YouTube – An Educational Resource? Yes!
I have to admit I’m not one to get involved in the “social sites” that seem to permeate the WWWeb and I thought YouTube was just a place for people to share seemingly useless videos of themselves and their friends doing mudane things like partying or trying out new stunts on the skaterboard.
Mind you, there is a lot of that on there, but if you look hard enough you’ll find some really valuable information and find some very talented indiviuals offering great musical talent or some really good self-help tutorials for jsut about anything you need.
For example, I do a bit of video editing for different organizations and I needed some information on how to change the background while the foreground maintained the original video (called chromokey). Chroma Keying is what you would likely see the most often when you watch the nightly news and the weatherpreson is pointing to different areas on a map showing the weather conditions.
This person is standing in front of something known as a “green screen” or “blue screen” it is just a solid colour screen and the graphics are added later. In most cases there is a monitor off-camera that shows what we, as the audience, is seeing. This assists the one doing the forecast on where to point. (This must take a lot of proctice.)
Anyhoo, back to YouTube… as I searched for more info about ChromaKey I found a great reasource on YouTube with a fellow named Mark Apsolon who gave some very valuable pointers on the best way to get good results using proper lighting, the right materials and a whole lot more.
This has change my opinion about YouTube and I now use it as a primary resource for finding other valuable information.
