Useful software for videographers and photographers - Part 2

Earlier this year I was presented with some footage shot in Cote d'Ivoire, Africa on a Canon 5D MKII. The pictures were OK but the sound was distorted when the levels peaked and a look at the waveform showed that everything was square off. After an appeal on Twitter (@pukkascott if you want to follow) one suggestion was to try iZotope's RX2 audio repair software. 

iZotope RX2 tools

This is an immensely powerful suite of tools including Denoise, Declip, Spectral Repair, Declick & Decrackle, Remove Hum and more. After a quick view of an instructional video I applied Declip to the exported WAV file and after a little bit of playing around the distortion was completely removed and the waveform peaks nicely rounded. At $349 for the standard version it is not cheap but could save your bacon. 
A much cheaper version called music and speech cleaner is available for $39 which improves noisy speech but is no good for declipping.
There a lots of sound capturing pieces of software available and after a lot of experimenting I plumped for SoundTap by NCH software. It produces very clean records from anything played on a computer or voice recordings from Skype. 
There a lots of sound capturing pieces of software available and after a lot of experimenting I plumped for SoundTap by NCH software. It produces very clean records from anything played on a computer or voice recordings from Skype. 

SoundTap

Backup is one of the most important day to day operations since tapeless production came along. It took me a while to get round the fact that my G-Tech Raid drives were not backed up despite having two drives in the case but my Netgear network drives were. So now I use Netgear network drives to backup the G-Tech ones using Netgear's own NTI Shadow software. It works OK but it's a resource hogger and I have to disable the software when editing.
Backup is one of the most important day to day operations since tapeless production came along. It took me a while to get round the fact that my G-Tech Raid drives were not backed up despite having two drives in the case but my Netgear network drives were. So now I use Netgear network drives to backup the G-Tech ones using Netgear's own NTI Shadow software. It works OK but it's a resource hogger and I have to disable the software when editing.

Deep Meta thumbnail selection

It's important to set up the right recording location and the file naming convention in options as it would be impossible to find the recordings later if you don't. One feature I really like about the software is that even when you click "start recording" the file only starts to be created when it senses an audio input. Until the end of December it is available for $19.99 so I recommend you to get it this week.

To backup my system drive I use Casper 7.0 by Future Systems which creates a clone of the drive. The software manages to copy every file on the drive so the backup is true replica of the primary drive and when that falls over you really can slot in the backup and everything boots up perfectly. 

It is light on computer resources and it uses SmartClone to only back up changes to the drive, but doesn't take hours checking the drive like other tools I have tried. I doesn't work with network drives or on a Mac unfortunately but should be on everybody's PC.

Getting more specialist I thought I would briefly mention two tools I use to upload and manage stock material. 

I recently discovered Deep Meta by Belgium company Eazign byba which is a great analysis tool for iStockphoto material. I won't go into detail about what the software can do because as it is free there is no reason not to try it, but one feature I discovered is a real bonus. If you control+click to select a number of connected files and then right click to open the dialogue window, click on "create thumbnail links...", save changes and a little while later the associated thumbnails will appear in the iStockphoto listing for each one giving a link to alternative shots for a purchaser. 

 Finally Send to Smugmug by Omar Shahine is a very useful piece of freeware for uploading photo and video files to your Smugmug account. Once account details have been entered it will list your albums (or you can create a new one) that you can upload to. Choose a folder containing the files and select which files you want to send and click upload. Very quick and easy.

Useful software for videographers and photographers - Part 1

Over the years I have purchased or downloaded for free many small pieces of software to achieve specific results or solutions. Some are used a couple of times and then deleted, others, like Christmas dogs, stay with me forever. I thought I would run through some of them here as they may prove useful to you one day.

MPEG Streamclip by Squared 5 is one of the best known video converters and despite owning powerful conversion software by Avid, Apple and Adobe, this is the one I use the most. Firstly it produces files that are universally playable and recommended by stock sites. Secondly it can convert sections of a DVD to a QT file that can be imported to Avid. Thirdly it is quick to use and the presets are logical. Finally it is very small programme that has little impact on computer resources.

MPEG Streamclip options

Most editors know that attaching Apple formatted drives to a Windows PC just doesn't work unless you install Mediafour's Mac Drive which allows you to be totally agnostic about the drive format. But another of the company's software, Disk Aware has been the find of the year for me. Disk Aware analyses every folder and file on a drive and presents it as a list arranged in size order and also as a colour-coded wheel which shows you the relative size of the files and folders. Simply click on a segment and analyse the next layer down.

DiskAware - The Wheel

The programme only costs $10 per computer but it can analyse any drive: internal, external, flash and even network drives. It enables easy clearing up of drives and lets you work out why all your storage has disappeared. 

One tool I used for a while, dropped and have returned to is IrfanView, the strangely named freeware viewer for PCs. One of the more recent improvements is IrfanView Thumbnails which you get when you install the complete set of plugins and I place as a shortcut on the desktop. It opens up an explorer window with a light grey background to distinguish it from Windows Explorer. Open up a folder containing mixed media and almost immediately it is populated with thumbnails which can be set to many sizes, not just Window's three. 

IrfanView Thumbnails of text, video and .psd

Thumbnails are shown for videos (with filmstrip icon), stills (even Photoshop) and text. PDFs are not shown however. One of the most useful tools is the ability to save those thumbnails as separate images for putting into a spreadsheet for example. Hovering over a thumbnail reveals information about the file itself such as dimensions, although for video only the dimensions of the thumbnail itself are shown. Like most features of IrfanView they are a work in progress, but the ability to see thumbnails from both videos and Photoshop files make it worth having.

In Part 2 I look at a a couple of sound tools, a backup programme and a couple of tools for uploading and managing material at iStock and Smugmug.