I found this website while looking at a fireball tutorial. It’s full of awesome free stock footage and movie special effects that look so frikin cool! I found a muzzle flash tutorial, various fire effects and some blood splatter. I particularly liked the Kapawwe tutorial containing all you need to turn your toy shot gun into a real firing weapon! Some of the stock footage you have to pay for but there is a lot you can use for free which Is awesome and will get you set creating realistic action movie effects in no time!
I’m planing on trying out the fireball effect myself and will upload the results as soon as it’s done!
Here’s a trailer for one of their projects: Agent 12
I love to see low budget independent films that are awesome because they are full of…. awesome ^^
I just found this radio interview with Quentin Tarantino talking about he record collection and how he uses it in his music. If you are serious about your film music you will find this facinating.
It’s on BBC iPlayer and available for 4 more days so get listening now!
A friend over at boyinaband.com asked me to make a short intro sequence for his video tutorials so I got to work by checking out some cool adobe after effects tutorials.
I found this site ae.tutsplus.com which is full of high quality tutorials on after effects. I have been looking over some of the tutorials for title sequences and already it’s given me some ideas that I hadn’t thought of. I love it when you watch something and think “Wow I never thought of doing that it’s so simple!”. Some of the videos are a bit long but the effects they produce ate totally mind blowing! Unfortunatly they sometimes use plug ins that don’t come Nativity with After Effects but most of what I’ve seen I’ve been able to use in some way or another to make cool effects with the standard plug ins. It looks like you can submit videos there too, maybe I can submit some videos once I finish the sequence on how I made it! :3
5. Copernicus
This is a very neat application I found on my hunt for free software. It’s small and compact, runs in the background and becomes active when you call it up with a set key function. Now at first this annoyed me because the default key setting was already in use by my Mac, it’s the play/pause button, but it is very easy to change this to something more useful. It is primarily a screen shot application and allows you to capture the whole screen or an area but it is capable of recording video.
Though having said that it doesn’t not have the ability to record sound which rules it out for some people. The file size of recording to RAM seems to be very high and the option to record to Hard Disk seems to make a smaller file size but the frame rate is reduced significantly making videos seem a little jerky.
It depends what you want from a screen capture but Copernicus is a good place to start specially as it’s completely free. There is no branding over the output and no trail restrictions, just good old fashioned shareware!
4.Screenium
This is a very nice video screen capture software I found on the Apple website. It’s very simple to use, in some ways too simple, I ended up recording a screen capture with out realizing what I was doing first try! But once I’d figured out what all the buttons do I was away capturing screen videos all over the place! With Screenium you are presented with the application panel which holds all the settings. You can select which screen you want to capture, what audio you want to capture and even do the web cam with in the capture feature which is really cool! You can apply mouse effects which is pretty neat and “hot text” which allows you to add text to your video during the capture! Just hit the appropriately mapped hot key and your text will appear in the location you selected. Fantastic!… Well kinda not. It’s ok If you have everything planned out and just need to annotate a couple things but it wont make you titles and unless you know exactly how long the recording is you can’t have the text appear the whole capture.
It’s a nice video capturing tool but some of the features need a bit more thought. Also Screenium costs for the full version so you might want to think about other software before you dive right in.
3.Jing
Now jing is a “Free” piece of video screen capture software. Well It says it is free and if you don’t mind the Jing logos on the end of your video and don’t mind only exporting in .swf file format that’s fine. Unfortunately this may not be what you want. Jing looked so promising when I finally found a “Free” piece of screen capture software but then my heart sank when I realized the inbuilt flaws in the free side. Of course these can be rectified easily buy paying for it which will remove the logoing and let you export in .mov format but that’s NOT free like it said it was ¬¬
That said it is still a very nice piece of software! Once run Jing will appear as a “sun” in the corner of your screen, this sun has 3 points which you use to access Jings features. The recording selection is very flexible and easy to use so you can select exactly what you want to record. You also have the ability to publish directly to YouTube or one of the other video sites at the click of a button. If you are just looking to capture a video for yourself and your friends to put on YouTube and don’t mind the logoing and don’t want to edit it much Jing could be the way for you! Though if advertising other peoples software on your videos isn’t your thing *cough* then maybe it’s not the way for you.
2.iShowU
iShowU is a very clear useful piece of software. I particular like the viewer where you can see the desktop you are capturing. Though with desktop capture you expect that to be obvious but I think it’s a neat little feature that it shows this real time. I also like the multiple desktop feature that lets you slide from one desktop to the other in the video. It’s a well presented screen capture utility that lets you capture video how you want. You can select the size/area you wish to record, the video output you want to export as and a few other features like being able to show keys pressed and having mouse effects.
iShowU also has a HD counter part which means you can capture in very high quality! This is going to be more for the corporate market, maybe if you are making a DVD or something where you need to show off a bit. Though It is still a very easy to use piece of software that makes excellent quality videos for any output.
1. ScreenFlow
I still Like screen flow for it’s simplicity and ease of use. The fact the whole screen capture process from capture to export is kept in one neat little package saves so much time. There’s no messing about with file formats so your screen capture is the same format as your editor, there’s no worrying about loss of quality due to compression the video more than once. They have taken video screen capture just one step further and created a piece of software that does it all.
ScreenFlow is the only screen capture software I’ve found yet that contains an editor as well. The editor is where ScreenFlow excels, making it unique compared to other screen capture software. That’s why ScreenFlow is my software of choice when it comes to needing screen capture software. Official website
Hey, I just finished my ScreenFlow tutorial! It’s a bit long but I’ve tried to fit in all the features I like to use and that I think are awesome. The tutorial goes from your first capture to using the editing suit and then exporting and what export settings are available. Please feel free to leave a comment bellow the video or on the YouTube site and let me know what you think! :3
