USB Flash Drive Security : Differently
Some techy art for you today. From Dialog5.
The Fastest Way to Video Editing
Your digital camera may look a bit like mine: beat up and scratched from bouncing around in your bag. Or perhaps it’s impeccably shiny because you actually have a camera case. Either way, those “inside parts” still function quite well. So well in fact, you’ve decided that being a filmmaker is your new calling. So now here you are with a plump video collection on your memory card. If you have a Canon your videos are likely in .avi (Microsoft) format and if you have a Kodak you’ve probably got .mov (Apple) files. Different camera manufacturers choose either of these formats most often, though I am not sure of their personal reasons. But no matter the file formats your camera creates, you can work with them easily and it’s no sweat.
After transferring the video files to your computer, what’s next? Here you are with a folder full of random clips and not sure where to begin. I had previous experience with Adobe Premiere so I downloaded the trial of Adobe Premiere Pro CS3. It really looked exactly the same.
By selecting “File > Import” you can repeatedly import several video files to work with. Then you can movie them around (get it?) where you like, delete certain parts (razoring) and easily add special transitions between clips. It’s also very easy to add text titles to distinguish changes of scene. However, my problem with Premiere Pro comes at the end of the process when you are ready to export the finished file. It’s not easy or intuitive. I had a 17-minute video which took 2 hours to render into a new .avi file. And still, after all of that time, the file was over 1 GB in size - hardly web friendly. I tried lowering the quality many times and changing different settings. It just wasn’t making much sense but I figured I would have to download different “codecs” for compression. But this brings the question: why aren’t the “good ones” already included to make this all easier? I decided to try saving my video as .mov instead of .avi. Maybe this would provide an easier way and better compression. Or maybe not. Open output… what? Well we can possibly blame Windows Vista for this.
This is when I went directly to the source. For $29.99 (as compared to hundreds of dollars for Adobe products) you can purchase a QuickTime Pro license which adds editing features to your existing install of QuickTime Player. I grabbed the huge 1 GB completed movie and imported it into QuickTime, re-exported it as a .mov and the file was a healthy but much smaller 132 MB. This was more like it. There’s also so many other options when exporting your movie with QuickTime which I’ll get into in later. So start practicing until next time!
The Messy Desk Transformation!
Since today is Leap Day, we knew we had to do something fun. It would be easy for all of us to have a “Messy Desk Contest” but the winner here will show us the best transformation.
Just take a before picture of your messy desk and the area your computer is in. Then after it’s all cleaned up, post the before and after photos here. (Must be a registered user/logged in.)
The most amazing transformation will win a dedicated server for one year (from April 1, 2008 until April 1, 2009).
We apologize that everyone with clean desks are not allowed to participate!
You can prepare for and post your entry of this defining moment from today until March 19th. Public voting here in Surmunity will take place on or before March 31st. Brooms and flashlights ready? Go!
P.S. If you happen to be in the middle of purchasing a server during our current sale, you can hold off and participate in this contest if you think you can win! Or if you already have a server, and happen to win this contest, you’ll win ANOTHER server free for one year! But please remember, any bandwidth overages unfortunately will not be free.
Only current Surpass customers allowed to participate.
FFFFOUND!
Do you ever find yourself in Google images searching for random photos? I’ll admit I do it every few minutes. Ok maybe not that often, but it’s something that happens all of the time. If I want to find an image fast, it’s off to Google Images I go. Then there’s all of the other random images you come across on other web travels. Say you want to keep track of images for later, what to do? You need image bookmarking. And better yet, how about an image bookmarking community? A really great one is FFFFOUND!
FFFFOUND! is a web service that not only allows the users to post and share their favorite images found on the web, but also dynamically recommends each user’s tastes and interests for an inspirational image-bookmarking experience!
What will you found?
