Free Programs for Multimedia Journalists
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
In journalism today it is important to be able to be a multimedia journalist. There are free legal programs on the web that can help make a journalist's life a bit easier.
Some of the top programs are priced at hundreds of dollars, for example, Adobe After Effects and Final Cut Studio. I have listed a few legal programs that are free and can be downloaded from the web.
.01 MPEG Streamclip is a video trans-coder and compressor. It has the ability to manipulate the size of video files.
It can be used to compress HD footage from a camera, such as DSLR, into a smaller high quality file that Final Cut Pro can edit.
If you're working with a film shot in .mov files but you have one .avi file from another source MPEG Streamclip will convet it. It will also make sure all your video uses the same codecs.
.01MPEG Streamclip can be downloaded for free and is available for Mac or PC.
.02 GIMP Is an alternative to Adobe Photoshop. It does practically everything Adobe Photoshop can and is released under the GNU philosophy of free software ownership.
GIMP can resize, manipulate and layer photographs. It is a great tool to have to edit photos for blogs. It can also be used to create graphics and design logos.
The latest version of GIMP is 2.6 and can be downloaded here.
.03 Audacity edits audio and is extremely effective for editing speech. It has the ability to add professional filters to an audio file and allows for multi-layered editing.
Audacity can be used simply to turn a big .WAV file into a nice .mp3. It is more valuable to use to help edit podcasts or audio slideshows.
.03 Audacity is compatible for Windows, Mac and Linux. It is available for free under the GNU license.
Photo Credit: Creative Commons
1 comments:
Thanks for sharing this information. I think Photoshop is a great tool but it is extremely expensive. I'm glad to know there is free software available out there that will do the same job.
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