Dear Student, Welcome to Edu 514 at the Ventura Branch of Azusa Pacific University! I look forward to a productive and useful experience for you in our upcoming class, and insofar as we have only nine weeks and much to cover in getting you up and running in making your own classroom videos, I wanted to let you know ahead of time what software and hardware you might need for our class. The hardware is the easy part. You will want a computer with a firewire port and some 50 to 60 gigabytes of free space. Digital video is notoriously harddisk intensive, and running short of space on your harddisk can be a problem. It is sometimes said this is an expensive class, as many students go out and buy a digital video camera and an external hard drive. This need not be the case. Have some free harddisk space and firewire port, and you will have the minimum necessary. Software is a relatively more important consideration. I hope to have you up and editing digital video on the first night of our class, and so having the software bought and installed by then is important! Medium to advanced users on the Microsoft operating systems want to purchase a copy of Adobe Premiere 1.5. This is powerful program that beginners can use, but at the same time will allow for plenty of growth in the future; many full length movies are edited with this software; you will have everything you need. Premiere Pro costs around $200 for educators. Beginngers to computers generally and software applications in particular might want to purchase Adobe Premiere Elements, an scaled-down version of this video editing program. Premiere Elements is less powerful than Premiere Pro and allows for less customization, but it can be simpler for someone who might feel overwhelmed by more complex software. Premiere Elements sells to educators for approximately $70. On the Apple operating systems, the first choice for medium to advanced users would be Apple's Final Cut Pro HD. Final Cut Pro is almost the software application of choice for digital video professionals. Less experience users can purchase Final Cut Pro Express, which serves as the cut down version of Final Cut Pro. So with your laptop ready and a video editing software application bought and installed, you will be ready to explore and learn on our first day of class. I look forward to meeting you then. Very Truly Yours,

FTHS  Ventura, CA     805.289.0034 ext. 1408     rgeib@vtusd.k12.ca.us