DAC1138

People keep talking about 4k cameras, but people keep on forgetting it's not ALWAYS about the camera. People have to learn that the lens is another important artifact in the camera world. Crap going through the lens is going to look like crap to any image sensor. Also, hard drive space is going to be a huge factor. Better quality = bigger file size. Instead of being able to cut a movie on a 200 GB hard drive, if you're using a 4k camera you'll need to upgrade to get an 800GB, maybe even a few terrabyte drives. Has anyone seen those samples from that new Red camera? Any comments on them? I'd like to know what others think about Red. It's certainly no film camera killer, but damn!

Yup. My first short video I ever did was cut on Final Cut pro. Since then, I only use a PC in my house, I discovered Premiere. It's very very similar to FCP, so I've been using that to cut anything I do. For a while I played with Sony's Vegas. It was alright, but I still prefer the FCP/Adobe premiere interface. Maybe it's just because that's what I started off with.

Right now in "the industry" they use Avid and Final cut. Final cut is becoming more mainstream in the professional world and more and more movies are being cut with Final Cut over Avid. One example, the current production of Alien versus Predator 2 is being cut on Final Cut pro. There's one yet to be released by David Fincher called Zodiac (though I heard the title was changed to Chronicles). I also know of a lot of professionals that use Adobe premiere. I use adobe premiere myself, and I don't need anything more.One really cool thing about final cut, though, is the new multicam edit feature. It's really hard to describe, but it's really really cool to play with. Google it to learn more if you're interested.

MenuetOS does look really nice, but I'd still suggest something he can use, like linux on a floppy. Tomsrtb is a good one I've used. Using liux over something like MenuetOS will ensure he can have a bigger range of software. With MenuetOS, he's limited to whatever they provide. Say he wants to get into html or writing, he can use vim or emacs in linux, wheras if he used MenuetOS he would be at the mercy of whatever the coders for that OS have created. I'm not syaing there's anything wrong with MenuetOS, but I'm just saying think of all the programs that are for linux.

You should post some screenshots of your current methods. Maybe they're pretty cool, I'd like to see them.

I keep seeing this "film is better quality" argument, and it is true. But here's the deal: How many ordinary people out there will actually be able to notice the difference? Not many, I can tell you that. Not everyone on the planet stares and film/video clips all day. Has anyone seen superman returns? It was an all digital movie and it was absolutely amazing. Even the CGI needs some great recognition. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ This article is a great read and you can get some insights into both the FX and the film versus digital debate. George Lucas believes in digital, why don't you guys? I can't say the same for Spielberg (who I'm not a huge fan of anyway). He's being pompous and won't switch to digital just because he's used to doing things the old fashioned way. There are so many more advantages to using digital than using film. It's worth the quality loss, don't you guys think?

Enemy territory is a good free FPS. There's also Open Arena and Nexuiz. All are free and open source. Tribes (the first game in the series) is now free from Sierra's official website. Unreal 2004 is a great game, but just get the free demo. I made the mistake of buying the full game only to find out everyone online plays the demo levels, as they are the best.

Not necessarily sell them, because most people could just go to youtube.com and watch them for free. But people could still subscribe as they do with any other podcast in iTunes and watch them on their Apple TV box. That way they can have something nice to watch every night when they come home from work. They can relax on the couch, turn on their TV, and watch some funky stuff. Some people might catch on to that idea. Not me, so much. I don't watch TV, and the only show I watch is Battlestar Galactica. So my main video and media source is the internet. But for those non-tech savvy people might dig the idea of an on-demand funny video service.

You can do rotoscoping in photoshop easily. In a program like After effects you can export your video to a "filmstrip" (which is essentially a single file that contains separate frames of your video) and in photoshop you can import the "filmstrip" and draw on top of the video. http://www.alienryderflex.com/rotoscope/ I seriously think the best and easiest way is to do what you did and apply some filters to render it. It may not perfectly simulate the hand-drawn look of the video, but it's surely a helluva lot easier to do. Best advice I can give you is to try many of the different lightsaber methods out there. You'll get the hang of rotoscoping fairly quickly if you do that. I remember seeing something about a year and a half ago from microsoft that takes any video source and it renders it through a filter that makes it look like it weas hand-drawn with crayons or colored pencils. It was supposed to be for Microsoft's movie maker, but I havent seen anything about it ever since I shrugged it off a year and a half ago. Anyone know what I'm talking about and can provide a link?

What about the people without internet or even a computer? I know that will be a very small target audience, but they're still there. It may sound like I think this will happen, but I actually don't think so. I just want a 2-way argument so people can get both sides of the discussion. I really don't like Youtube at all. The videos are crap, and the Terms of use are just bad. I prefer Divx's Stage 6.What if youtube each week made a 30 minute show of "the best of..." and put them up for a subscription podcast/vidcast on iTunes and it was downloadable show like any other on-demand show for the Apple TV box. Now that's a thought. I don't really know how they could make money from that though.

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ "Google's YouTube video-sharing site has been "noodling" over the idea of creating a linear TV channel comprised of content culled from the thousands of clips posted on its site, YouTube vice president of content Kevin Donahue said." So I got to thinking: Users create the content and YouTube puts them on TV while the creators get what? If I remember correctly, when you post a video to youtube you pretty much sign away all rights that go with that video. I wasn't sure if I was thinking correctly, so I went to youtube to find the terms of useage agreement. Here it is, plain and simple: "For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube's (and its successor's) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels." So does this mean no compensation? Maybe not. Maybe youtube will make it like a contest. If your video is shown, you get a certain dollar amount in return. This could be used as encouragement to keep on producing great videos people will watch. Or, it could just mean bigger bucks for Youtube and google, and no money for the creators of the content. This is what happened with that ebaumsworld show that was on TV, they grabbed the most popular videos of the week and aired them on the show. The creators got nothing. What my peeve is, what if someone steels my videos and puts them on youtube and then it makes it onto TV without my permission? If you carefully read the agreement youtube puts out, they're not responsible. I would have to be suing the user who uploaded the video. Youtube claims no responsibility to any content uploaded that is copyrighted. They have a great legal team. Anyways, this is just my own big rant now. What do you guys think about it? Are you happy about it? Sad? Angry? Nervous about who you show your videos too in fear that they may steal it and upload it to youtube? Fill us in on your thoughts.

I used the OpenOffice suite all throughout highschool. The .Doc support was fine, I never ran into any issues. After high school and as of now, I've been writing and rewriting my resume in OpenOffice and saving in .doc format and I've noticed not everything looks the way it should. I write everything in OOffice and then I use microsoft's free word .doc viewer to check and make sure everything looks okay before I send it off. That's how I work around that.Other than essays and resumes, most of my writing now are screenplays for my movies which I write in Celtx (also free and open source)

I'm a geek. Most of my wallpapers consist of superheros: Batman, Superman, and the Green Lantern. I get most of my superhero wallpapers from the official DC comics website: http://www.dccomics.com//

Wow. Lots of great software listed. It's amazing how you can divide the users by te software they use. You can tell who's into movies, editing, animating, drawing, etc...I'm a media content creator, so I use a lot of programs. Most of them all at the same time, so I have no order of preference. I use:Firefox (1.5.0.9)Blender 3d (2.43RC1)Adobe After EffectsAdobe Premiere ProAmaya HTML editorTrillianXchat2GIMPFilezillaAnd that's about the most I use in an average day.

Microsoft's Movie Maker will do all of that. So will Avid FreeDV. As for other editing software solutions, pretty much every other editing application will let you creat an old fashioned look to it.

I think the free program you're talking about is called "Stoik Capture" from stoik imaging. I only use that to capture all my video, and i edit in Adobe Premiere Pro. It's a great app. Requires very little memory in the system. Is this the program you're refering to or was it something else? Let me know, I'd like to check out any other free capturing apps.

I've been all around the block. I started out with 3dsMax a long time ago. I went all the way up to version 6. Then I moved to Maya for a year. During this time I started experimenting with lightwave and wings3d and blender. Out of all of them, I was impressed with blender's speed and size. It's a very small app with so many features. I've been with it ever since. I've been using it for about 5 years now. I love it, and it keeps on getting better.For all the blender bashers out there, the learning curve is a bit steep. Blender is different than most other apps because it relies heavily on keyboard commands and shortcuts rather than a GUI driven interface. In the longrun you'll find this most pleasing and you'll wonder why everyone else hasn't switched to this efficient way of working.Heh, actually, the main reason I signed up for Xisto was to get a website back to host my 3D gallery. Actually, it was to host my video editing/motion graphics/3d animation demo reel.

For vector art you can try Inkscape. A free and open source alternative to Adobe's Illustrator.GIMP has been very stable for me. But I finally got around to installing Avid (I'm a video editor, wannabe professional) It had some conflicts with the DLL libraries that GIMP was using. Therefore the only way to get Avid to run was to uninstall GIMP. Not saying it's GIMP's fault, I love the GIMP. But it still shouldn't be happening. And I'm a special case. I don't think many people will have the combo I have, using GIMP and Avid on one system.

I do a lot of 3d modeling and animation using Blender3D. Terragen is a very useful tool in the 3d community. What I've seen most people use terragen for, though, is not necessarily use it for an animation or model, but to use it for generating random terrain for a game they develop using Blender's built-in game engine. It's a very handy tool to be added to one's arsenal if you ever think about getting into 3d modeling. This just came to mind, but you might be interested in the free Caustic Generator app. https://www.dualheights.se/caustics/ Window's only at the moment, but I'm hoping someone will do a Linux or Mac port. It can be great for making animated caustic textures for any sort of underwater animation.

I did some professional web design a while back. I have been using front page, and more recently, dreamweaver. I absolutely love Nvu. Nvu has all the perks of Dreamweaver without all the junk most people don't need. The thing I like the most about Nvu is that it has a built-in CSS editor. If you ever want to start learning CSS you can do it through Nvu. There are also lots of help documents that will walk you through building a CSS style.Though a word of advice: learn to code by hand. If Nvu can't help you get the proper effect or look you want, you may have to manually go into your page and edit something. Not knowing what you're doing will make things a lot harder. Things will become fluent and easy to edit once you learn what it is you're trying to modify.As for other great freeware website apps, Filezilla is a great FTP program you should use to upload files once you have created a website. GIMP (as already suggested) is another great app very comparable to photoshop.That's about all I have in my web development arsenal: Nvu, Filezilla, and GIMP.