One of my first articles for Tech Edge featured some free tools that are out there to help people in the television and post industry get things done at the best priceºfree! Since the article, many more great free tools have come out and there are some that weren’t covered. This month we will reprise the article and feature new free tools that can help you be creative and get your job done.
Magic Lantern
Magic Lantern is a free utility that runs on the memory card of your camera. The application is specific to Canon cameras but runs on most Canon DSLR cameras. It adds tools that don’t come stocked with your Camera DSLR camera.
Some of the features are zebra, histogram, waveforms, spot meter, vectorscope, audio metering, selectable audio sources, audio monitoring via A/C cable, contrast and saturation adjustments, video bit-rate control, adding the ability to zoom while recording video, rack, follow focus, rack focus, power saving capabilities. This is just a fraction of what Magic Lantern can do. Your Canon DSLR is not complete without Magic Lantern.
Installation is pretty simple, they have a very intuitive guide right on their website that includes screengrabs of what installation looks like. And if you don’t like what Magic Lantern adds for you, uninstallation is just as easy. In my experience the only reason people have wanted to uninstall Magic Lantern is that it does so much that it can a bit overwhelming.
Although the software is free, there is still support via the user forums right on the website. For a list of supported Canon cameras and to download Magic Lantern visit www.magiclantern.fm
Handbreak
Handbrake is free tool that will convert just about any video file you encounter. It runs on Mac, PC and Ubuntu. It will take most video files and it will rip from a DVD or Blu-ray that does not have copy protection on it.
What Handbrake will do is take your obscure video format and convert it to a very edit-friendly MPEG 2/H264 codec. What it also does is the ability to take PAL and change to NTSC (and vice-versa), change frame rates, frame size changing, device format presets for Apple devices and Android OS, de-interlace, noise reduction, queued transcodes, adding chapters for DVD authoring. And like Magic Lantern, Handbrake has user forums for people to converse with one another about any issues that arise. To download Handbrake, go to http://handbrake.fr/
Storyboardthat.com
StoryBoardThat.com is a website where you can create free storyboards to pitch your ideas. The interface is very, very easy to use. Using your web browser, you can simply drag and drop any scene, character and text. This is great for business meetings or in the classroom. It is also good for people simply looking to create comics as well. You can see a screen grab of a comic I quickly created to show some of the different scenes and characters that you can use. On top of being a really useful tool, StoryBoardThat.com is really, really fun to use.
To start creating your own storyboards for free, just go to http://www.storyboardthat.com/
Gimp
If you are looking for a quick way to edit your photos for free, there is a great program called Gimp. Gimp stands for ™GNU Image Manipulation Program.∫ Gimp is also supported on all major operating systems, so if you are Mac, PC or Linux you can use Gimp.
What features does Gimp have? Well it will take in just about any image file that you have, even ones created in Photoshop with a .psd extension. Gimp will open as many images as your computer’s hardware can handle, it has full alpha channel support, support for layers and channels, multiple layers of undo and redo, editable layered text, full transformation tools set, selection tools, foreground extractions, path tools to do Bezier and polygon sections, quick masks, scripting support, and full plug-in support that already has 100 plugging readily available.
Gimp also gets software updates very frequently and bug fixes are commonly addressed. You can download Gimp here http://www.gimp.org/
Coursera.org
It’s New Years, the time of year where people always want to improve themselves. Whether it’s losing some weight, quitting a habit or learning something new. Coursera.org will help you with learning something new. Coursera.org offers classes in things that help in post-production like computer networking, film studies, music studies, music theory and a bunch of other topics that have nothing to do with post-production. The courses are real courses where they stream lectures, so there are set times were you attend your classes as if you were in a classroom. The classes are also a few weeks long as well, so it is not a one-time course. These are genuine college courses. To sign up for a course of just browse their offerings, visit https://www.coursera.org/
Steve McGrath is a Broadcast Sales Engineer for HB Communications. He has worked with NBC, ABC, CBS, NESN, NECN, Fox, ESPN, Pentagon, Powderhouse and many others. You can reach him at
Steve.McGrath@HBCommunications.com.