Reviews Archive

Looking for a new video camera seems like such an exciting idea at first. You tell yourself that in no time flat, you'll find something that will fit all your needs and last you for years to come. But in reality, it can be a painfully frustrating process if you don’t know how to go about it.

This week, web-renowned videographer and blogger Kevin Nalty (aka Nalts) takes you through his steps for finding and buying your dream digital video camera. He promises to keep the process as painless as possible.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but what about a thousand cents? If your video is missing that essential snapshot of a monkey eating a banana or even a video clip of said monkey, a thousand cents ($10) may be a bargain for you.

So what’s your one-stop shop for all things monkey-related and more? If you’re looking for high quality yet low cost images, Vector illustrations, Flash animations and video clips, your best bet may be iStockPhoto.com. 

By Master New Media

If you are familiar with names like Adobe, Alias, Apple, Avid, Discreet, Eyeon, Media100, Newtek, Pinnacle, Sony and Quantel, you will be surprised to find out that there is an open source video editing and post-production program that is freely available and waiting to be downloaded, installed and put to good use.

Called Jahshaka, this grassroots real-time video production powerhouse integrates multiple fully-featured modules including a frame-by-frame paint over video facility, a production titling component, full video and audio editing, animation, and a special effects lab.

For all you how-to video creators out there, don’t waste your time and money on so-called “professional” screen capture software when you can achieve similar (if not the same) results with a free program like CamStudio.

CamStudio makes capturing any activity on your computer screen dead simple, and the price certainly can’t be beat.

Ask an amateur producer what the secret to video success is and he’ll probably say, “Getting good audio and video.” The truth is, while production values are important, they won’t make or break your video unless they are so low in quality that they distract from the plot and dialogue. What really matters is everything that comes prior to production – the idea, the script, the production plan, and the 1000 other little details you have to keep track of.

Granted, preproduction for a one to eight minute video is going to be a lot simpler than for a big-budget Hollywood film. But it’s more difficult than you might imagine. That’s where Celtx’s Media Preproduction software comes in.

If you’re sick of being constrained by the limits of “reality” in your video productions, but know nothing about animation outside of the crude stick figure flipbooks you made in high school, you may want to give machinima software like Fraps a try.

The real-time video and screen capture program comes in both freeware and pro versions and lets you capture live footage from many of your favorite video games. Forget shooting in real life. Fraps lets you create machinima videos simply by recording a video game as you move characters around their virtual environments.

The immortal Marvin Gaye once said, “Music is the soul of the man. Music makes a happy day. And music makes the clouds go by baby…”  While this rang true in Marvin’s “peace and love” 60s, one could argue it’s even more relevant today – what with people refusing to walk so much as a city block without their MP3 player providing the soundtrack.

Marvin’s astute lyric doesn’t only apply to people – music is often the heart and soul of a great video.  The problem is, scoring your video with just the right soundtrack can be expensive and time consuming.

By The Editblog

If you’ve ever been asked to use a series of still images to make an edit sequence, you know how time consuming, yet effective it can be. You can always create the Ken Burns effect using a plug-in or spend countless hours trying to get the eases right with Final Cut Pro’s built in motion parameters.

But if you are limited on time or you don’t need to zoom to specific elements within a photo, then you just might be very happy with the ImageFlow Fx from CoreMelt.

From Kevin Nalty's WillVideoForFood.com

Remember when hypertext was all the rage? Then hypervideo was going to allow Seinfeld viewers to click on the phone and buy one?

Asterpix has a somewhat new service that allows you to rip a video from video sharing sites and then drag hyperlinks over the images.

From Kevin Nalty's WillVideoForFood.com

I’ve been adding to my list of blogs related to online-video. It’s up to almost 30 now, but I’m going to eventually rank the top 10. Surprisingly, few of these came from people who posted their blogs in the comments (yet I encourage that).

I’ve found many of them by tracking inbound links or based on the coverage of my recent AdAge story.