AAUG Reviews

by Guy Okada, AAUG Member

About a year ago I heard about Serene Saver which was touted as a video screen saver. Ever since the flying toasters, I’m a sucker for cool screensavers so I volunteered to review Serene Saver and its creator, Kevin Kachikian, responded immediately with a review copy. Alas, the original Serene Saver was not designed for my monitor which is wide screen with high definition. On my wide screen monitor the images appeared blurred and distorted. When I contacted Kevin he agreed that a widescreen, HD version was the number one request and that it was in production. A few months later, Amuse, Inc. has unveiled the new HD version. called Serene Saver 2.

Serene Saver 2 is just what its title implies: a screen saver to bring serenity and relaxation into your busy life. Downloading was a breeze and the current version works with 10.4 and higher on G4, G5 or Intel based Macs with at least 512 MB of ram. 1GB of available hard disk is required for the library of 24 scenes. Downloading the 24 additional scenes took a few minutes so be patient. A 10-day trial is available before purchasing. however the screen choice is very limited.

Serene Saver 2 opens in the Desktop and Screen Saver window and it works like most other screen savers. (more…)

by Gary Miller, AAUG Member

InDesign CS3 is a big step from my version, InDesign CS. Many new features, ease of help, and videos to get one started, and now Photoshop like effects, better search features, while the controls, sometimes called the ‘interface’ are better, but could be simplified. It is an amazing tool for your design work, be it full on graphic designers, or like me, gives me the ability to create better quality work, with more control, it’s definitely worth the money and time to learn it.

Let’s get started. The install requires you quit all apps because it puts many shared pieces in many places. The new window you see, really is a good awakening to what’s in store for you.

As you see, i was able to go right to getting started, learn quickly what’s new, or search out resources in it, or on Adobe’s website. You also see, Adobe had expanded it’s user group community to include inDesign, like it’s general purpose user grp, which AAUG belongs, or it’s others, like Acrobat. The directory of add’l plug in’s is helpful, as you come up against new jobs requiring add’l skills. I really appreciate this. I went right to the videos supplied to give me a tour. First up, was Using the Control Panel, high quality video’s by Lynda.com were shown, Adobe offering a brief tutorial in how to use the video controls. well done. Next I wanted to see what was new. The creative effects For example the satin effect that applies interior shading in a satin like finish. The plus is that you can experiment in seeing what you can do without permanently altering your project, til you’re ready. (more…)

by Elnora Wands, AAUG Member

What a difference from the encyclopedias of my youth! You went to the shelf, pulled out the book with what you hoped was the correct alphabetical reference and began thumbing through the pages. You might, or might not, have chosen the correct volume. If you chose the right one, great. If not, then you had to try to locate the correct volume by going back to the shelf and trying again. With the multimedia 2007 World Book you never have to leave your chair. It’s sort of like the old ad for the telephone book yellow pages; let your fingers do the walking.

When you open your “book” there are all sorts of choices, not the least of which is a series of individual pictures undulating across the bottom fourth of the screen. Click on any one of the photos and you are immediately taken to a new screen. It may be a short video with beautiful visuals or an article with links to more information. There are far too many choices for me to detail all of them, such as the 248,000 plus word dictionary. Double click on any word in an article and up it comes with all its meanings. I would say you could compare it to using a horse and buggy for your travel or using a jet airplane. You can plod along with the printed page in a book, having to go to a dictionary for the meaning or have all your resources at your fingertips.

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by David Enders, AAUG Member

elgato is probably best known for their EyeTV hardware and software products. They have supported the Mac platform since 1992. This is not surprising since the founder Markus Fest is the creator of the Toast software all Mac users know and love.

Newly released elgato turbo.264 is a hardware encoder that converts video to the H.264 format used by the iPod, Apple TV and Sony PSP. Installing turbo.264 could not be easier, pop in the CD and install the software to your applications folder. The hardware encoder connects via an available usb 2.0 port. When I installed it on my MacBook, the size of the turbo.264 blocks the second usb port. To fix this situation , elgato supplies a short usb extension cable so that this becomes a non-issue. With the encoder connected directly to the usb port it felt a bit loose. It never fell out or came disconnected , I would have just preferred a tighter fitting connector. Converting video whether it be a Quicktime movie or an unprotected DVD movie to a format suitable for your 5G iPod or Apple TV is easy. The turbo.264 will also convert the video for the Sony PSP.

If you have ever exported video to any of these formats within Quicktime, you will know it takes a longtime to complete this task. (more…)

by David Enders, AAUG Member

Fission is the one program you maybe missing. Yes, it is that good and to boot it is simple to use. What more can a person ask for ? Well how about a discount if you already own Audio Hijack Pro. I already own and use Audio Hijack Pro and Airfoil from Rogue Amoeba and have enjoyed the benefits that they provide. About a month a go, a friend of mine brought over a mp3 file from a bluegrass festival where he performed. The entire concert was recorded resulting in an audio file that was huge. He wanted to edit the file to and save just their performance.

So we tried Garageband and Audacity (an opensource project). Garageband choked on the file and Audacity was hard to use plus required plug-ins to export it to mp3. That is when we tried Fission. It turned out to be the solution we needed. Fission is a lossless editor and can edit MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless and AIFF formats. Being a lossless editor simply means you do not lose audio quality when you edit and then save the file. This is an important feature when editing music more than spoken voice. To get started with Fission, I recommend you watch the screencast available at rogueamoeba.com/fission, it demonstrates with ease how files can be edited. (more…)

by Chris Tofteberg, AAUG Member

iMovie is quite possibly the most fun application included in the iLife package. I also believe it is one of the most underused. Yeah, everyone uses iTunes, many of us use iPhoto. But how many of you have explored iMovie? Or looked into the plugins available for it? Perhaps that is why there is a somewhat limited number of iMovie plugins out there; we just don’t use it enough! Digital Thought Software is one of a handful of software companies that has gambled on iMovie and made some pretty attractive plugins for it.

Digital Thought Software makes plugins for both iMovie and Final Cut Pro. I reviewed the iMovie specific plugins. Installation was kind of weird in that it not only installed the plugins in the user/library/iMovie folder but also put them in Applications, which they don’t really serve any purpose from. The packs I reviewed included plugins for titles, video effects and audio effects but no transitions. The plugins for this review included all of these. I was somewhat disappointed not to see any transitions in the mix. Good transitions can make or break a movie, in my opinion.

The title effects in the Digital Titles pack were plentiful and creative, including about 60 title options. I personally feel that you can’t have enough titling options when you’re making a movie, but Digital Titles filled that void. (more…)

by Gary Miller, AAUG Member

Sandvox is exactly what I wished for. I’m a basic user, don’t want to spend eons on learning all the extras, appreciate an intuitive interface, and want room to grow. This product is just that. It will assist you to design your website quickly, using a well done Quicktime Video ( why doesn’t everyone do one, we all hate manuals ), good support via email - although it takes a bit of time to get a personal response, but in the end, it really is pretty simple to use, and that’s what I wanted.

We Mac users get iWeb included with our computers, so we’re spoiled. But the family of Mac based developers, like Karelia Software, love the beauty and simplicity of the Mac, even if Steve Jobs, often trumps their work, and uses it. This is what happened to Karelia with Sherlock and now Sandvox. Watson was out there as a fabulously well done search tool for movies, stocks, recipes, etc, and then Apple brought out Sherlock, less content, but ok. Then iWeb came out and Sandvox.

But Sandvox is an easier to use product than iWeb, and since when you use iWeb, you have to use .Mac, it limits you. Sandvox will assist you to create a site with a zillion templates, and tools - RSS feed, drag and drop, Pagelets, and more and upload the site to any hosting service. (more…)

by Richard Geiger, AAUG Member

DiscLabel is one of the many great programs that the software company SmileOnMyMac has created. The program is a CD/DVD/VHS labeling and a CD/DVD/VHS case labeling program. The program comes with a lot of standard templates so you can easily create great looking CD/DVD/VHS labels and case labels. Also, the program supports LightScribe CD/DVD writable drives so you can burn your data on one side of the CD/DVD and burn a custom, silkscreen-quality label directly onto your discs on the other side. A special CD/DVD blank is needed to be able to use the drive.

SmileOnMyMac is supporting the program with updates which I had one update in the 25 day review period. I had a of couple crashes when DiscLabel launched iPhoto and iTunes in order to obtain information on photos and music track information.

I used the program to create CD/DVD jewel case covers. I did not use the disk label part of the program because I am not a big fan of putting labels on CD/DVD. The reason is that labels on CD tend to warp the CD/DVD over a long time period.

One of the tests I did with the program was to make a slim jewel case cover for a DVD of photos I shot at an Anchorage Rowing Club event. (more…)

by Guy A. Mofley, AAUG Member

VOB. SVCD. Progressive/Interlaced. Frame rate. Aspect ratio. Video bit rate. These were some of the first words I was exposed to when I was learning how to edit video on the PC. A process as powerful as video editing certainly requires its technical language, but over the years I have found that I ended up doing the same types of editing and rarely needed to venture into some of the more exotic options offered by this commanding hobby. I would often ask myself what if? What if I just want to merge two home videos into one? What if I just wanted to delete commercials from some TV show I recorded? I don’t care about pressing it to DVD, I don’t need to re-encode it and I don’t even want to re-render it. I just wanted to take out a digital knife and cut away some parts.

Enter SimpleMovieX. This Spain based company has taken the very familiar Apple approach (simple is better) and applied it to the science of video editing. The first thing that strikes you about the program is its user interface and layout. If you have any video editing experience at all a quick scan of the controls and you’ll feel right at home. Maybe even “Wow. It can really be this clean.” Video editing programs are notorious for being cluttered and spread out (think Finalcut Express). SimpleMovieX isn’t trying to be Finalcut Express (your not going to use a chroma key effect) instead it is as advertised “the Swiss Army knife of video splicing”.

To put SimpleMovieX to the test I took a copy of TV program I had recorded and cut out some commercials. (more…)

by Guy A. Mofley, AAUG Member

I remember my first Star Trek convention. 1978. George Takei took time to let you get your photo with him and ask one question about the series Star Trek. Mine was simple: How did you do the transporter scenes? My young mind was fascinated by not only the idea of transporting, but the illusion the show used to make it seem real. With a little help from Particle Illusion, you can reproduce that effect and whole lot more.

What are particles? Particles, as it turns out, are simple shapes that you can load into Particle Illusion SE (PI) that when grouped can produce some pretty amazing illusions. Smoke, water, fire, transporter beams, explosions, lasers, moving backgrounds - these are all possible illusions in PI. I won’t go into the actual creation of the particle in this review, but PI makes it very easy to load, store and give those “building blocks” attributes for some pretty powerful manipulation.

The good news is there are hundreds, board line thousands, of pre-built particles (called emitters) that you can download from Wondertouch.com in semi-organized libraries. Once downloaded, just open them up in the library area of PI and use them without having to do any detailed particle work. The workflow for this product is simple. (more…)