Feb
Maybe I should start this post wondering about their usefulness and if the things I’m going to talk about are only interesting in “Yuppy Worlds”. I mean, I’m going to talk about utilities for postproduction, photography, editing, 3D and so on, but they have one thing in common, they must be free, open source, or educational versions sufficiently operational at least to learn the program in question. The reason why I say that I am not very sure of its usefulness is because we are in a country where software piracy is totally institutionalized, even among those who then tear their clothes because they download from Megaupload the movies or discs they make with that pirated software, but that’s another story …. If you can download the professional program “por la filosa”, what interest can have a free application if it is not professional, and on top of that with such an ugly interface? 🙂
The truth is that there are many more free options to produce with video and other media than we think and, in many cases, not only have nothing to envy to the professional ones, but they can be even better. I don’t pretend this is an exhaustive list, I’m sure there are many others that I’m forgetting, I just hope you find these useful.
Education applications
There are quite a few free applications to learn and get acquainted with programs that are then used professionally, which allow you to work with almost all the features of the program, but somehow are “capped” to not be able to export files or projects, and put a watermark on the renders. These versions usually have a somewhat cryptic name, but they are perfectly usable to learn how to handle the program, they are usually called PLE (Personal Learning Edition), Free, Lite or something similar. The most interesting ones are:
Nuke PLE: The Foundry offers on its website, in addition to the usual 15-day trial versions, a PLE version to learn how to use its flagship digital compositing program (and therefore the most used compositing and digital effects program by major studios worldwide). It requires us to register on their website.
Maya Trial: Maya, the most professionally used 3D software in film and video, used to have its PLE version, but now Autodesk allows you to download a 30-day trial version that can be extended if you register as a student.
Autodesk also offers a similar deal for perverts like me who prefer Softimage (Formerly XSI).
And for those of you who want to use MotionBuilder, please note
By the way, if you have a powerful MAC, time to invest and desire to deal with an interface coming from the Jurassic times of computing, you can also download Smoke for MAC operating for 30 days, good luck ….
Other companies such as Avid, Apple, Assimilate, etc… offer 15 or 30 days trial versions of their products on their respective websites and if you want to try some other software in particular you can always contact their distributor and see if there is an option to get a demo or trial version with more or less limitations.
Regarding free applications, without the alibi of education:
DaVinci Resolve: The star without a doubt during the last few months, since Blackmagic bought DaVinci has offered a Lite version of Resolve for Mac, now we also have the possibility to download a beta for those of us outcasts who still use Windows, both the commercial version and the Lite. For those of you who have just landed in this industry or have been locked in a dungeon (I mean room) of editing for the last few years, Resolve is a very powerful color correction system and very widespread in both film and video and TV professionally.
Resolve Lite is one of the great mysteries of this industry, how can you give for the face a fully operational version (although with some limitations with respect to the commercial) and not ruin yourself in the attempt? We don’t know, but just in case, take advantage of it while it lasts:
Download options are at the bottom of the page. There are Lite versions for Windows (beta) and Mac, and commercial versions for those operating systems and Linux.
Open Source Applications
Lightworks: The video editor that came from the past. One of the former heavyweights of video editing, it became, after many vicissitudes, the property of Editshare, who decided to relaunch it as an open source application. In principle there is only a Windows version (although Mac and Linux versions are under development), and since November there have been no updates, but it is a good alternative, even if they keep saying that it is Beta.
Blender: One of the veteran softwares, an increasingly complete 3D program, with integrated node compositing and perfectly usable for professional projects, as they show in their page. On top of that they offer versions for Windows, Mac and Linux and in 32 and 64 bits, besides having a tremendously active community of users, with tutorials and educational resources “a tutiplen”.
Wings3D: A 3D polygonal modeler that is the clone of an obscure Japanese 3D software called Nendo, if that’s not freakie, I don’t know what is… A good polygonal modeler, with quite powerful subdivision surfaces. They also have versions for Linux, Mac and Windows.
VideoLAN VLC/VLMC: The standard in media players that eat all formats, codecs, subtitles and other stuff, VLC is a marvel with Mac, Linux and Windows versions, which should not be missing in any computer dedicated to video (professionally or amateur). In addition, they are also developing a simple editor called VLMC that looks good, and can be an alternative to do certain things quickly.
DJView: Also called DJV, it is a totally free frame sequence player (a flipbook) that has little to envy to other commercial options. It plays Cineon/DPX, openEXR, etc… streams and on top of that it has versions for Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris.
VideoMasher: This is a really good one, an open source video editor that allows “cloud editing”. That is, it can be integrated into a web page to make video editing from the web page, users only have to upload their videos and start playing with them. Logically it seems intended for consumer users, but I can think of some professional utilities where it can be interesting. You can visit their website for more info, download the software and see examples of its integration.
And now a good portion of Linux:
Linux is the realm of open source par excellence and in this environment, in addition to some very powerful commercial applications, is where we have more options of BBG (Good, Nice and Free) software.
Ubuntu Studio: for those of you who are not very familiar with Linux, Ubuntu is the most widespread Linux distribution, and has a version called Studio oriented towards multimedia creators in graphics, video and audio. It includes a lot of free applications to work with these media and allows you to add others through a repository system (pages with software libraries that can be downloaded from the operating system itself). Its audio applications stand out above all, such as Audacity or Ardour, which is compared to ProTools, it does not go as far, but it is quite powerful. In 3D graphics, we can download Blender (which we talked about before) and in 2D we have the ubiquitous Gimp (which is not quite Photoshop, but it is quite handy).
Regarding the video, there are several applications included (not very good), with some options that we can add a posteriori to our Ubuntu, such as:
LiVES: A video editor and VJ tool, as they say, not bad, especially for not very complicated things. In the project page at Sourceforge (where else) you have more info, screenshots and download links, and if not, you know, repository to the song.
Open Movie Editor: Its name says it all. I haven’t had time to try it, but from what I’ve seen on their page, it looks like another simple editor more aimed at the consumer or prosumer user than the suffering professional. However, the interface is not as horrible as others (it looks like a half clone of a Pinnacle). Only for Linux, more info here:
Cinelerra: Yes, the name is awful, they are Linuxers, marketing is not their thing 🙂 Seriously, Cinelerra is perhaps the most serious and longest running attempt at a professional video editing system on Linux. The project has been going on for several years now and, when it seems to be dying, it suddenly reborn again, for now it seems to be still alive and kicking (the last version is from November 2011). They have interesting tools like DVEs, color corrections, tracker and even some compositing. As with almost all open source applications, the interface is its weakest point.
Jahshaka (formerly Cinefx, formerly Jahshaka, formerly ….): As you can see, changing names is one of the constants in open source applications. Jahshaka is perhaps the most interesting of all the Linux projects (besides having versions for Windows and Mac). With a well thought-out interface reminiscent of professional applications, it offers editing, color correction, effects and compositing (2D and 3D). The project has recently been relaunched and they hope to be able to release version 3.0 soon.
And you can download the previous versions from this page:
You also have a Youtube channel with tutorials and demos of Jahshaka:
CinePaint: One of the most interesting projects, although it is currently on stand-by. CinePaint is the evolution of a project called FilmGimp, which was nothing more than a development of Gimp applied to film, that is, with capabilities to work with sequences of frames. It started as a project of Rythm & Hues (one of the largest postpo companies in Hollywood) and sponsored by Silicon Grail (a now defunct company that developed compositing software for film). Then other companies like Sony ImageWorks joined the project until they decided to take it a step further and rename it CinePaint. It has been used in quite a few film projects and has quite advanced features, such as OpenEXR support, very oriented to film and video work.
Currently, and after a long time frozen, it seems that the project is still moving, with new versions announced (although delayed with no final date as of today).
You can download version 1.0 from Sourceforge, currently only available for Linux, although previous versions were available for Mac and Windows.
There are a few more applications such as Kino (a kind of MovieMaker for Linux), but they are not the kind of applications that might interest us professionally, being much more focused on the consumer market.
Mastering, encoding and various conversions
Here the available solutions are almost infinite, I will focus on a few that I think are the most interesting:
IrfanView: IrfanView is an application that lets you preview and convert image, video and audio files. It allows file conversions, cropping, scaling, adding watermarks, etc. …. works with frame sequences or video files (usually in prosumer formats).
XnView: Very similar to the previous one, perhaps with a friendlier interface and support for more formats (including DPX). allows batch conversions and renaming frame sequences. They have versions for Windows and Beta versions for Mac and Linux.
Freemake Video Converter: A very powerful video converter, mainly oriented to consumer formats, with a simple interface. However, it has some capabilities more typical of professional software such as the use of CUDA or DXVA to speed up the conversion. Very oriented towards portable devices, cell phones and the like. It can also burn DVDs and BluRays, convert online video material and directly upload the material to Youtube, or even generate video for HTML5. The same company has other very interesting free applications as well.
Handbrake: A very powerful video and audio file converter, which even supports DVDs and Blurays (unprotected) and has little to envy to other professional solutions:
FFmpeg: It is a very powerful video conversion solution but it works only in command line. It is the engine used by other applications (such as Handbrake), which are simply interfaces that facilitate the use of these libraries. The project includes other solutions such as ffserver (a video streaming server), ffplay (a multimedia viewer/player) or ffprobe (a media analysis system), all of which work via command line or shell.
Super: A file conversion application that is a front-end (an interface), for several command line solutions like FFmpeg. It supports a multitude of formats and has presets for all kinds of portable devices, phones, tablets and so on. In addition, it can be combined with AviSynth scripts (see below) for more advanced functions. Windows only, that’s right…
The download is a bit hidden:
http://www.erightsoft.biz/GetFile.php?SUPERsetup.exe
To use the DirectShow options (which allow GPU acceleration), you will need these two programs as well:
http://haali.net/mkv/MatroskaSplitter.exe
And the ffdshow:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow-tryout/files/latest/download?source=files
Also interesting is this application, Monogram GraphStudio, for creating DirectShow filters:
http://blog.monogram.sk/janos/tools/monogram-graphstudio/
Format Factory: Another conversion application, with a very simple interface and very thought for conversions to portable devices and similar. Also Windows only.
Avidemux: A simple video and audio editor that allows you to cut, apply filters and convert formats. With a simple but effective interface (it can also be run in command line), it supports multiple input and output formats, as well as several filters that allow us to make simple operations with video and audio. It also allows you to work with subtitles (burn them, extract them from a DVD), do batch processing, add scripts, etc… There are also versions for Windows, Mac and Linux.
VirtualDub:A solution that allows you to capture, edit (simple editing functions) and convert video files. Very oriented to work with AVIs, it also allows to convert to frame sequences (BMP or TGA). There is a version based on VirtualDub, VirtualDub Mod, that allows to work with other formats such as Matrioshka (MKV) or Mpeg-2.
AviSynth: The height of freakism, a command line based video editor. It works mainly with AVI files (and other formats through plugins), internally it is a frameserver that allows to apply filters that are generated with scripts, for the processing of these video files. The generated script (with .avs extension) is opened by any application that supports “Video for Windows” and executes the filtering before showing it to us or writing it to disk.
In this way a lot of processes can be performed with the video material, such as spatial transformations, color corrections and color space conversions, noise removal, deinterlacing, etc…
Digital film mastering (creation of DCPs)
Here are some powerful free tools and some open source tools in development. If you want more information about creating DCPs you can check the tutorial I published a few months ago here, or, better yet, attend Fernando Alfonsin’s great courses at 709 Media Room.
DCPBuilder: Free, but not totally free, the DCPs have a watermark and you have to ask for an activation code to remove it, in theory they only allow one per user. Otherwise it is quite powerful, it allows subtitles, stereoscopic DCPs, etc.. but, like all those listed here, it does not yet support the generation of encrypted DCPs with KDM. It is the one with the best interface and there are versions for Windows, Linux and Mac, both 32 and 64 bits.
OpenDCP: With a more spartan interface than the previous one, it does not support encrypted DCPs either (although they say it is under development). It is capable of generating DCPs with subtitles and stereoscopic. Versions for Windows, Linux and Mac, 32-bit and 64-bit.
Open Cinema Tools/DCP Maker: The oldest of them all, in principle a command line software, they also have a graphical interface for Windows called DCP Maker. The group that develops it is not very active (last version July 2009).
DCPC: Quite less evolved than the first two, it is an interface for the previous one and it is in German, but you have a manual in English, so it is more or less manageable. By the way, the manual uses two applications we have talked about before, Super and VirtualDub Mod to generate the DCDM TIFFs.
Well, that’s all, I know there are quite a few missing softwares; many of them are command line, or very specialized image processing libraries, TC calculators, render queues or similar. So, if you are interested, we will make another entry for advanced freakies.
