Make Your Own Video

Here’s another neat low-cost idea.

Ever got frustrated at the poor quality of your pictures of small objects (things to sell on eBay, stop-motion animation props, etc.)? You might find that a “light tent” is the answer. With these instructions you can get a smooth, even, light and a plain background to your images for next to no cost.

Read more at: Super Simple Light Tent

(via DV For Teachers)

One tip which I have found very useful when capturing and editing video on Windws over the years (since my first Windows 95 PC, in fact) is to tell Windows to keep its grubby hands away from the Windows “swap file” (also known as “page file” or “virtual memory”).

When installed, Windows initially sets itself up to manage its own virtual memory, growing and shrinking it as needed. Sometimes, though, this can get in the way of processing large, timed media (like video). So on a PC used for video editing it’s usually a pretty good choice to set the swap file to a fixed size and leave it there.

Recently, I was reminded of this by some discussion on the Media Studio Pro User Group mailing list.

To explain how to do this on Windows XP, I have made a short “screencast”. I hope it makes sense, and I hope it might be useful to someone, sometime.

Click here to watch the video (WMV, 320 x 240, 1 min 31 seconds, 2.28MB)

Want to get into blue/green screen stuff? Check out this tutorial: jushhome.com - Build a Blue Screen

When you are looking to buy some video editing software it can be really hard to find useful information. Manufacturer web sites and user-groups are often very one-sided. So it was nice to find an interesting comparison review at DVGuru of four “top” video editor programs.

There’s not a huge amount of depth to the article, but make sure you read the comments - there’s a load of interesting thoughts and suggestions.

Read more at: Top Four Non-Linear Editors - DV Guru