If it has an achilles heel, however, it’s shot steadiness. Although the camera does apply a smidge of anti-shake processing, it’s simply impossible to hold the thing without jostling it slightly, as if your heartbeat is making the camera tremble. It helps if you try to imagine you’re holding a priceless vase filled to the brim with water, but the Zi8 is still a bit too light.

Attaching an accessory grip does help a little. However, what I really want to try is one of a new breed of ultra-light (and relatively cheap) Steadicam alternatives. Steadicam themselves make an astonishing bit of kit called the Merlin, but it’s far too costly for our pockets. However, there are a couple of similar products available for around £80, which might just solve the Zi8’s greatest weaknesses.

The things I want to try are the Manfrotto 585 Modosteady, or the Hague Mini Motion-Cam. Most reviews of the former are pretty poor, but expectations may have been too high; the latter may be more effective, but by the time it’s balanced for a very light camera it may be more expensive than the Modosteady.

Neither of these is going to be a patch on the Steadicam Merlin. But if they make a £200 package that rivals £400 camcorders for smoothness, they might just be worthwhile.

Our colleagues at EngineeringUK are aware of the issue, and are working to solve it. In the meantime, our apologies.

[update Wednesday 3^rd March: sorry, no change to the site so far, and we don’t have an estimated fix date. We’ll keep you posted.]

Animated Rat Dissection. No rats were harmed during the making of this film.

That’s right — no longer do you have to strain to read white text and near-invisible red links on a black background. We’ve finally rebuilt this blog so it’s more in keeping with the rest of the SciCast site. In fact, it’s even more up-to-date than the main site is, and we have all sorts of plans for things we could do with this new layout.

There will doubtless be a few niggles and problems as we work things out. We’re reasonably confident that this design isn’t more broken than the previous one, but if you spot anything that’s gone haywire, please leave a comment here or drop us a line by email.

Internet Explorer 6

OK, so things are a little funkier than we’d intended in IE6. Sorry about that. IE6 has been past its use-by date for years, so if you can, install Firefox, Chrome or IE8. They’re all much faster and more secure browsers anyway.

If you’re on a managed network and can’t update your browser, you have our sympathies. The site does still work, though, so you’re not missing much. Please note that we’re not alone in phasing out support for IE6; YouTube is about to do the same. If they can’t justify the engineering resources to support a buggy nine year-old browser, SciCast certainly can’t!

[update: we’re receiving word that things are a little funky in IE7 as well. That’s hard for me to test, but I’ll see if I can get it sorted.]

Iain travels to the Naica Cave in Mexico, where he and his crew battle 50°C temperatures and 100% humidity to bring remarkable footage of the world’s largest crystals, in a deep underground cavern. It’s phenomenal stuff.

I can’t embed the video, sadly, but do check out the link. You’ll be glad you did. And remember, we do have a geology category for the SciCast Awards…

[update 20^th Jan: 3.5 million viewers! The highest figures for a science programme on BBC2 in four years, according to the Guardian. Fantastic news — congratulations Iain!]

We noticed this just after everyone at our hosting partner went home last night. There doesn’t seem to be anything we can do to fix it, sadly, so we’ll have to live like this for the weekend. Hopefully we’ll be able to get the site fixed up first thing next week.

Apologies for the inconvenience, and all that. Perhaps it’s a cue for everyone to pick up cameras and spend the weekend making films rather than watching them?

Here’s the archive.

You can browse by genre, or search by style/feel/tone — then you can preview the tracks before you download them and put them in your movies. Most of the tracks I’ve previewed have more than long enough for a SciCast film, which saves trying to loop them. You can try editing them so they finish neatly, or simply add a fade at the end of your film.

The composer/performer is Kevin MacLeod; if you use his work, remember to credit him in your film, and make sure you keep a note of which track you’ve used (so you can tell us, and we can link to it from the SciCast site).

Longer version: That was fun!

We had a wonderful time in Berlin — we’ll try to post some photos over the next few days — and the MEDEA Awards were a terrific way of bringing together a disparate group of projects and people. We’d never have realised we had anything in common until somebody put us in the same room and told us we did. I’m extremely grateful to the organisers for sparking all sorts of interesting and potentially useful conversations.

The entirely worthy winners were:

• Innovation Award: Daisy & Drago, an animation developed by a class of 6 year-olds in a Turkish school. A wonderful, mad achievement led by a brilliantly enthusiastic teacher.
• Special Jury Award: Eyes on the Skies by the European Southern Observatory. The jury paid particular credit to the high quality of the video, but the way the film has been distributed is at least as impressive. A big, glossy, but very well-executed project. Also, Lars from the ESO was hilarious.
• European Collaboration Award: Traditions Across Europe, a comparative project encompassing 22 schools, led by a school in Italy. A huge achievement for a tiny project, driven entirely by goodwill and tenacity — a great example of how much can be achieved if you just roll your sleeves up and get on with it.
• Overall MEDEA Award: Know It All, by Childnet International. The other UK nominee, this is a very complete and well thought-through set of modules about online safety, aimed at quite young children. Fun, witty, colourful, and well-paced animations deliver clear messages.

It’s a cliché, but we really are delighted to move in such circles, and it was an honour to reach the final stage. Our sincere congratulations to the winners, and to the other finalists.

MEDEA is a pan-European organisation that ‘recognises excellence and creativity in media in education’, so we’re utterly thrilled to be recognised by them. Katie and I are jetting off to Berlin at the end of the week for the Awards event, and to meet the other finalists, who range from an astronomy project from the European Southern Observatory to an Italian schools’ project about local traditions across the continent.

Here’s more about the finalists, about the 2009 Awards, and about the MEDEA organisation in general.

Of course, we wouldn’t have got anywhere without all the terrific support and particularly films contributed by so many of you over the last few years. Reaching this stage of the MEDEA Awards is a wonderful recognition of the imaginative, insightful, and plain crazy work done by SciCasters across the UK and Ireland.

Yay us: all of us.

We’ve not used Pinnacle Studio, so we can’t vouch for it one way or another. However, if it looks like it might fit your needs this is certainly a pretty good price. One frustration is that while some other products, like Corel VideoStudio Express and VideoStudio Pro X2, or Sony Vegas Movie Studio, offer trial downloads, Pinnacle doesn’t seem to do the same for Studio.

If you have any experience with Studio — or the other tools, for that matter — please let us know in the comments here.

Windows Live Movie Maker is now available for free download from Microsoft. There’s a catch, though, in that it’s ‘not supported’ on Windows XP. It’s not clear if this means it won’t run at all, but on the face of it you need Windows Vista or Windows 7.

We’ll be downloading it and trying it out just as soon as SciCast Orbiting World Headquarters gets its broadband back (you wouldn’t believe how hard it is for BT to run a cable up here). If you beat us to it, leave a comment to let us know how you get on.

SciCast supporter, teacher, and film-maker Alom Shaha is a bit miffed about the way this is being done, so he’s rolled up his sleeves and taken matters into his own hands. He’s hosting an open forum for opinions and discussion at his site howscience.co.uk. The QCA have assured him they’ll read his summary of responses; he’s hoping to collect contributions from rather more teachers than they do.

If you’re a science teacher, and you have something to say, please do take a look at the site, leave comments if you’re so moved, and consider writing up your own thoughts to add to the conversation. You can contact Alom by email: alom.shaha@gmail.com.

Here he is adding some detail to the magnificent supersonic-shock vortex cannon he made in that first show:

1. Flip’s new UltraHD is finally available in the UK. This is a high-definition (720p) camcorder, and reviews suggest it’s almost as good in low light as the earlier Flips, making it a clear leader in the field. I believe it also has a slightly wider-angle lens than its sister the MinoHD, which should make it more useful for our sort of films. Available from Amazon and elsewhere. Starting price is around £120.

2. Kodak have announced a new addition to their range of Flip-like cameras, but this one may well be the holy grail. The Zi8 records full HD (1080p), has image stabilisation (the anti-shake feature many early HD stick cameras lacked), and — wait for it — a microphone input jack! If this works properly, and if the camera can cope with dimly-lit classrooms, we’ll have a new camera winner. It should be available in the UK from September, for around £150. More detail at Camcorderinfo.

I was about to buy a Flip Ultra HD, but the Kodak looks worth waiting for — a microphone input is a huge boon. Plug in one of these and your sound problems should be more-or-less solved.

We hear lots of conflicting reports on essentially all software packages — what works for some people seems to crash constantly for others. So our advice is to download trial versions of the various packages, and see which works with your combination of computer and camera, before you buy.