DVD Trials and Tribulations

Well, it was certainly a good idea to provide T189 students with DVD tutorials taking them through various techniques and procedures using the Photoshop Elements 5 software ….. but in practice it has proved to be a serious drawback.

You see, the tutorials are in Adobe flash format and, while I have to say that they are excellent animated teaching materials presented by members of the T189 Course Team, they have caused a lot of grief. Some tutorials are not long – between two and five minutes perhaps – but the longest ones run to ten maybe fifteen minutes.

Most students found they could watch the shorter tutorials but the longer ones proved impossible. There were endless complaints about the video and audio losing synch which meant that the former finished well before the latter. The tutorials seemed to bring some computers to a total standstill, lock up, needing a reboot. Some students said they got a ‘Red Screen’ and had to reboot.

Although we did have the tutorials on disc, we also had the option to watch them online (using broadband obviously) via links in the course material on the website. This seemed to solve the problem for some students but made no difference to others.

In an attempt to try and isolate the cause, one of the moderators posted a request in a course forum asking for details of the computer being used, whether it was the DVD or online tutorials being watched and how much memory was available.

This was my response:

“Processor and speed, AMD Athlon 64 bit processor 3000+ (2Ghz)
Amount of Memory (ie Ram) 1Gb
Video Card, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 128Mb
Whether you are running the movie from the DVD, from the website, or both, Running it directly from the DVD
Whether you have other programs running as well (if so, try shutting them and seeing if it helps). Minimal programs running

* * * * *

Watching the Session 3 tutorials, during the last three (3.5, 3.6 and 3.7) I noticed my computer starting to grumble and fired up/checked Norton System Doctor. I have 1Gb memory of which about 800Mb was free when I started watching the tutorials. At the point when the computer started grumbling, the memory level on my system had dropped to 3.2Mb …. which is probably why the video was stuttering, out-of-synch and all over the place.

My system is always sluggish after I’ve watched the Tutorials or used Elements – sometimes it’s almost a case of rebooting just to get everything running smoothly again”

The long-suffering and ever-patient Mods have been passing on student complaints to the Course Team and now the course website bears a message asking any student having serious problems (i.e. unwatchable tutorials) to contact them direct with details. There is talk of re-encoding the tutorials into a different format and future prospects of having them produced in proper DVD format so that they can be watched on a home DVD player or using your computer’s DVD and software player. Hopefully the CT will be able to help the students who have been most badly affected.

I’ve managed to watch all the first six sets of tutorials on my computer by dint of grabbing the progress slider when things get out of synch, returning it to the beginning, and then sliding it back to position whereupon the video and audio seem to re-synchronise themselves … for a while at least. It’s not perfect and it is irritating, but it’s workable. It is only a ten week course and, although I’m busy, I do have a lot of patience and I’m not restricted to working in the evenings when so many working students come home and do their coursework. But I can understand why some students have become extremely angry and irritable about the whole business.

On a brighter note, we have our CMA (Computer Marked Assignment) approaching. It has to be completed and submitted using the OU’s eTMA (electronic Tutor Marked Assignment) procedure. It is worth 10% of the marks and is fairly straightforward … although, from past experience, there are always some questions that are worded in an ambiguous way to make you think carefully before you leap for the ‘obvious’ answer.

So the Week 6 Assignment is actually optional, due to the CMA being due on June 18th, but is an interesting and thought-provoking challenge nonetheless:

Take five photos that form a set linked in some way, for example in technique (e.g. motion blur, macro, small depth of field), colour theme (e.g. reds, natural colours, cool colours), or subject (e.g. portraits, landscapes, still life). Upload the photos to OpenStudio. Can you spot the linking theme on other students’ sets?

Hmmm… goes off to think …..