Multimedia applications I can’t live without!
January 9, 2007
MUST HAVE APPS FOR THE MULTIMEDIA"SHOOTER"
Just a quick post to share with you some of the applications that make my life as a mutlimedia shooter/producer easier. Some of these you've no doubt heard about, but hopefully one or two will be new to you and help you as they do me. They range in price from FREE to about $70, with the exception of Squeeze which is about $400, but any department doing video should NOT be without this app.In no particular order here they are:
- http://www.monoslideshow.com blogged about this one already here
- http://wordpress.org/ this site and MercuryNewsPhoto are built off this easy and feature rich platform.
- http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/ three products from them, Snapz is the best screen capture (movies) it's what i use for the tutorials on this site, Wiretap rocks! It records ANYTHING playing through your computer speakers, very handy. Haven't tried Roadster yet, but I will.
- http://www.rich-media-project.com/ very easy way to have many videos (.flvs) in one place I recently used it here
- http://www.flashloaded.com/flashcomponents/ must have a knowledge of Flash for these, but components here are some of the best especially, HotFlashVideo have yet to use it in a project but what a great way to make video truly interactive video. Check out their example here. Click on any of the Three Stooges during the video and see what happens. LOVE IT!
- http://www.soundslides.com enough said.
- http://www.fotomagico.com/ for the Ken Burns lovers in the house!
- http://www.power4mac.com/renamer absolute best tool to rename files quick and easy.
- http://www.slideshowpro.net/ nice slide show tool.
- http://www.verticalmoon.com can't say enough about these products, I have and use all of them. Best of the bunch is Swf 'n Slide (tutorial on this soon maybe after the chaptered Soundslides.
- http://www.sorensonmedia.com/ compress those video files any way you want or need.
- http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/19973 I'm a very messy dude, so I love this desktop cleaner.
- http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/ best html/code copy and paste text editor.
Great list!
I’ll add a couple of video-specific ones:
MPEGStreamclip: http://squared5.com “MPEG Streamclip is a powerful video converter, player, editor for Mac and Windows. It can play many movie files, not only MPEGs; it can convert MPEG files between muxed/demuxed formats for authoring; it can encode movies to many formats, including iPod; it can cut, trim and join movies.”
VLC: http://www.videolan.org/ “VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.” It will also play .flv files.
On2 Flix: http://www.on2.com/ — Compression software. If you install a trial version of On2Flix, you’ll have a copy of their .flv player that works. Squeeze’ flv player has problems on Mac Pros, though the compression works fine.
Squeeze? or Squish from Sorenson media?
Squeeze. but i just went to the site and noticed squish, it must be new, haven’t tried it yet. squish looks like it’s made for user generated video to be posted on a site, but squeeze is a powerful compressor that will take your video and save it to almost any format-.flv,wmv,realplayer, etc. making it look great and have a small file size.
What’s the difference between using squeeze to make an flv, and just using the Flash 8 Video Encoder?
squeeze has way more options on how to encode, which ins’t necessarily a good thing, because you feel like you need a science degree to figure it out, but it’s nice to have. The codecs are different, or the way they compress the file. The biggest difference is that with squeeze you can take any video file and output it to other video files, not just an .flv, but quictime, realplayer, windows media, etc. It’s nice to have the felxibility cuz online departments tend to move from one format to another. But flash encoder works great especially the on2vp6 (setting) if you just need an .flv. Hope that helps.
Great post.
You should add Still Life.
I have used Still life about three years for animating and creating video segments from still frame photography and graphics - it is cheap and gives great results.
Also don’t overlook the amazing animations you can create and export using Apple’s Keynote software. That’s what I use to create the animation for my home page. KN is slick and you probably already have it on your Mac.
Keep ‘em coming.