Free stock photos reference

Keeping your sites legal isn't really something that many people take seriously, but it is important. Here are some sites that provide free photos with varying degrees of licence for you. 

http://designinstruct.com/roundups/free-stock-photos/

The Art & Science of Video Storytelling

Recently I had the privilege of watching a webinar on creating videos for non profits that actually are effective. This is something that I have been struggling with, because I don't feel like I fully understand the rules of the game. So if you are like me, I found this webinar from ArtezInteractive to be quite helpful at putting some goals and parameters in place for the creativity to have some structure. I hope you find it as helpful as I did.
I would also recommend the other learning videos on the Artez site, which seem incredibly relevant to non profits working in a creative, online world.

Karaoke!

If you have ever traveled to the Philippines during a holiday and are unaccustomed to the culture there, the word Karaoke may make you want to run for the hills. I know I got very little sleep during a social aid trip I did down there a number of years ago... there was singing everywhere all the time!

Now that I have recovered from that lovely bit of culture shock I find myself wanting to do some parodies of songs for some random side projects I have on the go that require moving the vocals from the song similar to a karaoke tune. So say for instance you were thinking of making a music video of you singing, but you actually needed a backup band (say a claymation backup band, because your real band was off for the night - or something).  Anyway here are a couple of options I'd like to share with you on how to remove vocals from a track, completely free.

Option 1: go the internet suggested route using Audacity and subtracting the right channel from the left. There are a number of video tutorials out there on how to do this and it is pretty straight forward. This works because generally vocals are recorded in a mono channel, and then split between the left and right (so the wavelength is identical). When you invert one channel and subtract it from the other like this, in theory it should remove only the doubled frequency, being the vocals. I however didn't find this worked that well for the song I was working on (home-recorded folk bands apparently don't produce conventional mixes, who knew)

Option 2: Is super quick and worked great for me. It's a little plugin called Vocal Zap for iPhone or mac/pc that you can install and use with your favourite DAW software. And it works, so I would recommend this- unless you live in near Manilla and are the ladies who sang karaoke at 3am during the only reasonably temperatured hours of the night, in which case I would recommend something else.

**Note that neither method guarantees to totally remove the vocals in any track. However both are the best option for getting you as close as possible to a song with no vocals.

Creating Automated Subtitles for Video

Normally I would try to edit the sound as best I can. But when all else fails, sometimes subtitles are the best way to go.  Unfortunately, there are a bunch of special folks online who have suggested that the only way to add subtitles to a video are doing it one at a time by hand thought the "title" option in Premier Pro (I will be using CS6, but this also applies to CS4 and 5).

If you are like me, your reaction to this was something along the lines of "I quit". Until I found this video:



Here is a copy of the script that he referenced:

Adobe After effects Subtitles Script.  For use with adobe premiere's transcription

L = thisComp.layer("name of your video. extension");

max = 5; // number of words to display

n = 0

  if (L.marker.numKeys > 0){

    n = L.marker.nearestKey(time).index;

    if (L.marker.key(n).time > time){

      n--;

    }

  }

s = " ";

if (n > 0){

  base = Math.floor((n-1)/max)*max + 1;

  for (i = base; i < base + max; i++){

    if (i <= L.marker.numKeys){

      s += L.marker.key(i).comment + " ";

    }

  }

}

s

Which can be found here:  http://www.mediafire.com/?oko5zvmq3nnzktn

I take no credit for this, but thank you so much Tory Moghadam for the post!

Happy Subtitling!