Macintosh Tips & Tutorials

Visit the Find out how site at Apple to view tutorials on basic Mac tips, photo, web, music and more. I like how the site is organized with a few topics for each category and the navigation is very easy to follow. In the Photos area, tutorials are listed for the current iPhoto '09 and for iPhoto '08 (and Aperature 2).

Acrobat to the Rescue

This story is about adding digital images to a Word document to be posted in an LMS - Blackboard then D2L. Originally the Word doc was exported as a PDF (Acrobat) file and posted to Bb. One of the documents was only 34 pages but 77 MB in size - WOW.

Using Acrobat Pro's Advanced > PDf Optimizer menu, the file slimmed down to only 2.1 MB. Now students can easily access the file online or quickly download it.

Video File Converter

Jim Hill (Media Services) described a program that converts video files from one format to another. StreamClip. This is free for Windows and Mac and is conversion video software. I'll be looking to install StreamClip in the lab for testing and use. Drop by with your video clips on a USB Thumb Drive and we will convert them as needed.

http://www.squared5.com/ Supported input formats: MPEG, VOB, PS, M2P, MOD, VRO, DAT, MOV, DV, AVI, MP4, TS, M2T, MMV, REC, VID, AVR, M2V, M1V, MPV, AIFF, M1A, MP2, MPA, AC3, ...