Audio Mixing and Videotape Rescue
Audio Mixing and Videotape Rescue
eNews News!
It's time to put the final touches on those New Years projects! That means that we're going to need to mix some audio, and adjust some levels. It can affect the outcome of how our audience views our video, which is why Mixing for Mood is this week's Hot Video Tip! Plus, an exclusive story to eNews looks at the best practices for backing up projects safely.
In week's edition of Tips & Tricks, focuses on editing tools used to help make green screen effects easier and more precise in three different software programs!
Hot Video Tips: Audio Mixing for Mood
By Hal Robertson
Imagine your favorite movie or TV show without the music. It just doesn't work, does it?
What would a Batman movie be without the dark, brooding score? Where would Napoleon Dynamite be without its quirky soundtrack? The selection, timing and mixing of music are critical to the success of your project. They set the mood for current events and can even signal events to come. So it's worth focusing some time and effort on the sound mix. It doesn't matter whether you have a big budget or no budget, you can create equally powerful mixes using common tools and software you already own...Continue
Test Bench: MAGIX Videotape Rescue Package
By Tom Skowronski
The Analog Bridge
For most of us over the age of 20, memories of VCR recording are still stuck in the back of our brains. Over the years, we've all found some embarrassing childhood memories under a couch on some dusty videotape. The birthday with that invincible piñata. The trip to the theme park when your brother fell off the ferris wheel. The soccer games where your brother would beat up the ref. We could go on, but two things are certain: the death of VHS is imminent, and some of those tapes are worth saving!...Continue
More New Product Reviews
- DoubleSight DS-1900S Dual-Monitor LCD
- Panasonic HDC-HS100
- Imagine Products' ShotPut Pro Video Offloading Software
- NVIDIA Quadro CX Video Card
Feature: Backing Up - Best Practices
By Morgan Paar
Your project's done. How do you archive it? Helpful notes for someone who has to open the project after you're gone.
Archiving media and other assets has always been an important issue. But, as video moves away from magnetic tape (e.g., Mini DV tapes) toward solid-state Flash memory (e.g., Panasonic's P2), optical storage (e.g., Sony's PD), hard-drive storage and other media (can we even call it video anymore, now that it is no longer tape-based?), the need to archive has become not only more important but, in many ways, more difficult.
There is little doubt, at least outside the walls of videotape manufacturing companies, that videotape is going the way of floppy disks. I'm pretty sure the generation being born today will someday ask their parents, "What is that stuff they call videotape in those old 2000 movies?" Flash memory, optical storage and hard-drive storage are quickly replacing the linear acquisition format we have been using for the last 58 years...Continue
Movie and Video Production Planning
Movie and Video Production Planning
VideoMaker.com
Plan the shoot, shoot the plan, edit the planned shoot.
That's the mantra we introduced in last month's piece on production planning. We rejoin the discussion now with the amazing new idea that when production starts you should shoot what you planned to shoot.
Talk about obvious!
Not so fast. If that deceptively simple rule were routinely followed, Hollywood epics would never overrun their schedules and amateur productions would never look embarrassing (assuming they didn't crash and burn before completion). So let's review reasons for staying on-plan, gremlins that attack production plans, and ways to protect yourself against disasters, both serial and parallel.
The underlying concept is that crucial decisions are made in pre-production planning that will affect everything that follows, all the way through to the end of post production. A good planner keeps that long timeline in mind, the way a good chess player thinks many moves ahead.
Stick to the Plan
Sticking to a plan no matter what seems sort of, well retentive; but there are several reasons for resisting changes or at least studying them very carefully before making them.
First, remember the law of unintended consequences. Even small productions are complicated organisms with many interdependent parts. If you decide to shoot, say, scene 22 instead of scheduled scene 14, the cast, location, and time of day might be fine -- but what about the actor's distinctive Grateful Dead shirt, which got all muddy in scene 13 but has to be clean again for scene 22? Thinking fast, you run it through a Laundromat during lunch break. Uh-huh, but when you go to scene 14 later that shirt has to be dirty again -- with exactly the same stain pattern as before it was washed.
So things start to domino. Cleverly, you have the actor play scene 14 without the shirt, adding a line like, "Boy, I hope I can get that shirt clean; it's an heirloom." Right away, you've handed the editor two problems. Since the action is continuous across scenes 13 and 14, the character has no off-screen time in which to take off the shirt. Major jump cut. Also, the added line tells viewers that the shirt's valuable, which is totally irrelevant to the story and distracting from the point of the scene.
You're already thinking of fifty things at once, under time and money pressure to move, move, move! If you must make alterations, take the time you need to think them through. The second moral is that post production is very demanding. Once you wrap production, it's expensive and often impossible to re-open the shoot for vital pieces that are missing or mis-matched to other pieces.
Entire Article Here
What's Face Detection?
What's Face Detection?
eNews News!
Many of the newer video cameras are following the still-camera features by offering face recognition technology. But how exactly does this technology work? This issue's Basic Training has a primer on this new technology along with some food for thought on those times when it might hinder your work and how you can work around it.
Plus... You're hearing about it all over the news... the end of Analog Broadcast is coming, is it really as frightening as the Y2K scare? Our "Digits Over the Air" feature explains what the change means to TV viewers and, more importantly, how it can affect video producers.
Hot Video Tip: About Face!
By Kyle Cassidy
Many video cameras now seem to include face detection capabilities. But what exactly is face detection? Our primer explains how it works and how it might stump you, too.
The story of face recognition technology begins back in 2005, when Nikon released the Coolpix 5900, a mid-range point-and-shoot still camera with what it called a Face Priority mode. The camera would use built-in algorithms to examine a scene and identify human faces. It would then adjust contrast, color balance and exposure to "properly" expose the faces...Continue
Test Bench: Canon VIXIA HG21 HD Camcorder
By Tom Skowronski
Load Up Your Canon!
Canon's new VIXIA HG21 is a high-definition hard-disk-drive powerhouse, with 120GB of hard-drive space and a ton of exclusive Canon-only features. Prosumers rejoice: the HG21 is the perfect fit for family events, weddings and entry-level professional videography. At $1,300, the HG21 is a welcome addition to the HDD library...Continue
More New Product Reviews
Feature: Digits Over the Air
By Charles Fulton
The transition to digital over-the-air TV is nearly complete. So what does that mean for videographers?
While most of our discussions of television are generally about either criticizing the medium as a whole or trying to get distribution for our own productions, the technical aspects of television distribution generally never enter into the equation. However, we are at an interesting technical crossroads as the digital television transition nears its conclusion (and as some stations have been on the air in digital longer than 10 years at this point). As such, the fork in the road for this discussion goes in two different directions: what it means for the TV viewer and what this means for videographers.
To the TV Viewer
While we've been noticing that the average digital TV channel has at least one subchannel (e.g., an auxiliary service provided in addition to the main channel), the irony is that, after the transition is complete, there will actually be less spectrum available for television channels. The 1948 bandplan for TV eliminated channel 1 and reserved channel 37 for radio astronomy, leaving a total of 81 channels available. The first channels hacked off were 70-83, which went away in the 1980s to make way for cellular phones, leaving 67 channels available. Now, elimination of channels 52-69 for public safety radio leaves a scant 49 channels available. And, to compound the bandwidth impact, a group of consulting engineers calling themselves the Broadcast Maximization Committee proposes reallocating all AM stations to channels 5 and 6.
This is not to say that there will be no analog signals at all after February 17, 2009. Class A, low-power and translator stations may remain analog after that magical date. It's only full-power stations that must be digital after that date. However, some Class A, low-power and translator stations have applied with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to "flash-cut," to go from transmitting their current analog signals to transmitting digital signals instead...Continue
Filed under: Mozilla, Browsers
Mozilla Labs has announced a winner of the Jetpack .5 contest. While Jetpack is known primarily as a framework for allowing coders with a web development background to put together add-on type enhancements for Firefox, the winner 's project wasn't your run-of-the-mill sidebar hack.Alex Miltsev's submission was jetpack-to-CUDA, and it provides Jetpack developers with a simple way to offload intense processing tasks to GPUs. CUDA (demo video above) is NVidia's parallel computing architecture - and with CUDA-capable chips in more than 100 million PCs, Miltsev's handiwork could enable some seriously cool (and powerful) Jetpack add-ons to be developed.
The runners up (not to take anything away from them) were much more standard Jetpack offerings - a Google Translate extension, link shortener and sharer, and Twitter client.
Kudos to Miltssev for his creative entry! Here's hoping we see some truly awesome things in future versions of Firefox and Jetpack as a result.
Mozilla Jetpack contest winner harnesses GPU power to process data originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: Fugly Friday
With all the hullabaloo over medical reform in the U.S., you might wonder what health care looks like in other parts of the world. At this hospital in Japan, your care comes with a healthy side order of flashing, blinking Lucky Cats, and a prescription strength dose of animated gifs.
Warning: If you're epileptic, we take no responsibility for what may happen if you click to view this Fugly Friday. And, for once, we're really not joking.
Granted, I don't read Kanji, but I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb to say that this site is in need of some time in the emergency room. Even if the visible text were eloquent and poignant -- and I could read Japanese -- the overwhelming and incredibly inappropriate use of crazy color combos, frames and the dreaded solid black background of doom makes this a Fugly Friday to remember -- and avoid.
Fugly Friday : Aiseikai Hospital has no opthamologist on staff originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments Filed under: Fun, Social Software, iPhone
If you ever let a helium balloon float away when you were a kid and wondered where it eventually ended up, you already know what Balloons for the iPhone is all about. This cute little app lets you launch a virtual balloon with a message and a photo attached. Anyone with the app installed call pull down balloons near them -- Balloons uses the iPhone's location services -- and read messages.I grabbed a few balloons to see what it was all about, and it was more addictive than I expected. My first balloon was an ad, launched by some marketer near my city (Boo! Hiss!), but then things started getting interesting. I caught a balloon that had drifted from London to Texas to Arizona, picking up new notes along the way. Balloons reminds me of the message-in-a-bottle feeling of the early days of the Internet -- "Hey, who else is out there?"
I tested the Lite version of Balloons, which is free. There's also a $2.99 version that adds the ability to track your balloons, in case you get really serious. TUAW interviewed the developer at this year's WWDC.
Balloons: launch a balloon from your iPhone, see who finds it originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments Filed under: Internet, Macintosh, Blogging, Web services, Yahoo!, Shareware, web 2.0
A native Mac OS X application (requiring Mac OS X Snow Leopard), Viewfinder allows you to search Flickr from the desktop apply filters to show only Creative Commons images, and specify a particular image size. Then, once you select an image you can download the image, set it as your desktop background - and most importantly - send images straight to Keynote for your slides.
If you're a heavy keynote user (or blogger) who frequently needs to find Flickr images for your work Viewfinder is indispensible. I've been testing it since early September and found it an incredibly convenient tool to have at hand. A licence costs 15 (roughly $25) and a free demo is available for you try from the Viewfinder webpage.
Viewfinder brings powerful Flickr search to your Mac originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments Filed under: Fun, Games, Time-Wasters
You play the number one, armed with a ninja's favorite projectiles: throwing stars. And by "stars" I mean +, -, /, and *. To complete a level, you've got to defeat enemy numerals using the correct operator to satisfy the equation in the bottom right corner.
Sure, nailing this eight with a + would do the trick, but who knows what other numbers lurk around the next corner? Perhaps there's a two waiting to pounce? Who knows how many other nasties this guy brought to the fight. Getting the correct mix may take you a few tries on some levels, but I didn't find the process frustrating.
If you want a good way to keep your brain limber for a few minutes, Number Ninjas is a good way to do it.
Number Ninjas is an addictive, equation-solving Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments 
Gadgets change how you interact with waves, whereas robots process your input in some way or pull in data from another service (such as Twitter or Wikipedia). Robots are generally more powerful, but Gadgets are more fun.
This article is all about Gadgets. There will be another one on Robots soon: you folk that want to aggregate your Twitter and RSS feeds into Wave will have to wait a little longer! It's surprisingly hard to find good gadgets for Wave at the moment, so hold onto this guide even if you've not yet been invited to the beta.
Note: You should bear in mind that these are all 'beta' gadgets. A lot of them work just fine but you might hit some bugs along the way. The 'direct import links' might also change at any time, so feel free to report any broken links!
Share
Continue reading Ten gadgets to make Google Wave more productive - and fun!
Ten gadgets to make Google Wave more productive - and fun! originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | Email this | Comments Filed under: Hardware, Windows, Google, Browsers
The EC might be content with Microsoft's browser ballot screen, but that's not stopping Google from getting OEMs to turn away from Internet Explorer on their own.
Google already has deals with several OEMs to include their software, of course. They've been shipping Google Desktop on OEM pcs for quite some time now, and their plans to drop Google Chrome on new users have come to fruition as well.
As you can see, I unboxed a new Sony Vaio laptop running Windows 7 yesterday. Nestled amongst the other desktop icons was the tri-color Chrome orb.
Not only was Chrome pre-pinned to the Windows 7 taskbar, but a quick look at the internet options on the laptop revealed sad news for Internet Explorer: it had been bumped from default web browsing duties.
If we weren't already in the middle of an all-out browser war, the introduction of Google Chrome as the preinstalled default on Windows PCs could well set things off.
Game on, Microsoft: Google Chrome shipping as default browser on some PCs originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | Email this | Comments Filed under: Internet, Video, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Beta
Boxee can access online video from services including Hulu, Joost, and BBC's iPlayer. You can use it to enjoy audio and video podcasts. And you can access local media stored on your hard drive.
But despite all of its features, Boxee is still alpha software. That's going to change next month. Boxee is set to launch the first beta version of its software at an event in New York on December 7th. I suppose the day will continue to live in Infamy, although I doubt that decades from now we'll still be talking about it as the date that Boxee went beta.
The new version will have a new user interface, improved navigation, a user-controlled queue, and a new TV and movie search function among other changes.
Boxee media center to hit beta next month originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments Filed under: Social Software, Microblogging
Have you ever actually clicked on any of Twitter's trending topics? I don't want to sound like the old guy telling whippersnappers to get off his lawn, but trying to read almost any Twitter trend gives me a headache. There's so much spam with popular hashtags attached that even people who care about the trends aren't getting a great user experience. Twitter realizes this, and they're going to do something to cut down the noise.The precise something that Twitter intends to do isn't really clear. Biz Stone's blog post is full of ambiguous language: "We're working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful." It's not clear whether this means manually filtering trends in some way, or whether Twitter is introducing an algorithm to weight tweets by relevance. I think the average Twitter user is less concerned with the technical details, and more concerned with how effective this experiment will be at reducing junk tweets.
[via TechCrunch]
Twitter plans to cut the noise out of trending topics ... but how? originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments 
Today Skype announced that the company has reached a settlement with Joltid. The net result is that Skype now owns the technology and Joltid founders Niklas Zennstrm and Janus Friis will join the investor group that is in the process of buying Skype away from eBay as well as the Skype board.
If those names sound familiar, they should. Zennstrm and Friis were also the founders of Skype, back before eBay bought the company.
While there's a lot of backroom politics involved in the deal, here's what it means for users: Skype isn't going to close up shop anytime soon.
Skype lives on, reaches settlement with Joltid originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments Filed under: Social Software, iPhone
I once called BeeJive the best chat client for the iPhone, and for good reason: it supports several different chat services, offers push notifications, and has a user interface that makes chatting on the iPhone about as easy as it can feasibly be. BeeJIve just keeps getting better, too. The latest version, 3.1, now supports group chats in AIM ... almost.Group chats are a great feature that I'm sure Beejive will fully implement soon, but I'm not a fan of the way they work now. To start a group chat, just click the plus button and add multiple contacts. So far, so good, but here's where things get sticky: the only option is a private chatroom. You have to invite contacts to allow them in.
There's also no control over the name of the room. It's just Beejive plus a random string. Also, you'll want to turn notifications off if your room is very active, because having your phone beep or buzz for every message in a fast and furious chat is a wee bit obnoxious.
I know these are all minor quibbles, but it would be great to have a separate "start group chat" button, with the ability to create and name a public room. For now, though, I'm not complaining too much when an already-excellent chat client adds a useful feature it didn't have before.
BeeJive iPhone app gets AIM chatroom support, sort of originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments Filed under: News, Google, VoIP
In the case of the latter, however, it looks as though there might be light at the end of the tunnel. Business Week recently got a peek at a letter Google submitted to the FCC with regards to the blocking of certain rural and "red light district" phone numbers.
While the original letter included "formatting errors" and has since been replaced with a heavily redacted public version, BW's Arik Hesseldahl reports finding good news for those of you outside the US waiting for Google Voice.
Hesseldahl states that the letter reveals Google has working agreements with several "international service providers for inputs to Google Voice." At least the groundwork is in place, but there's no telling how long we'll have to wait. The letter goes on to say none of those services have launched as of yet.
So, how about it, Google? When does the rest world get to take Voice for a spin?
Google Voice getting ready to go global? originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments 
Citing the ol' chestnut that most visitors spend on average just eight seconds before deciding if it's the right site for them or not, Google's Commerce Search replaces any kind of built-in search engine that an e-commerce shop might already have installed. Rather than hosted locally, it's hosted up in the big Google cloud, so as business gradually increases in the weeks up until Christmas, the Commerce Search will remain quick and snappy, not buckling under the increased load!
And as you all know, Google prides itself on the accuracy of its results -- so being able to search a shop quickly and reliably for the gift you want can only be a good thing for us this Christmas.
There's a lot more info over on the Google Blog itself, so go take a look.
Google's new Commerce Search helps you find holiday gifts faster! originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments 
The Unreal Engine has historically been very hard to get your hands on with large license fees and other barriers to entry. And now, just like that, it's being made freely available to everyone. Whether for educational or non-commercial purposes, or to make your own commercial game, you can now use the UDK and get started with the fun bit -- the game creation -- immediately.
The catch? For non-commercial purposes: there is none. Students and those of you that are quietly working away on the next Big Thing in a garage or basement somewhere -- REJOICE!
For commercial developers: it'll cost you 25% of your royalty on any revenue revenue over $5,000 (see the full licensing details for more info).
And for everyone else -- the gamers! -- be ready for a lot more Time-Waster games powered by the Unreal Engine in the next few months!
Continue reading Unreal Engine developer kit now freely downloadable
Unreal Engine developer kit now freely downloadable originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Productivity, Open Source
Cache My Work was created to tackle the task of restoring your windows following a restart. Launch the app and a list of your cacheable programs is displayed - you also have the option of re-opening all your open Explorer windows. Check off what you want restored, click save, and reboot.
Once Windows is up and running again, Cache My Work's preparations make your programs reappear. It's a simple but effective little app - all it really does is zap a few lines into your registry under the Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce key.
You'll still need to re-open your files -- except, of course, in apps like Firefox where you have the option to restore your previous session automatically.
While the project hasn't seen an update in just over a year, it still works nicely - even on WIndows 7 (both 32 and 64-bit builds).
Pick up where you left off before a reboot with Cache My Work originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments 
RSS
