The Bayeaux Tapestry, one of the most important chronicles of its day, offers a vivid depiction of the events leading up to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. A video available on YouTube from PotionGraphics brings the tale to life through animation and sound effects. The clip begins about halfway through the tapestry, at the appearance of Haley’s Comet, and ends at The Battle of Hastings.

Video discovered via Open Culture. The entire scroll is available to view here.

The Database of Virtual Art seeks to document and ultimately preserve the evolving field of digital installation art. The database is intended for both researchers and artists, and digital media artists are encouraged to post content themselves. The web-based resource is free and allows browsing by artist name as well as keyword. Works, literature, people, events and institutions may also be searched.

Pictured: The Living Web by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, 2002.

More than 1,500 historic American television commercials from the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History in the Duke University Special Collections Library are now available on iTunes U. This collection is called AdViews. Videos are free to download, and can be viewed at the computer or on video-capable iPods.

Most of the 1,500 currently available videos date from the 1950s and 1960s. A keyword search for “coffee” brings up eight albums, including a Yuban Coffee ablum with more than seventy commercials.

The total collection comprises 12,000 commercials and librarians at Duke hope to finish digitization by the end of 2009. Click here for more information.

The VLC Media Player is an open source multimedia player for various audio and video formats, as well as streaming video and DVDs. Free to download, it works well with both Macs and PCs. The media player includes a Snapshot feature (under the Video menu) which allows you to capture stills from video. Just pause at the suitable frame and take the snapshot. These snapshots may then be used in PowerPoint, Keynote, or OIV presentations.

For more information about the VideoLAN project (including the VLC Media Player), click here.

ArtsConnectEd, a joint project between the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center, launched in Beta on May 4, 2009.

The new ArtsConnectEd is completely redesigned as a dynamic and social Web site that empowers teachers, students, and museum educators in the creation and sharing of content and ideas in the process of learning about art.

The new Art Finder offers an intuitive and powerful interface to the combined collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) and Walker Art Center (WAC), encouraging both wide exploration and in-depth research.  Users can browse over 90,000 works of art, watch and listen to more than 1,000 video and audio records, and read thousands of articles and object labels.  All of these resources can be collected and arranged as interactive presentations for personal or classroom use, which can in turn be published for others to use.  ArtsConnectEd also allows users to enhance their presentations with video and photos from services such as Flickr, YouTube, and the new ArtBabble video site.

This week the Indianapolis Museum of Art announced the launch of ArtBabble.org, an interactive website dedicated to art-based video content.

It is intended to showcase video art content in high quality format from a variety of sources and perspectives… ArtBabble was created so others will join in spreading the world of art through video.

Videos are organized by Series (such as “Behind the Scenes at MoMa“), Channels (similar to subject areas, with a large number of videos about Contemporary Art), Artists, and ArtBabble Partners. Videos can even be exported as MP4s for offline play on computers or Ipods — just click on the Ipod icon beneath a selected video to download.

Contributing institutions include Art21, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and The New York Public Library.

TAMI is an independent 501c3 organization dedicated to the preservation of Texas film heritage. Every year, home movies, television programs, and locally produced films are lost as these visual records of Texas rapidly decompose or are simply thrown away. TAMI works to discover these “orphan” films and to educate the public about moving image history and contemporary preservation practice.

You can search TAMI’s Video Library for your hometown, famous Texans, historical events and more, or click on “Random Film” for a surprise. Contributions from the public are also welcome; if you see someone or something you recognize in a film, become a TAMI Tagger. Some of our favorite films include Paper and I (an educational film from the Texas Forest Service) and Knife Throwing Family, which speaks for itself.

• Cinematize and Cinematize Pro
• iMovie (Mac)
  
• QuickTime Pro
• Episode (Mac)
  
• Final Cut Pro (Mac)
• MPEG StreamClip