Today, MakeUseOf offers four little-known multimedia authoring tools for your next production. What we have here is the junk drawer of your virtual artistic toolshed, and whether you are a video-maker, a graphic designer, or an audio engineer, these sites are sure to help.

Movietools

Movietools is a rare gem that every video artist should know about. With an array of over 140 video loops consisting of backgrounds, virtual studios, lower thirds, and moving objects, you will never be at a loss for your next presentation.

File formats are only Windows Media Video files, so if you’re running a Mac OS, you might want to check out a free media converter. However, if you are willing to shell out a few extra bucks, you should look at the AVS Video Converter.

All files from Movietools are made in 848×480 for 16:9 scaling and 640×840 for 4:3 scaling. Also, the lower third and moving object loops have been pre-keyed for your video-editing software.

The Freesound Project

As mentioned before by MakeUseOf, the Freesound Project is a collectively growing community that donates sound files for you to insert into your media project. With nearly 116,000 files to date, there is nearly an endless supply of royalty-free sound.

As a given, each file is under the Creative Commons 1.0 Sampling license, and credit is required for each sound creator. Also, each file comes in the format of the user’s choice, so again, it might be good to find a sound file converter such as AudioExpert if you plan on using this online tool seriously.

Another little feature offered by Freesound is the Mootcher open-source programming library. This bit of open-source software allows you to write the FreeSound library into your own video or audio editing software.

One thing to keep in mind is that the Freesound Project focuses primarily on sound bits rather than music. It is possible that you will find music on here, but it is more likely to be a simple recording of a live performance at a parade or a festival of some sort.

The Internet Archive

Taking a cue from the Library of Alexandria, the Internet Archive is an attempt to digitally archive media files that includes moving images, sound files, photographs, texts, and pretty much anything that you can use to absorb information. That being said, it also offers a variety of media sources that can be used on your next project.

Not surprisingly, this site incorporates a great deal of downloadable media that is open to the public domain or is royalty-free. However, this is not to say that all of the media on this site is for you to put your hands on. Each file has its own specific license, and many of these incorporate Creative Commons. Make sure to check both the sidebar and the bottom half of each media page to find exactly what the creator or submitter allows. Some licenses are visible, but others are not.

Detonation Films

Whether you want to add some explosive transitions to your PowerPoint speech or a few action-packed sequences to your latest video project, the pyromania boys at Detonation Films have enough napalm and shrapnel to satisfy the Michael Bay in all of us.

Detonation Films is the ultimate zone for stock video of explosions, rockets, bullet holes, and more. Although many of their videos are for sale, there are a whole lot of freebies for you to download.

Most videos utilize a simple black background which can be done away with using a luma or screening effect, but there are a few with chroma-key green and even pre-keyed clips to easily layer on top of your source video.

In addition to their main site that is full of 4:3 video clips, there is also DetFilmsHD which offers a few pricier, yet sexier, hi-definition explosions.

Conclusion

Hopefully, these sites will aid you in your next big production whether it be a presentation at a conference, an audio mix, or the latest YouTube viral video. Visit them often, for they are constantly updating their material.

What kind of other sources of free media do you know about? Have you ever used any of these sources before with your own projects? What types of projects have you made using them?

Image credits: jppi

Creating a video from a slideshow isn’t something new. It has been a pretty common activity thanks to the clutch of PPT to video converters. But thanks to the latest edition of Microsoft Office, you can do away with third party tools…at least for a basic video conversion job.

Microsoft Office 2010 has come in with a slew of user-friendly new features. One of the new features in PowerPoint 2010 helps you convert Powerpoint presentations to video with just a click.

Here are the steps that start with a normal presentation file.

1. After creating a presentation, select the File tab from the ribbon.

   

2. Click on Save and Send – Create a Video under File Types.

   

3. A few optional settings help to further tailor your video creation process.As the screenshot below shows, you can record and time voice narration and laser pointer movements in your video effectively creating a screencast. All other animations and transitions are also preserved in the converted format.

   

4. Two dropdowns fine tune your ‘production’ for the media it will be displayed on. It also determines file size. For instance, opting for Portable devices reduces the resolution. I find this quite handy if I have to carry along and watch a presentation on an iPod or a smartphone.

   

5. You can also add the recorded timings and narration to the video. You can also specify the time that will determine the transition from one slide to the next.
6. Finally click on the large Create Video button and choose a location to save your video as a WMV file.

   

As the conversion to .wmv format begins there will be a progress bar displayed in the lower right corner of PowerPoint that indicates the pace. The time taken for the conversion will of course depend on the size of the PowerPoint file. My 15-slide sample presentation took about eight minutes to turn into a movie.

The inbuilt PowerPoint video conversion is a handy aid to have. There are some limitations of course:

PowerPoint 2010 supports only one video format. A few more choices like MP4, FLV etc would have been real handy. For that, you still have to depend on third-party conversion tools. Also, the highest resolution that’s on offer is 960×720. Higher resolutions (and commonly available) like 1,280×720, 1,920×1,080, or 1,920×1,080 are not available.

The limitations notwithstanding, the Create Video feature is a great tool to have. It saves us the bother of looking for a conversion tool and allows us to quickly upload and share videos of any presentations. If you are a PowerPoint super-user, would you agree that Microsoft has plugged a gap.

It was this experience that made me realize how talented all of those YouTube video bloggers and entertainers are. They make reciting monologues on-screen look so easy! Believe it or not, it actually is possible to come across on-screen in much the same professional way as these pros. What separates the expert video blogger from the amateur is the lack of mental pauses that distract the listener and take away from the message you’re trying to convey.

The trick is to remove the need to memorize what you’re going to say, and instead just focus on saying it as professionally as possible. You can remove that need for memorization with free teleprompter software called uPrompt. We’ve offered other tools for making videos, like Israel’s list of 5 tools to make a home movie, and Travis’ list of 5 screencasting apps. But uPrompt is probably one of the most unique tools available.

Let Teleprompting Turn You Into A Pro

Even some of the best TV commentators turn to teleprompting to deliver on-screen statements and monologues.  It isn’t that they can’t memorize what they need to say, or that they can’t improvise – it’s just that many people don’t have the time to memorize everything they want to say.

When you first install and run uPrompt, it looks like a fairly simple application. There is a center area where you’ll see the uPrompt logo – this is where the scrolling text will display. There are three control areas that you can use to control the text movement and speed. There are clickable buttons on the lower left, keyboard shortcuts listed to the lower right, and then off to the right side of the window you’ll see two scrollbars, one for speed and one for “course” movement.

If you right click where it says “Right click for menu“, you’ll see the different options you have to bring in the teleprompting script that you want to use. If you don’t have any existing text and you’re starting from scratch with your scripts, go ahead and choose “Quick Edit Script.”

This opens the Quick Edit editor, which is essentially a glorified text editor. The free version of uPrompt allows for about 2,500 characters, which is around 25 full lines in Microsoft Word – a couple of large paragraphs. Once you’re done writing, just click File -> Save and it’ll save the file in .upr (Uprompt) format, and then instantly open it in the uPrompter.

If you used the default font size settings in the editor, the font in the teleprompter will also show up in that same font. As you can see, it would be pretty hard to quickly read the text off the screen when the font is this small.

You can change this in the editor by clicking the “F” button in the menu and selection a larger font size. 36 usually works best if you’re going to be sitting right in front of the computer screen, and using the webcam placed at the top of the screen.

You can also modify the font from inside the teleprompter software itself by going to the right-click menu and choosing “Font“. When you’re ready for lights, camera and action, just click the “W” button on your keyboard, or click the button to increase the speed, and the teleprompter will start. The words will scroll up the screen at the speed that you select. Pause the scrolling by tapping “Q” (or clicking the mouse), and then restart it with the “W” (or clicking the mouse again).

It only takes a little bit of getting used to, but once you get used to using the teleprompter, you’ll be able to speak naturally while appearing to look at the camera – people will think that you’re a trained pro!

Also, keep in mind that you don’t have to use the built-in editor. uPrompt is able to import script from text or rich text files as well. So, if you prefer writing your script in Word or Notepad, go for it.

In the display below, I’ve imported an RTF file into uPrompt. The speed and course slidebars are on the right, and elapsed and remaining scroll time is displayed at the small bottom panes.

The way to use the uPrompt teleprompter software when you have one of those laptop or computer screens with a webcam installed into the top of the screen is to place the uPrompt window at the very top center of the screen, closest to the webcam. This way, as the text scrolls across the teleprompter window and you read from it, it appears as though you’re actually looking right at the webcam itself. Set the speed of the text just right, and everything will look entirely natural.

If you struggle to create that YouTube monologue, or otherwise need to record yourself speaking on camera, give uPrompt a try and transform yourself from an amateur to an on-camera expert overnight.

Give uPrompt a try and let us know if it improved your video quality. Do you know of other tools that work as well or better? Share your insight in the comments section below.

Image credits: Jgclarke

One trick is to display your posts at the top of your main page, so they will be instantly accessible. One of the tools that you can use to do this is Wibbitz, a web service that will help you feature the latest contents of your blog as an interactive blog posts slideshow.

Building The Player

Basically, Wibbitz will help you collect your blog posts (either using RSS or direct links), and then compile them as a slideshow video. Similar to other web services, you should register before you can start building your slideshow player. After registering, you can build as many players as you need. Then you can continue customizing the player.

Start by naming your player with something that you can remember easily. If you want to create more than one player for your blog, it’s advisable to name the players similar to the blog name.

Other details that you need to fill in are the website’s URL, the text that you want to appear on the launcher, and also the theme.

There are several themes (color combinations) available on the list. Choose one that you like and click “OK” to save.

You can also set the language, upload a logo and item image, and choose the background music.

Click “Next” to move on to the “Content” addition process. You can use your blog’s RSS feed URL, or you can use the direct links of the articles. The advantage of using an RSS feed is that the content of your slideshow will always be updated with your latest posts. But static links can also be useful if you want to keep certain posts always visible.

In the next step, you’ll get a script that you can put in your website to embed the slideshow player. This script is intended for general websites.

If you want to install the script on a blog, Wibbitz provides users with a more customized setup. Go to the lower parts of the page and choose the type of blog that you use. For WordPress, the basic setup is downloading and installing the plugin, then putting the script’s URL path into the plugin’s settings.

After you save your settings, you will be brought to your Dashboard. There are three panes there: “My players“, “Analytics“, and “What’s New“.

The “My Players” pane is the place where all of your players are listed. You can edit the player’s settings, view the statistics, refresh the code, or share the players via Facebook. You can also add more players here.

Adding The Slideshow Player To A WordPress Blog

I’ll use WordPress as an example since I only have a WordPress blog. To add the slideshow player to a WordPress blog, you have to download the plugin from Wibbitz and upload it to your blog(s).

Since the downloaded plugin is a .rar file, you have to extract the contents and recompress it into a .zip file. You can use almost any compression utility. One recommended free compression application is 7Zip.

The next step is to upload the plugin to your blog. Go to the “Install Plugins” menu and choose the “Upload” tab. Choose the file and click “Install Now“.

After installation, you will find “Wibbitz Configuration” in the side menu.

Enable the plugin by checking the box, fill in the “Wibbitz Player Path” with the script’s URL, and click the “Update Wibbitz Player” button.

After that a small “Play” button will appear on the left side of your blog. When you hover your mouse over it, the button will slide out with your launcher text written on it.

Clicking on the play button will open the Slideshow Player. The player will show articles from your blog. The article’s title will be written at the bottom of the frame, while the article’s main image is moving in the background. If the article has no main image, the background will display Wibbitz’ image.

The plugin only allows one RSS feed per blog, but that doesn’t mean that it should be the feed from the same blog. You can put feeds from one of your blogs into another blog’s slideshow player to cross-promote the content.

If you want to give your visitors some exposure to the articles that they might’ve missed, Wibbitz’ slideshow player is a good way to do so. Moreover, the player will not disturb your visitors as it hides silently at the side until your visitors choose to open it. Try to build one for your blog and tell us what you think about it using the comments below. If you want more permanent-style exposure, you could try SlideDeck.

There were a couple of services like this mentioned at MUO before, such as Touration and Demofuse, but as far as I can tell none of them had the ease of use, and the ability to customize the tour to your liking so easily. The method that Amberjack uses to do this is impressive. Within just a few quick steps, the site generates javascript code that runs the Amberscript tour application – turning the browser window into a virtual tour of your website, exactly how you configured it. It’s the coolest tool that I’ve seen for web designers in a very long time.

Setting Up Your Amberjack Tour

If you’re nervous about installing anything on your own web server, don’t worry about it. The tool runs on Amberjack’s server. All you have to do is paste the code into your main page (such as your header.php file), and paste the button graphic into your page design. All visitors have to do is click the button to start the tour.

To design the tour, just visit Amberjack and click “Create Your Own Tour.”

On the Basic tab, all you have to do is fill in the URLs for the webpages on your site that you want to highlight as part of the tour. Don’t get too carried away. No one is going to want to sit through twenty pages of the same thing – just choose five or six of the cool areas and features of your site and past those URLs into the fields.

The Skin tab selects the theme of the tour. You can pretty much leave everything else on all of the other tabs as is, but if you want to customize the look and feel of the tour, Amberjack gives you the flexibility to do so.

On the Behavior tab, you can select the name of the Tour – the default is “MyTour“, and that ID will be used in the link that sends visitors into “tour mode” for your website. I also highly suggest changing the “Close Button” and “Exit Page” URLs to send visitors back to your main page. This gives the appearance to visitors as though the browser view simply changed from the “Tour” view to the regular view – seamlessly running the Amberjack tour without ever leaving your site.

The Captions tab lets you further customize what the tour will look like. You can change what characters show up on the previous and next tabs, the close button, and the website page number description (this will all make sense once you see the tour!)

Finally, there are also some advanced options where you can have the tour fetch a CSS file or a JavaScript file at the end of the tour. This lets you further customize the behavior as visitors transition out of the tour back to your site. If you don’t know what any of this means – just leave the fields blank!

Finally, just click the “Create Your Code” button at the bottom of any one of the configuration windows, and the Amberjack system creates your tour and gives you the three pieces of code that you need to embed the system onto your site. You’ll find the large snippet of code that goes in your website header under “Tour HTML code“.

The “tour entry link” is the link that anyone can type into the browser to see your website tour – you don’t necessarily need a button. However, you’ll find the button code listed on this page as well. This is a good thing to place at the top of your main page – the first thing a new visitor will see.

When you do paste the code into the script area of your header, don’t forget to replace the “Placeholder” text with the text that you want to display when that particular page shows up in the tour.

Either embed the button on your site, or add a link – something like “take a tour of this site” – on your main page. You can even send the tour link to anyone you want via email, and they can visit your website tour directly. The link looks like it goes directly to your site – but it calls the Amberjack tour script.

The tour window pops up an explanation box over the webpage and dims the page itself so that it is sort of a background window that visitors can view as they read your explanation about the page.

This is a cool website feature that some web designers would spend hours trying to code and implement on a webpage, and thanks to Amberjack, you can create a website tour and have it implemented on your site in literally a matter of minutes.

Give Amberjack a try with your site, and sell your website to your newest visitors, in your own words. Let us know what you thought of the system. Was it easy enough to customize? Is there anything you would add? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Its beautifully designed and easily accessible features enable you to create, publish, and share your presentations without the hassle of uploading and downloading them to the Internet for updates and online collaboration. In addition, if you’re using SlideRocket for business purposes it’s a perfect interactive tool for your clients.

Stunning Features

If you have experience with PowerPoint or Apple‘s Keynote, SlideRocket won’t be a stranger to you. Many of its features are similar to the former programs, but without the extra panels that sometime get in the way of creating presentations.

SlideRocket includes about a dozen well designed themed master slides that can be customized for your particular needs. What makes SlideRocket a more practical platform is that all of your presentations and resources can be stored in one place, making it easy for you to access them on any computer with Internet access.

As SlideRocket is an online program, you can easily share and collaborate with others to create slide projects. SlideRocket won’t automatically save your presentations, but if for some reason you lose your Wi-Fi connection it will attempt to recover unsaved changes to your presentation.

Multimedia Support

Some of the newer features of SlideRocket include the ability to pull media resources such as photos from sites like the photo sharing site, Flickr, the stock media site, Fotolia, Google Spreadsheets, as well as your own computer.

Audio files included in SlideRocket must be purchased, but you can also import royalty-free music from programs like Apple‘s GarageBand and these online music sites.

Layout Features

SlideRocket includes a surprising number of layout and design tools that are comparable to what you would find in PowerPoint and say Photoshop Elements.

Beyond the ability to insert photos, movie files, charts, and audio files, SlideRocket enables you to do advance text formatting, layering and alignment of elements you add to slides. As you might expect, the program also includes a good variety of transition effects. They all may not be as dynamic as what you would find in PowerPoint and Keynote, but let’s be honest, how many presentations have you seen that were marred by the misuse of slide effects and animations?

The free version of SlideRocket includes 250MB of storage and 15MB file size; up to 5 multi-seat accounts, shared folders/items, shared libraries, public presentations, Google indexing of Presentations, PowerPoint import and printing and exporting to PDF format. The Pro version includes a lot more, but if you’re not creating presentations on a regular basis, the free version should suffice.

Presentation Formats

SlideRocket includes HTML 5 platform support, which means the presentations can be easily viewed in mobile applications like the iPhone and the iPad.

You can also download the SlideRocket Desktop Presenter which lets you synchronize presentations from your online account to your desktop. This is useful for occasions when don’t have a Wi-Fi connection. SlideRocket is also accessible as a Google Chrome application, providing a one-click process to your account.

Let us know what you think of SlideRocket. Do you find it easy to use? Also, check out these other alternatives to PowerPoint.