PhotoSoftware

How cool would it be to make your own The Golden Compass...mixing your own animation/real life content? How about expressing the real you in SecondLife and bringing in your own controlled environment -- animals, vehicles, people, buildings? Adding your own action/figures into TV shows you've captured? Reallusion's iClone is your own virtual movie studio that lets you quickly (and easily) create your own characters and add your own special effects. Read more

iClone really lets you bring digital life to ...life! It's like an entire computer animation studio right on your system to create 3-D models of real people, bring places alive. Whether it's your games, your movies, your place in SecondLife, your videos on MySpace/YouTube/wherever.

Remember the holidays from three…five…ten years ago? Birthdays? Family outings? The great times you had with your parents, grandparents or great grandparents? Aren’t you glad you captured all of those special, precious moments on videotape? You’ve got dozens of taped memories stacked in a cabinet or tucked away on a shelf in closet.

The problem is consumer VHS tape isn’t be best format to use for long-term storage. Every time you play one of the tapes you wear away part of the image, you scratch the video, you destroy small portions of the memories.

If you haven’t played the family celebration tapes for years you may be in for a rude awakening. The magnetic film may have aged, turned black and the images disappeared. The coating may mysteriously peel away or flake off when the tape is played. The special moments, the memories are suddenly…simply memories. Signs of video quality degradation can become apparent after five years or sooner if the tapes aren’t stored properly. Read more

Personal and personalized video content is not only more precious to people, it is quickly becoming the entertainment of choice as consumers buy and use lower-cost, high-performance camcorders; video-enabled cameras; web downloads and video-to-go personal media players (PMPs).

To put the fun back into video production and content distribution/sharing, Pinnacle Systems continues to expand the industry’s most widely known and used product line …the Studio family.

First Family of Video
Leading the cast are three versions of award-winning Studio 11 software -- Studio 11,under $50; Studio 11 Plus, MSRP $99; Studio 11 Ultimate, under $130.

With support for today’s advanced AVCHD format, the Plus and Ultimate versions of Pinnacle Studio enable users to capture video from AVCHD camcorders and immediately edit content --without requiring cumbersome, time-consuming format conversion. AVCHD delivers 1080i high-definition video requiring only half the storage capacity of MPEG 2. Videos edited in HDV or AVCHD format can be authored as HD DVD or AVCHD format discs using standard DVD media and played on the latest HD DVD and Blu-ray players. Read more

MotionDSP just announced a new service called fixmymovie.com, where video from any source (cell phone, digital camera, webcam) can be optimized with one-button operation - just click and your video will be uploaded, enhanced and displayed. Then, you can share it, embed the improved video on your blog, Facebook or MySpace page, or download it.

The automatic enhancements improve resolution, poor lighting conditions and also removes the blockiness that is sometimes present in mobile phone and low-end digital camera videos.

During the beta, Fixmymovie.com allows for free enhancement of video clips smaller than CIF resolution (352x288 pixels) and less than 20 megabytes (almost any video from a mobile phone or digital camera fits these requirements). Read more

Video Shooters Get Latest Technology, Professional Tools, Easy-to-Use Software from Pinnacle Studio 11

Pinnacle has always produced great products…the company comes from a professional level background and we benefit from what it has developed for the pros.. Pinnacle Studio is now available in it’s 11th edition to give first time and experienced videographers the most advanced, most complete solution including support for new high definition media including AVCHD, Windows Vista and Web publishing for online video sharing.

With the ready availability of economic high definition camcorders, almost anyone can afford to produce their own theater-quality video content. To deliver content that is equal to the quality that is produced, Pinnacle Systems new Studio 11 makes it fast and easy for first-time and seasoned video enthusiasts to create, produce and share their videos in a quality equal to the best you see from Hollywood studios. Read more

Online video and photo sharing service Phanfare has a special offer for current customers of Yahoo! Photos. Yahoo! Photos is closing on September 20, 2007 and all photos stored at Yahoo! Photos will deleted. In response, Phanfare is offering Yahoo! Photos customers the opportunity to move and save their photos from Yahoo! Photos to their own Phanfare Web sites. As a bonus, current Yahoo! Photos customers will get six months free service when they move their photos to Phanfare.

Unlike most other photo and video sharing services, Phanfare allows its customers to access and download all of their full-size originals at any time, for no additional cost. Like all Phanfare customers, those customers who move photos from Yahoo! Photos get unlimited storage for all of their videos and photos. Read more

Over the last few years, affordable DVD and CD recording technology has given us all the power to produce and distribute digital content. Like millions of other Americans, you may have created CDs filled with digital photos to share with family and friends, or perhaps you've even created DVDs containing your camcorder footage. If you haven't gotten in on the personal content revolution yet, now's the time to take the leap. New technologies are making it easier than ever before to create professional quality productions without any special training or skills.

Recording DVDs and CDs at home is easy. Most of today's computers include a pre-installed DVD and CD recording drive, and recording software. After firing up the software, selecting the files you want to record, and loading a blank disc into the drive, you simply click the software's record button. A few minutes later, out slides your fully recorded disc, ready to share with the world.

But wait. As great as the content you've recorded on the disc might be, there's one final piece missing. You need to label the disc. You don't want to just scribble some notes on the surface with a marker -- that wouldn't impress anyone. You need a labeling solution that looks more professional. Read more

There’s an old saying that if all you have is a hammer…everything looks like a nail.

It may be true in the building of your house but when you’re building your multimedia content library, everything is different and everything seems to require a different tool. That has meant loading, learning and using a wide range of software and then hoping you can find the content – audio, photo, video – when you wanted to share or enjoy it.

The InterVideo MediaOne Gallery puts an end to your cluttered media center desktop and stores your content so it can be quickly found and used. It is a new category of content suite software that lets you access nine different applications from a single opening screen. Read more

With the popularity of digital cameras and prices of media cards dropping, photo hobbyists are looking for places to store their digital photos rather than taking up space on their computers. Many decide to store images using a photo sharing service. But with so many to choose from how does someone go about finding the one perfect for them?

I was recently given the opportunity to check out SmugMug. With over 30 templates and multiple color options, I was able to create a gallery as individual as me. Did I mention that SmugMug has unlimited photo storage? Perfect for me as I frequently attend music events and been known to shoot as many as 500 photos in a single night! And with no ads, my friends don’t get annoyed when viewing my pictures. Also, friends don’t have to register to view my pics (unlike some other photo sharing services). Read more

We have the best of both worlds in our home. Our daughter takes great photos, shoots artistic video. Our son is fearless when it comes to making our family PCs the centers of our home entertainment.

Corel’s recent release of Ulead VideoStudio 11 Plus seemed to be a product all of us could use…simple enough for us to use without spending weeks pouring over the manuals but with enough depth to satisfy the household technophile.

We chose the Plus version of the software (under $80) because it would enable us do our video in high definition when we used our PVR (personal video recorder) to save HD TV shows and show off the quality of our new, economic HDV camcorder. Read more