Free Simple To Use Video Editing Software?

Duncan has a book report presentation on Monday. One of the options is to create a video rather than speak directly to his class. He'd like to do that. Last night with the help of an iSight camera attached to my Powerbook, QuickTime Broadcaster and the excellent instructions on the O'Reilly macdevcenter.com web site, we worked out how to capture the video in MPEG 4 format.

That's fine, but there are some bits that we'd now like to remove. I'd also like to add initial titles and if possible, fade-out / fade-in between "scenes".

If you haven't realized by now, all of this is new to me. If I had the luxury of more time, I'd be happy to use something like the Digital Video For Dummies and try a few experiments. For now, I'm looking for free, simple to use software that will make these tasks easy and quick.

I copied the video over to my Ubuntu system and loaded up Avidemux and worked with their wiki and was able to successfully cut out some of the pieces that we didn't want, but due to my inexperience, it was a bit of a hit and miss affair. I still haven't worked out how to do the other things.

Anybody got any recommendations for free, easy to use alternatives? For Windows Xp, Mac OS X Tiger or Ubuntu Hardy.

I thought there would be a time when I'd have trouble helping my son with his homework, but I didn't expect it to be while he was still in fourth grade.

Any pointers would be very much appreciated.

Thanks.

[Technorati Tag: Video Editing]

( Mar 07 2008, 11:16:10 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [14]

What's In Gcalctool For GNOME 2.22

We'll all be cutting our tarballs for GNOME 2.22 on Monday. This release will see several major changes to the default GNOME desktop calculator. Many thanks to Robert Ancell and Sami Pietila for their help in making these improvements.

I sent the following to Davyd Madeley for inclusion in the GNOME Release Notes. Note that these are just the highlights. There have been a lot more bug fixes integrated as well.

• Gcalctool now uses Glade for its user interface. This will make it easier and quicker in future to make UI fixes or add new UI features.

• The number of significant numerical places has been increased to 99 and the number of displayable digits has been increased to 200.

  (Note that if you have problems seeing the first digit in the display area, this is Gtk+ bug #482688).

• The keyboard shortcuts for the hexadecimal digits have been changed back to "a" - "f".

  With copy/paste operations, where the user is pasting a string into gcalctool, the copy buffer is now iterated over. If an "A", "B", "C", "D" or "F" character is encountered, it will be converted to its lowercase equivalent. If an "E" is found, and the next character is a "-" or a "+", then it remains as an upper case "E" (it's assumed to be a possible exponential number), otherwise its converted to a lower case "e".

  Displaying of hex digits in the gcalctool display will still be in uppercase. Displaying of the "e" in an exponential number will still be in lower-case.

• The following functions have also had their keyboard shortcuts changed:

        [A] - Set accuracy
        [C] - Change sign
        [D] - Double-declining depreciation
        [E] - Enter an exponential number
        [F] - User-defined functions
        

• The way to enter exponential numbers in arithmetic precedence mode has changed. The following four examples should show you the new correct syntax:

          1  2  Exp + 8  =              1200000000
        - 1  2  Exp + 8  =             -1200000000
          1  2  Exp - 8  =              0.00000012
        - 1  2  Exp - 8  =             -0.00000012
        

• In both left-to-right precedence and arithmetic precedence modes, if the user enters a numeric digit that is incorrect for the current numeric base, this isn't allowed and is not entered in the display.

• There is now a cursor in the calculator display area. It understands the Home and End keys. This is in arithmetic precedence mode only. You can also "hand edit" the display by moving the position of this cursor.

• A "Reset to Default" accuracy menu item has been added.

• When the bit calculation extension is enabled, a message now appears in the status bar.

• The Delete key is now used to delete the character to the right of the cursor in the display area. To clear the display area, use Shift-Delete.

• The help menu shortcut has changed from Ctrl+H to F1 to match the Human Interface Guidelines (HIG).

• There have been many changes to the online help. They include:

  • The various screenshots have been updated to reflect all the latest changes.

  • Square root documentation has been updated. The entry now includes examples for both arithmetic precedence and left-to-right precedence modes.

  • The logical operations, And, Not, Or, Xor and Xnor now use uppercase letters (AND, NOT, OR, XOR and XNOR) for both the buttons and in the display area in arithmetic precedence mode.

    The result for the AND example is now correct.

    The syntax for using NOT in arithmetic precedence mode is different then for left-to-right precedence mode. The online help example has been updated to show both examples.

  • Updated the documentation for bit calculating extension.

  • Updated the documentation for Changing Modes Clears Calculation.

  • Added in a new section titled "Changing The Display Area" and updated the keyboard shortcut for the Clear operation.

  • Adjusted "monthly interest rate" to "simple monthly interest rate" for two of the financial examples.

[Technorati Tag: Gcalctool]

[Technorati Tag: GNOME]

( Mar 07 2008, 07:33:37 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink