28 June 2008
Cool Software Roundup
Posted by andybeach under: Cool Things; Software .
I’ve been on the road more or less for the past month between a big trip out west, then a quickie vacation, so I haven’t posted a whole lot - sorry about that.
But it doesn’t mean I wasn’t checking out interesting things on the web. In fact, this week, I was looking for various video & compression related tools for the Macintosh and thought I should put together what I found.
ScreenFlow 1.1.2
If you have ever done a desktop screen capture for training, you know there are a handful of applications out there for this now. For years the one and only go to was Ambrosia’s Snapz Pro. But Snapz always had some issues, and several other options began to appear. The newest I’ve seen is ScreenFlow from Vara Software. Unlike the other tools for this, which are basically just screen recorders (leaving you with QuickTime files ready for editing), ScreenFlow actually has editing tools built right in! ScreenFlow allows to you do after the fact call out and highlights of specific parts of the screen, which is incredibly handy as you are trying to put together a quick tutorial or example of how to do something.
The down side? Screenflow is Leopard only, so unless you’re on a new mac or have upgraded, it’s not the tool for you. Some people may balk at the $99.99 price tag as well, but if you are in the business of producing screen based content, this is a fairly minor cost. If you need either a cheaper or more backwards compatible solution, try old reliable stand by iShowU from Shiny White Box.
Countdown Maker 1.1
Need a little countdown clock for your video? Want it to be custom, rather than the default countdown in Final Cut Pro (does anyone even use that?). Countdown Maker is a simple little shareware app that generates a QuickTime movie of custom lengths, fonts, colors, backgrounds, etc.
Now at $49, this seems way overpriced to me, but then again, if you send out a lot of custom video productions and would like to have your own countdown slate. Maybe not for everybody, but I thought the demo was pretty neat.
RoadMovie 1.4.1
Both Lisa and I are fairly big fans of foreign films and there have been a few times I’ve compressed something from DVD’s to watch, only to remember later that I neglected to burn in the subtitles. If you have ever had this problem, RoadMovie is the app for you.
Here’s an example of this - I recently bought Kung Fu Hutstle and wanted to watch it on my laptop while I was traveling. I encoded it, but totally (stupidly) forgot to turn on subtitles - which I realized after I got on the plane. When i landed, I searched a bit and found subtitle source, a collection of subtitle files for various movies. I found a SRT file for it, then used RoadMovie to add subtitles to my movie, then flatten (versus transcoding) the file. Fairly quickly I was able to turn what was a useless file into something I could watch! Before I found RoadMovie, I would have had to re-encode from the DVD, which was a)impossible in this instance as the DVD was at home and b) very, very time consuming, even if I did have the disc. This is probably more useful to our international friends who want to see US content and need a translation, but I still use it occasionally.
Roadmovie will do more than this however - it has built in templates and can encode directly to formats that are ipod, iphone, and web friendly if you want (though I tend to only flatten the files, thus retaining the encode job I’ve already performed in one of my preferred applications).
Roadmovie also has some great metadata editors that allow you to easily add info like the right category (TV, Movie, etc) or info like the director and handy things like chapter markers making it easy to jump to different sections of longer form content.
As we continue to get more international, tools like this that make it easy to add or change subtitles out will be dead handy. Best of all, its only $19.00, so it was totally worth it. Oh and if for some reason, if even that is too pricey, you can always look at Submerge from the same guy that has just the subtitle features without the metadata editors.
aspectRatio 1.8
Closer to home with the compression tools is the Aspect Ratio calculator called aspectRatio. I wrote about a couple in RWVC, but never saw this one before I think. As with all, its just a simple little tool that lets you quickly calculate a variety of aspect ratios as you are encoding your content for various destinations requiring a variety of resolutions.
The price tag here is exactly right - its free. Im not 100% who the author produceNewMedia is as their site is missing the about page, but they look pretty interesting.
VideoSpec 0.6.5
And lastly, I found a little app called VideoSpec. Its function is to analyze files and present you with reports about the various codecs and metadata associated with the video. This can be incredibly handy if you have ever been given a video and asked to encode something either better than it or exactly like it. Now Semaphore (which for disclosure’s sake, I oversee as part of my daytime job) has more functionality and reporting capabilities, but is only PC based and is a pro-level tool with a pro price tag. Now, I’m not bagging my own product - its great, but it can also be overkill for some. With that in mind, VideoSpec is an cheap, simple, easy solution.
So that’s all I’ve found for now - you have a favorite video or compression tool then by all means, pass it along!
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