back and forth without any waiting. The table of contents is clickable, so you can go straight to any segment for review. However, that means the file format of these tutorials is SWF, so for now, they will not play on iPad.

As an aid to a journalism training session I agreed to give, I created a short PowerPoint that is aimed at journalism students.

Windows Live Movie Maker Tutorial

Windows Live Movie Maker is quite different from its predecessor — Windows Movie Maker (not “live”). It is less versatile in several ways. To answer my own questions about WLMM, I did quite a lot of searching on the Web. To spare others the trouble and share the answers I found, I made a two-page PDF with links:

Windows Live Movie Maker Tips (PDF, 128 KB)

If you have any helpful WLMM links to suggest, please add a comment.

> Watch and listen to the tutorial.

It’s been a long road to making this tutorial, but finally, it’s finished. This is essentially my entire lecture and demonstration about how to use Audacity, step by step, for journalists and journalism students.

The target audience is people who have never edited audio before.

FireFTP is a free FTP (file transfer protocol) plug-in for the Firefox Web browser.

Because it is a browser plug-in, FireFTP works the same way on Windows, Mac or Linux.

To learn how to use FireFTP in eight easy steps: View the tutorial (one page).