The Peoples' Choice...: tips and tricks

Showing posts with label tips and tricks. Show all posts

Tips and tricks for shooting HD video

PC Authority, December, 2007
By David Field, Staff Writer

We've reviewed the best best professional handheld cameras available. As you might have guessed, none of them are particularly easy to use if you’re used to an automatic point-and-shoot style video camera.

Get a photographer buddy to help you operate the camera, and a director of photography (DoP) to compose your shots. In the likely event that you don’t know a DoP, recruit somebody in interior design, a theatre technician, or a film buff with an appreciation of light.

The biggest trap that everybody falls into when recording HD is the focus setting. HD’s monumental pixel count means that the viewfinder can’t display a 1:1 image, making it hard to judge your focal point, which can result in soft images. Fortunately a simple in-camera trick can help you pick your focal point if you don’t have access to an HD field monitor.

When you have set your scene, add a Neutral Density (ND) filter to darken the image. The ND filter cuts the amount of light entering the lens so that you can perform the following steps. Open your iris to F2 or greater to increase the amount of light reaching the CCD. This will give you a very shallow depth of field. Use the magnifying feature on your camera and find focus on your talent’s eyes. Once you’re done, revert to your desired settings. As you close the iris, you’ll bring more of the image into focus while keeping the focal point centred on the eyes.

In the HDV world, good tapes are vital. The compression scheme breaks if there are too many errors on the tape, which cheap tapes have in spades. Too many errors and a dropout occurs, which means the loss of one frame in DV but the loss of up to 15 in HDV. I’ve seen random dropouts that have made me throw away otherwise perfectly good HDV takes because half a second of footage was missing. If you’re interested about why this happens, research the MPEG-2 GOP structure, but at the very least avoid the problem by using high quality tapes from the same manufacturer as your camera.

Please don’t forget about your audio! These cameras can capture dialogue acceptably when they’re close to an actor, but will pick up a lot of background noise too. You should use a boom and/or radio microphones for better results. They all end in the same XLR audio connectors that these cameras use and are simple to manage if you have a spare pair of hands on set. They will do wonders to your production.

Remember – you’re telling a story, so plan your shots. Draw storyboards – no matter how bad – so people around you know what’s in your head and what you want to create.

Have fun, good luck, and let me know how you go.

And please don’t stretch a ten second pub joke into a seven minute epic.

Loic Le Meur’s Ten Rules For Startup Success

Michael Arrington

The Financial Times has a profile of French (now Silicon Valley) entrepreneur Loic Le Meur today.

Loic is an accomplished entrepreneur - he founded uBlog (merged with Six Apart), organizes the annual Le Web conference and has now created Seesmic (note that I’m an investor in Seesmic). So even though he’s French, his advice, when given, is worth listening to.

Included in the article are his ten rules for startup success. Reprinted below.

Don’t wait for a revolutionary idea. It will never happen. Just focus on a simple, exciting, empty space and execute as fast as possible
Share your idea. The more you share, the more you get advice and the more you learn. Meet and talk to your competitors.
Build a community. Use blogging and social software to make sure people hear about you.
Listen to your community. Answer questions and build your product with their feedback.
Gather a great team. Select those with very different skills from you. Look for people who are better than you.
Be the first to recognise a problem. Everyone makes mistakes. Address the issue in public, learn about and correct it.
Don’t spend time on market research. Launch test versions as early as possible. Keep improving the product in the open.
Don’t obsess over spreadsheet business plans. They are not going to turn out as you predict, in any case.
Don’t plan a big marketing effort. It’s much more important and powerful that your community loves the product.
Don’t focus on getting rich. Focus on your users. Money is a consequence of success, not a goal.

10 Ways to Trick out your Mac

Friday, Dec. 15 2006 | Author: Michael

Customizing your Mac is easier than ever these days. I started combing the web looking for new ways to “trick out” my Mac, and found these 10 links. They offer a variety of ways you can make your Mac your own, increase functionality and ease of use, and Pimp out your UI.

Pixel Press Icons - 120 of the most beautiful icons on ANY OS that you can download and use for any of your programs.

Super OS X Menubar Items - 80 + ways to customize your Menubar, including DiggUpdates, Del.icio.us bookmarks, Desktop customizations, systems watching tools, and much, much more.

OS X Keyboard Shortcuts - From Apple’s official site…complete list of the keyboard shortcuts available in OS X.

Automator World - “…a clearinghouse of user-contributed Workflows and Actions, as well as Automator information, news and tips.” Great resource for Automator Users.

MacDesktops - Hundreds of Mac Desktop Images for you to download.

NeoOffice - So you have Open Office on your Mac, and you like it a lot…but you don’t LOVE it because it just doesn’t look like it belongs…well, NeoOffice is your solution! The NeoOffice Aqua Beta is finally available for download.

Pimp My Safari - Over 60 plugins and extentions for the default OS X browser, Safari.

CenterStage - “CenterStage is the Media Center Application that allows you to use the digital content stored on your Apple Macintosh computer & play it in a more comfortable enviroment such as your living room using any standard Televison set.” An Open Source FrontRow alternative

Undercover - Theft recovery software from Orbicule.

Unsanity Apps - A collection of free, and commercial Apps to tweak and protect your Mac.

Got anymore good sites or apps for “tricking out your Mac”? Feel free to leave them in the comments section below.

Sleep your Mac via Mail

By Rob Griffiths

OS X’s Mail program includes Rules (in Mail -> Preferences -> Rules) that can help you manage your inbound e-mail. You can filter messages based on content, sender, subject, and so forth, and then automatically route the messages to another mailbox. I use the rules a fair bit, particularly to route mailing list messages into mailboxes I’ve created for those lists. But there’s one other feature of Mail’s Rules that adds a lot of power—the ability to run an AppleScript on a filtered message. You can put this ability to use, even if your AppleScript skills (like mine) aren’t the greatest.

Here’s one example. Say you’ve left home for a business trip, and realize halfway to the airport that you’ve forgotten to put your Mac to sleep. All your normal applications are running, including Mail. Being the secure sort, you haven’t left any remote access methods active—Remote Login, FTP, and the like are all disabled. But you’d really rather not leave your Dual G5 sucking down the electric juice for a week. Short of calling a buddy and having them break into your home, what options do you have? Well, if you read this tip, you’ll have at least one solution at hand: you’ll send yourself an e-mail that will put the machine to sleep.

The first thing to do is create an AppleScript, so launch Script Editor (in /Applications -> Utilities). Don’t worry, this is a very simple AppleScript. It consists of exactly three lines:

tell application "Finder"
sleep
end tell

Told you it was simple. When you’ve pasted that in, choose File -> Save to bring up the Save dialog. Name your script and save it somewhere where you can find it later—I use a folder named Useful Code to store such things. Don’t worry about changing any of the other settings in the Save dialog; leave them as they are.

Now open Mail’s Preferences and click on the Rules icon in the toolbar. When the Rules panel appears, click Add Rule. In the new window that appears, give your rule a name (Sleep my Mac) and then create a set of conditions to insure that the rule will only act on the e-mails you want it to act on. This can be any combination of sender, recipient, subject, content, and so forth that you like. As an example, here’s how I set mine up:

Note that if you’re going to use more than one condition, make sure the first pop-up is set to “All” instead of “Any.” And before you all go crazy trying to spoof your mail programs to send me a message to sleep my Mac, notice that the domain information is fictitious, and I’ve changed the rule since I took that screenshot—so spend your energy on something productive, like guessing what products Apple will roll out at Macworld Expo next week.

At the bottom of the above window, you can see the key to making this work—the “Perform the following actions” section has been set to Run AppleScript, and I used the Choose button to point to the script I saved earlier. At this point, click OK and you’re done. The next time you forget to put your Mac to sleep before leaving on a trip, just send yourself an e-mail that matches the conditions you created, and your Mac will go to sleep.

Is this a security issue? Well, if someone figured out your rule, they could send an e-mail that would sleep your Mac. Of course, figuring out your rule would probably mean they had physical access to your machine, since I’m not aware of any security holes that reveal Mail’s rules to the internet—and if they have physical access, they can do many worse things than send you a sleeper e-mail!

You can do other things in this manner as well, obviously—any AppleScript you write or find on the net could be used, although if they require interaction, there’s not much point to running them via a Mail rule. You can also use simple scripts to launch applications:

tell application "Finder"
launch application "iChat"
end tell

You might use this technique if you’re on the road and forget that you meant to launch iChat before you left—perhaps to spy on your cat using your machine’s iSight camera. Of course, to make that work, you’ll also need Chax, which lets you set up the machine to automatically accept video chat invitations. I leave further uses of this technique up to your imagination.

Source : Mac world

Top 16 Flash Animation Creators to help you design stunning intros & text effects

SWiSH Max

SWiSH Max has everything you need to create stunning fully interactive Flash animations. You can create shapes, text, buttons, movie clips, and motion paths. You can also include more than 230 ready-to-use animated effects including explode, vortex, 3D spin, and wave. You can create your own effects or make an interactive movie by adding actions to objects. A scripting language allows you to program sophisticated operations into your animations. You can preview your animation inside SWiSH Max without launching a browser or external player, and live editing lets you make changes while the animation is playing. SWiSH Max creates all the files you need to upload to your Web server, or you can generate the HTML code to paste into an existing Web page.

SWFText
SWFText is an author tool of Flash text animation. It embraces 160+ text effects and 40+ background effects, and users may also customize all the properties of a Flash, including font, text color, and layout. With SWFText, a user without any experience of Flash development can easily create a Flash banner or an introductory page within a few minutes. And all you need do is to input text, select font, and animation effects.

Anim-FX
Anim-FX is a multiline Flash animator. With Anim-FX you can create animated text effects - such as intros, splash screens and banners for your website- fast and easy. It is a very compact tool based on a wide range of animation templates. Benefits of Anim-FX: up to 5 lines of animated text; unlimited number of characters; 71 great templates; background and text animations; user-friendly interface; easy to update.

A4 Flash Menu Builder
A4 Flash Menu Builder is an all-in-one, easy-to-use, templates-based Flash Menu Building software. It helps you to create professional looking Flash menu headers in minutes, with dropdown sub-menus, background image, music, and icon buttons. No any Flash programming, scripting, or design skills required. Features include: easy creation of Flash menu headers without coding; more attraction to your visitors, and faster loading speed; a variety of ready-to-use templates for you to choose from, and to build your Flash menus quickly and easily; fully customized, with font size, color, and animated Flash effects; background music for your Web site, and sound effects for mouse-over events.

Flash Effect Maker Pro
Flash Effect Maker is a Flash Web Design tool to help Web master design animated Flash website, flash intros, Flash banners, Flash ads, and any other Flash. With Flash Effect Maker you can place your own photos as font frontground and page background. And then combine them with animated text, background effect to create fun Flash movies, all in just minutes. The Flash Effect Maker enables you to create simple as well as complex Flash animations whereby you can combine different fonts and effects within a single Flash animation. You can save SWF file to EXE Flash Player, and than send it to your friends. The EXE Flash Player support set to wallpaper and screensaver also.

KoolMoves
KoolMoves is an affordable Flash-authoring tool, both powerful and easy to use. It is ideal for creating a wide range of Web content, including high-impact Web pages, banners, navigation systems, and multimedia slide shows. It features libraries of text effects, Flash templates, and clip art. For advanced users, it has Flash 8 action scripting, interface components, and bones for character animation.

Sothink SWF Quicker
SWF Quicker is a Versatile Flash Maker and SWF editor, providing a group of tools for you to create vector graphics and texts in the way of WYSIWYG, which also supports the syntax of ActionScript 2.0. A large amount of built-in animated effects can also be applied to any elements. The Quick-start Wizard of Flash Album, Banner, Navigation Button and Slide Show templates can guide you to easily create professional Flash arts.

Adobe Captivate
For learning professionals, educators, and business and enterprise users,interactive content is much more effective than static demonstrations or presentations. However, developing and updating professional-quality simulations is expensive, time-consuming, and difficult. With Adobe Captivate 3 software, anyone can rapidly create simple screencasts, powerful and engaging simulations, scenario-based training, and robust quizzes. Easily create screencasts and software demonstrations via editable screen, capture. Rapidly develop eLearning content in different screen recording modes(demo, practice, test). Add interactivity and randomized quizzing without programming knowledge. Easily create engaging learning experiences or online presentations without multimedia skills. Give subject matter experts the ability to create their own eLearning content. Integrate with eLearning tools and learning management systems. Deliver rich Learning content to virtually anyone, anytime, anywhere.

Mix-FX Flash Text Effects
Mix & match your own effects with Mix-FX. Want to create amazing Flash text effects and flash buttons, but don't have Macromedia Flash or don't know how to use it for complex animations? Don't worry, Mix-FX comes to your rescue. This simple-to-use program lets you create absolutely stunning effects in just seconds. What is Mix-FX? It's a text and background effect animator. With Mix-FX, you can create hundreds of different effect combinations. Change sizes and colors and you have millions of possibilities. Load your the effect you just created into Flash 4 or 5, into your PowerPoint presentation, directly onto your website. In Mix-FX what you see is what you get. Customize effects by changing the settings and see the results immediately!

1 Cool Button Tool
Suitable for the complete novice or expert Web designer, 1 Cool Button Tool is a fast and easy way to make sophisticated buttons, menus, and navigation in Flash. For the experts, 1 Cool Button Tool has the power to create advanced navigation with the JavaScript interface and even multimedia content such as interactive banner ads. 1 Cool Button Tool version 5.0 features the all-new QuickStart Wizard. In just a few clicks, the complete novice can create effects that would take hours to achieve using traditional means.

TrendyFlash Site Builder
TrendyFlash Site Builder is a tool for creation of professional quality flash Websites. No knowledge of Flash Designing or programming is needed for creating flash sites. The builder supports creation of flash websites of up to 100 pages with the ability to add own logo, JPG images, MP3 music, editable image size, image position and transparency, external links, and contact form. The builder supports rich text editing for all text fields. It includes 150 themes covering different categories and 50 animated designs making 7500 distinct Web site layouts possible. In-built gallery of 200 stock images and 50 music clips. Single click publish generates all the required files ready to be uploaded.

CoffeeCup Flash Firestarter
CoffeeCup Firestarter is a fast and easy way to make Flash effects for your Web site. It can create complex text and image effects with only a few clicks of the mouse. You can make intro pages, navigation systems, and graphic logos. Firestarter has more than 50 built-in, ready-to-use effects; a collection of MP3 sounds; a built-in sound editor; and an easy-to-use interface. You can add text, images, sounds, links, and shapes. Control motion, opacity, and layer order. Import images from any format, and convert WAV files to MP3 format, then export them as Macromedia Flash (SWF) files. Use built-in FTP support to upload your movies. Use the HTML code-generator to copy and paste code right into your Web pages. Firestarter also includes preview capabilities for movies and special effects, as well as the ability to loop audio clips, resize images and apply fade effects to text.

3D Flash Animator
3D Flash Animator gives you everything you need to create Flash animations and games for web pages. Includes vector graphics with gradients, textures, 3D effects and shadows, buttons and animated menus. 2D and 3D text with loads of text effects and transitions including motion blur. Develop games with velocity and acceleration. Includes advanced features such as complete Flash MX action scripting and 3D animation.

Flash4D Home Edition
Look like you spent hours designing an awesome Flash intro when in fact you only spent 3 minutes with Flash4D. Simply select one of the professional intro templates included in the software, customize it with your own text, and then click build to have your personalized Flash intro created for you. With Flash4D, you save time by using the professional designed templates that are included and can create your own Flash intros today without Flash.

LiveSwif Lite
LiveSwif Lite 2 is a free Flash maker that lets you create Flash movies, buttons, or banners quickly and easily. It provides several classic vector-drawing tools, including Freehand, Curve, Shape, Spline, Contour, and an in-place text editor. LiveSwif is a typical, keyframe-based animation system. Based on the capability of drawing tools, it provides a path-motion and transform-motion tool. In setting a new position, angle, size, or color in keyframes, LiveSwif will blend the in-between frames automatically. The setup package contains 500 library components.

FlashDigger Plus
Explores Flash files, extracts and updates text, graphics, sound and actions. Graphics can be exported in JPEG, PNG and BMP format. Sounds are saved in MP3 or WAV. You can change scene size/frame rate, insert/remove tags or frames, insert, remove or modify actions, change object placement, update URL's, associated with a button object or defined in ActionScript, apply your own URL to the scene or its part, remove/apply soundtrack or video to your movie, edit action scripts and do many other things. Supports up to Flash 8 SWF file format. Some advanced tools are included, such as ActionScript Obfuscator and ActionScript Protector.