Free Video Editors a top something or other

Been on the look out for some free video editors and stuff and thought I would give you a heads up on some things I've found. Everything is fucking shit and I'll explain.

I use quite a bit of free software to replace useless or inadequate stuff Windows does.   We use Recuva to snaffle pictures from old SD cards and Audacity and GIMP (not an actual gimp) for audio work and picture editing as well as a bought life subscription to Goldwave (they're Canadian, its cheap).  So would like to think they would have a nice free video botherer for YTP and the like something to rival Vegas for ease of use and integration.  What I've found is far, far worse.

Lightworks  

This could easily be from some cartoon tie in on the GBA

This is probably the best of the bunch as its remotely accessible to any newbies but still does things weirdly.  Overall it looks like it should be an old XP program from 2005 such is its design, you import stuff from a folder and arrange things in bins and then click on a bank of panels at the side to create you own timeline.  Even installing you'll need to register even for a free version, and the upshot is this unless you have a Vimeo or Youtube account you can't export it to popular formats such as WMV or AVI. Its a bastard headache to use and the shark logo kept reminding me of an old GBA game. 

It does have a great video tutorial that is narrated by a Brooklyn gangster.  Also if you are running linux, then versions are available for that as well, they'll still be opaque and obtuse though.

Blender.

Strictly speaking not a video editor as its a 3D renderer with some video editing added in, its on a par with Lightworks for complexity though, relying on drop down menus for everything.  You'll see when you start it up, you'll need to use a drop down menu to even reach the editor and then faff around with a few more menus to add a video clip, which needs a few unexplained keyboard short cuts to cut.  If you put in the hours you'll be able to do some great things with this, I am sure of this, its just like hitting a brick wall at 400mph and expecting to survive.

One really good thing is that it has the best tutorial videos ever with it, a seminar going through main functions and stuff split into a variety of videos.   On the strength of these vids, I've not uninstalled Blender yet, that's how good they are. If they simplified the video interface or split it off into a standalone product it would be genius.

Tencoder.

This isn't really an editor as such but a video converter and a decentish Youtube downloader. 
Its junk free unlike Freemake and you can update it painlessly in App to the current version.  Its not that hard to do just choose your output files from the drop down menu and it'll convert it.  A few caveats though some stuff will not get downloaded from Youtube, I've used this for a while now and it won't grab everything especially vevo stuff. 

You can use Keepvid or another site to download them for keeps, or if you want a program to do it then AVC Ultimate is pretty good, just keep ignoring the register nag box and it should download with no worries.

Honourable mentions go to WinFF which I've used in the past and Handbrake which I've never gotten on with.

Adobe Premiere CS2.

I haven't even tested this yet on PC, and its really old now so not sure if it'll work on Win 10 but this part of the discontinued Adobe creative suite.  Reading up on the comments, I see there are some formats it doesn't load but you can use Tencoder to switch them into something it recognises.

I've used and disliked Audition and a Legit version of Photoshop which I had to crack on an old PC to make it work.  I may actually download this if all else fails and use it on my old desktop (CS188 poops were done in Premiere and after effects) so I know its a good pedigree.

Shotcut.

I haven't talked about Windows Movie Maker here which isn't available for Windows 10, it doesn't matter as this is the nearest equivalent out there.  It didn't run in Vista when I tried but when I opened it in Win 10 bingo it loaded.  It feels like movie maker although its a bit of  a bastard about cutting stuff saying I should install Virtual Dub to do this which only imports AVI files. 

I like WMV as a video format and this was a deal breaker for me, if they add a way to cut and past in shotcut then I'm sold as Movie maker is a terrible program. I may give it a second chance if its rectified in the future but so far then its a no from me.

Conclusion.  They are either complex or missing features and stuff if you can live with this then good luck, blender seems the most capable but I would say learn 3D stuff rather then video editing.

Also Blackmagic Davinci, looks great but needs more HD space and RAM than God to get working, so its an automatic no from me.

A letter from the past

Been clearing out some junk from the room downstairs and finally managed to get into my desk after shifting a mountains worth of magazines from the front of it.  I fully admit I'm a packrat but there comes a time that even I feel the need to get rid of stuff and downsize.

The real reason was to see if there was any trace of my old Sony Movies studio 10 serial to see if I can get Vegas working, but to no avail.  Incidentally don't bother with a crack as they are all stuffed  with trojan's, had to clear a nasty dwm. Virus that spammed windows messages at the rate of knots. Will still need to see if Vista is clean on the old machine I loaded it in (of course its not coming within an inch of my new laptop). It comes to something you have to pirate something you legitimately own to get running.

To be honest It's still not found and am considering looking at Free equivalents including Davinci Resolve a pro product for free.  Incidentally if you want something to test that new graphics card to the fullest and have room to install it (its 512 GB unpacked, no seriously) then have a look at the specs here. 

Anyway stuff found includes several old instruction manuals for old games including Parodius from Palcom*, various bits and bobs, empty CD cases and stuff and a set of old snooker balls that were kept at my nan's.  I did blog about this before as I was quite the snooker nut as a kid, indeed I turned up a signed photo of Steve Davis circa 1981. Anyway we still have the actual balls for this and forgot what an actual patchwork of misshapen lumps they were.

One or two of these were beads.

That's no moon

We never did have a full set and had to make them up from several other things, worse the dog would grab them up whenever they would fly off the table and would need to be bribed with Bonio's to drop them. As you can see the were appalling, cratered and of various sizes, the original blue was a small bead at one point before we got another version.

The most awesome thing actually was the most unexpected, a letter from my granddad from 1987, tucked in among my folders.  A few lines about sending a cheque down to my mum and how my plants are doing.  That was enough to get me tearing up, and I'm man enough to admit that my granddad was cool. 

*Incidentally from what I could see there's a repro manual online with Ultra games stamped on it but this is strictly a Japanese / European release so that's a mystery. I'll leave you with a shot of all the bosses including a few sub bosses too.

Ghost Madam of Yotsuya Q is a mystery.

Emulation Round Up of sorts

Been working through what works emulation wise on Windows 10.  So far Snes and Nes stuff has caused no problems as both FCEUX and Higan work perfectly.

Both Yabause and SSF are working perfectly for Sega Saturn stuff and if I cared about Megadrive or lower then I suspect that it would work as well.

I finally managed to get both Playstation 2 and Gamecube and Wii emulation working at full speed so PCSX2 and Dolphin are working well.  Tested with a disc version of Final Fantasy 12 and Bubble Bobble Plus and as an aside found that Wii games cannot be played directly from disc unless you have a specific drive to play them on (thanks a bunch Nintendo).

Hand held wise BGB works for Gameboy and WScamp for Wonderswan does OK as well.

I haven't tested either arcade or old computer things yet although I do have copies of MAME, FBA and Raine on an old drive that I can test out and a Sharp X68OOO emulator that hasn't been updated in years. 

In fact the only problems I can find is Playstation emulation.  EPSXE crashes "everytiem" and has never gone in game despite multiple plug ins and configurations.  PCSX is massively fast when we tested it with Front Mission 3 and eventually ends up with a blast of noise that would make Masami Akita proud.  In fact its only PSX which works despite it being abandoned now.

Legolas's Cock

They can see my what!!!!!

The world's seemingly going crazy for Legolas cock, or at least Orlando Voorn's Bloom's as he was papped paddle boarding with Katy Perry.  If you haven't seen it yet, its everywhere and everyone is commenting on this, giving a sort of insight into the kind of minds that if it were a women would easily be called a sexist misogynist at worst. 

Decided to dive in and have a butchers at the first link there was and as its that fucking rag the Daily Mirror decided to keep some booze at handy to blot out any socialism that appears. 
As I'm A, a straight white male it did fuck all for me to be honest and clicked to the comments to see what kind of hell I'd fallen into.

Turns out there were pretty few that thought like me.

I'm curious, did this publication directly make the nude pictures of Kate Middleton and
Jennifer Lawrence available as Orlando's are right now?

Because its believed men don't deserve any privacy

Are just some of the quotes that aren't from jealous guys having their own online dick size contest.

(also pro tip if you want to quote from a page that does not let you copy and paste quoted pages from  it first hand just copy and paste it to notepad, and then copy and paste that direct to text)

Its weird that there should be such double standards when it comes to male celebrities where as for women (unlike the hideous break the internet, non paparazzi plastinated Kim Cardassian pics)
 with similar images its all a little seedy.  Either stuff like this and the fappening releases is  acceptable or its not there is no middle ground.

I'm curious, did this publication directly make the nude pictures of Kate Middleton and Jennifer Lawrence available as Orlando's are right now?

I'm curious, did this publication directly make the nude pictures of Kate Middleton and Jennifer Lawrence available as Orlando's are right now?

I'm curious, did this publication directly make the nude pictures of Kate Middleton and Jennifer Lawrence available as Orlando's are right now?

I'm curious, did this publication directly make the nude pictures of Kate Middleton and Jennifer Lawrence available as Orlando's are right now?

Power Up!

Yesterday I took a trip down to the Science Museum in South Kensington for a long awaited poke around the Power Up! exhibition.  Its a celebration of gaming and game culture through the last 40 years or so of gaming.  Imagine if you will, a bank of old consoles and computers hooked up to televisions, showing off some of their best games and all ready to be played.  This is power up.

Its a brief exhibition for the summer holidays only on for two whole weeks and occurring in 90 minute blocks.  So if you come early, be prepared to kill some time looking around the museum at some of the exhibits, my tip make your way through rocketry to the Imax bit at the back and then upstairs into the memory and humanities bit. There's a tonne of interactive stuff there and some genuinely interesting stuff on the state of who you are, failing that big fuck off rockets.

The Black Arrow the only rocket we built

So what can I see?

As everything is playable, you can make your way down to the back area where all the retro stuff is you'll notice that the first half is mostly themed around genres.  There is a timeline of sorts for Mario, Sonic, Batman and Streetfighter series although in Sonic's case that is mostly a nose dive to mediocracy.  You can relieve being at Boots the Chemist in the early 1990's with a limited play on the original Megadrive Sonic. You can hear grown kids marvelling at how shit the original FIFA was and play the updated versions too.

Me, I got a few retro kicks with some obscure stuff and relieve an old memory of my first ever encounter with Mario in the Index bit of Littlewoods Department store.  Or rather Luigi, as that's what it was (and what I thought it was called) this was the arcade version though with the extra lives dummied out and a re arranged layout pretty sure there's a romhack of this.  Edit yup.

The MAME cabs where the most interesting, with an obscure line up of platformers and puzzlers including Choko from Mitchell Corp, a Shanghai clone against the clock where you have to match pairs before the sides close in and Saboten Bombers a single screen action game like Tumble pop in which you have to clear the screen of enemies without being killed.  Oh and its the only game I know with both cactus as a hero and Huernia flowers as an enemy among other stuff.

The back area was pretty nice, they a load of old consoles with a few playable games in each cases, the Amiga contingent was brought up by James Pond on an Amiga 600, speccy fans were treated to Bombjack form Tekhan and C64 fans could play Toki running from cart.  Amstrad fans had a non playable version of Cybernoid for the 464 which was a shame but still better than the BBC which had basic up and running inviting kids to "code" something.  Atarians of course had a playable ST and the Jaguar with Jeff Minter's Tempest 2000 running (and yes the pad was still a nightmare to play with) in fact it reminds me a lot  of what TXK would become 2 decades later.

Played a load of Super Star Soldier for the PC engine before moving on to what I'd missed on the other side.  Didn't get a go on Taiko no Tatsujin or the rhythm action games sections and passed over the big lan party bits for Bomberman, Worms and Minecraft.  Did have a poke at Mickey Mouse for Master System and a ropey Batman game for PS2.  But spent the remainder playing Mario games for the Wii and Wii U.  Still not convinced the world needed motion controls or a big fuck off tablet to play either on or off screen but am convinced that Yoshi's Woolly World is a thing of loveliness.

Look everything is made of wool, you can collect yarn and unpick the landscape and push things around, its excellent and feels just like a Yoshi game should.  There is no 3DS version sadly but it what there is looks and plays ace so there.

Poking around Mario Galaxy with my first grab at the Wii motion controls, I suspect you'll get used to them  but it didn't grab me like Woolly world did.  We also played New SMB Wii which is more like the DS Mario games, they had (cliche alert) a slippy slidey ice world with a Hammer bro lobbing snowballs and various icicles to dodge.  Did briefly get a penguin suit but then it was time up and had to leave.

Let the games begin.

Final thoughts is this, if there are a family and one or more of you are a gamer you can show your youngsters what you were playing then and how stuff has changed.  Also give them a go on a few old consoles to see how far we have come even play multiplayer I see Mario Kart and Bomberman for some old school fun.

Power up 22nd July - 7th August. £8 to get in Adult and Child tickets available on line and on the door from here.

Disaster Report.

Thanks to some stuff and nonsense in the week I lost my PC to a massive crash the kind where you have to unplug because ctrl alt del doesn't work.  Thanks to that, it corrupted my hard drive so the only thing I could do was boot up in linux and see what could be salvaged.  Thanks to a partial back up, I didn't lose much just videos, documents and a music folder I haven't added to in ages, most  will be on back ups on removable drives from when I did it a few months ago.

The upshot is that I now have a new PC, a nice I7 laptop from Asus (incidentally does anyone else pronounce it ace us instead of ah Zeus) and a nice Numark Recording turntable from Maplin.
(you can skip the next two paragraphs if you want to know how to set that up my impressions).

PC is a laptop (which is new for me) and currently has a few custom additions by myself namely an external keyboard and mouse because a touch pad is an awful fucking contraption, leaving you cramped up like a zombie hunched over the screen.  Also added a external USB hub so it doesn't clog up what USB ports I have left and of course banished most of Windows 10 with Classic Shell and unpinned Cortana from the start bar.  The only thing left to do is to comb through the back shell bits and turn off all the ads and tracking bollocks though if you use free software you'll be used to that in some degree or other.

Relegated the old rig upstairs and put Linux Mint Sarah on it which was easy enough (ironically my cousin was called Sarah and yeah she was easy enough too ;). It looks fucking lush and sort of apes win 10 in its interface, finally added a network adaptor to the USB hub upstairs and added the address of my new VM  super hub. Result all devices are playing ball, which is a novelty for me as it was an absolute bastard to add the old PC to.

The Numark is the Numark TT USB turntable (on offer for £100) a lightweight plastic deck with a few pro parts and pieces.  It came with a link for EZ tape and vinyl recovery software for Vista and XP, but I've snubbed this for my legit Goldwave and Audacity combo that has stood the test of time for me.

Watch out when unboxing as there are several parts hidden in the polystyrene that are easy to over look, such as the stylus head and counterweight.  These are easily added and once the stylus cover is removed and weight calibrated you are all set up to go.  This is currently running from the separate system through the RCA ports at the back and the switch to line in. So far I cannot vouch for the USB connectivity but I'm happy with everything else.

Like Depeche Mode says, its important to "get the balance" right.  You must screw the counterweight in until you get it to balance perfectly and when its set right you're all set to go.
So far I've tried it out with UB40 in dub and its been good (though a brand new stylus helps) just need a few other things to add and I'll be set.

Pro's are: easy to set up and quite lightweight.  +/-8 slider for true DJ speed control.

Minuses: Plastic finish makes it look quite ugly.  Can be fiddly for those not used to a pro set up.
Easily over looked parts in packaging (seriously we found the counterweight when throwing away the polystyrene).

The Crossley Cruiser

I'm currently without a record player, I don't know how you feel about this but I'm kinda lost without something to play records with.  My old deck is part of a really old Sharp separate system that comprises of a base receiver and radio, a tape deck and a record player.  We picked it up at a bootsale for the princely sum of £5 a good ten years back and everything still works (except the record deck).

Most of what you see here has gone to the great graveyard in the sky, including Man Ginger.

So its with a heavy heart that I'm looking around for a replacement deck that fits in with what I have via the AUX port and isn't some cheapo Crossley derivative in a suitcase.

The thing is, records mean a lot to me, I grew up with the first wave of dance music where nothing came on CD and you either bought records or a compilation on tape for the car or walkman, latter stuff would come on CD and over the years I've come to enjoy the mix CD (now supplanted by Soundcloud) and Pirate radio which is more legit now thanks to streaming digital stations.  I am not one of those people who are amazed that "Vinyl exists" and re buy all their Beatles albums on 180gram vinyl, I am an techno head and its either records or go without (or option B Youtube).

Which brings me to the split between the two extremes the Crossley Cruiser in a suitcase and the £1000 audiophile set up.  My dad has the former of the two, and offered for me to borrow it to try it out.  I took it up and instantly regretted it, the play back was tinny and cheap and the MP3's I did get from it weren't very good.  Worse is that everywhere I look in shops (HMV and "Chas" Ohlson especially) have these modern spam tin atrocities.  I am actually considering looking in Crash Converters for discontinued Stantons or Technics that's how bad it is.

The other end is Hi-Fi magazines which blind you with science and favour the grossly overpriced "audiophile" decks that are available nowhere and cost upwards of a grand.  I know you get what you pay for but something around the £200 mark should be the limit and get you something decent. I know there are good decks out there, that will fit my set up, but its finding them and the confidence to buy them, something I lack and that.