Animoto....an amazing video tool

If you don’t think you are a creative person. Or if you just can’t figure out those pesky details when it comes to technology. Then you are in luck, because this application, Animoto, will create some amazing artistic videos for you with little or no technical knowledge.

The amazing thing about this application is the unique approach it takes to every creation. I used different songs with the same slides to see what would result. I was totally amazed at the uniqueness of each movie. The application analyses each photograph and song so that it can appropriately massages them into a visually appealing movie that can be emailed, downloaded, and embedded into web pages. I can just imagine some of the finished products when you introduce creative people to such an application. I personally wasted (not really) several hours when I should have been doing something else. But, then I think of the enjoyment I got from putting my pictures and music together with some professional help.

Animoto Productions is a bunch of techies and film/tv producers who decided to lock themselves in a room together and nerd out. Their first release is Animoto, a web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos using their own patent-pending Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology and high-end motion design. Each video is a fully customized orchestration of user-selected images and music. Produced in wide-screen format, Animoto videos have the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer. They are a welcome end to slideshows.

The heart of Animoto is its newly developed Cinematic A.I. technology that thinks like an actual director and editor. It analyzes and combines user-selected images and music with the same sophisticated post-production skills & techniques that are used in television and film. The technology takes into account every nuance of a song - the genre, song structure, energy, rhythm, instrumentation, and vocals. Whether it's punk, pop, hip-hop or a classical Mozart piece, every Animoto video is totally customized. Even videos generated with an identical set of images and music will each have a completely distinct set of motion design. No two videos are the same. They can be emailed, downloaded, and embedded in pages on websites including social network sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Animoto is also dedicated to supporting new artists and music. So while users can upload their own music, the guys at Animoto also proudly feature a regularly updated selection of fresh music that they truly dig. No stock music, no cover bands, no elevator music, and no wannabe bands.

Animoto is inspired by the digital camera revolution where taking dozens, even hundreds of pictures at a time gives people the ability to think more like a video producer capturing an entire experience, not just individual moments. As users are discovering the limits of traditional photo services, the guys at Animoto are innovating new ways for people to share their stories and express themselves through media.

While based in New York City, they also have an office in San Francisco, the founders are veterans of the entertainment industry and have produced shows for MTV, Comedy Central, & ABC, studied music in London, and played in indie rock bands. They share a passion for helping people better share their stories and express themselves through online media by innovating technologies in the field of video production.

Don’t linger………. Rush to: http://animoto.com/
Take a peak at one of my videos: http://animoto.com/play/bbd3c52e591fc0e9bf1411c6af1d9cf3

Round Robin - Holiday Feast

MacBUS
The Macintosh Business Users Society of Greater Philadelphia
Tuesday, November 27th Meeting:
Try to attend and bring a friend.

MacBUS @ University of Arts

Round Robin - Holiday Feast

Our Nov/Dec meeting will feature a round-robin of introductions of members present. Every other year or so, we ask members to introduce themselves, and to explain what they do for a living. Be sure to bring extra business cards to hand out!

We'll also ask what's the one thing on your Mac you can not live without - that is, what is your most important application or most often-visited website?

If time allows, we'll do a round of favorite holiday gift ideas - so bring information about your favorite gadget, gizmo or software to share with the group.

This is also our holiday 'feast' meeting, and we'll have our usual Q&As, so bring your questions and bring a friend or coworker who you think could benefit from our meeting!!

We will have a drawing for a $100 Apple Store gift certificate for members only. Tickets are $1.00 each or 6 for $5.00. Get them at any of our meetings.

This Month's Meeting: Tuesday, November 27th, 7PM Hunt Room
(turn right when you come in through the front entrance instead of going straight), Dorrance Hamilton Hall, University of the Arts, 320 South Broad Street, Philadelphia.

WD Caviar GreenPower

New 500GB drive promises to save power

By Peter Cohen

Western Digital (WD) on Monday announced that it’s shipping in volume its WD Caviar GreenPower (or GP) 500GB hard disk drive mechanism. The drive costs $149.99.

The WD Caviar GP is a 3.5-inch hard disk drive bound for external enclosures or internal chassis inside computers that use Serial ATA (SATA) interfaces. The “GreenPower” moniker indicates that this unit is especially designed to be power-efficient. WD claims the drive is the industry’s coolest and quietest running eco-friendly 500GB drive.

The GP 500GB model uses the same technology as its 1GB counterpart. It yields and average drive power savings of four to five watts over other drives in its class; WD claims that results in an annual CO2 emission reduction of up to 13.8 kilograms per drive per year, or the equivalent of taking a car off the road for about three days per year.

The drive utilizes special technology that reduces power load during startup, and optimizes spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms. It will automatically unload its recording heads during idle periods, for example, which reduces aerodynamic drag. It also reduces less noise and lower vibration rates accordingly.

The drive sports a 16MB data buffer and an average read seek time of 8.9 milliseconds (ms). Transfer rate is 3 Gb/s for the buffer-to-host (SATA) speed, and 1,160 Mb/s for the buffer-to-disk transfer rate.

Read - Watch - Do sequence for learning

Adobe Photoshop CS One-on-One (CD-ROM included)
By McClelland, Deke
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 978-0-596-52975-8 490 pages, $49.95 US, $64.99 CA,
Company/Producer’s name: Deke Press/O’Reilley
Phone #: 800-998-9938 Online address: www.oreilly.com

Deke created this book for both amateur and professional graphic artists, designers, and photographers. It is another in a series of books that provide step-by-step lessons accompanied by beautiful full colored lessons combined with video lessons and data files. The author’s approach is a “hands on –step-by-step process" that allows the reader to proceed at their own pace and establish their own sequence of lessons to personalize the instruction.
The book’s content is divided into 12 lessons that include several (up to 3-7) step-by-step exercises to explain the techniques. Explanations, data files, and video lessons support these real world project based exercises.
The book is highly visual, colorful, informative, easy on the eye providing nicely laid out pages on heavy clay based paper, and a comprehensive index to support the text.

Lastly, the wonders of the digital age have provided us with the possibilities of a virtual classroom in which anyone can invite an expert in the field to tutor them one-on-one. I would like to say that Deke McClelland has created a comprehensive training experience into which you can submerge yourself for hours at a time. In process of reading this book you'll get a good dose of graphics theory, best practices, and tips for avoiding Photoshop disasters. L. McNeil
Complete review @ www.macbus.org/reviews

Apple Updates MacBooks to Santa Rosa, GMA X3100; 2.6GHz MacBook Pro

posted by MacRumors.com
Thursday November 01, 2007 05:08 AM ESTAs rumored, Apple has quietly updated the MacBook tonight to the Santa Rosa architecture with mild speed bumps and the GMA X3100 integrated video
White 13.3"
$1099.00 2.0GHz/1GB RAM/80GB/Combo/GMA X3100
$1299.00 2.2GHz/1GB RAM/120GB/SD-DL/GMA X3100
Black 13.3"
$1499.00 2.2GHz/1GB RAM/160GB/SD-DL/GMA X3100

Despite comparable clock speeds (2.0 -> 2.0GHz, 2.16 -> 2.2GHz) to the old models, the new MacBooks use the Santa Rosa chipset which boasts a faster 800MHz front side bus over the previous MacBook models. The introduction of the GMA X3100 video card also provides significant benefits over the previous models. The new specs can be seen at the Apple Store:

Dave Marra presents Leopard!

Members of MacBUS enjoyed another fantastic presentation tonight from Dave Marra, Senior Apple Engineer.
Dave, in his classic speed-demon style, managed to cover nearly every single one of the 300 or so new features that come with an upgrade to Leopard.

Next Step Leopard...

Take Control News: Start Preparing for Leopard Now with New Ebooks
by Adam C. Engst
If you're excited about Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, now scheduled for release on 26-Oct-07, make sure you're ready to upgrade with the early-bird edition of "Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard." This 60-page ebook not only walks you through the prep steps that help guarantee a trouble-free Leopard installation, it also comes with a free, instant-download upgrade to the 124-page full edition of the ebook, which will offer detailed advice on every aspect of installation, based on countless hours of meticulous research by Joe Kissell. In particular, the early-bird edition helps you evaluate if your current Mac will run Leopard well, how to make an appropriate backup in case of installation problems, smart ways to clear disk clutter and unnecessary files, and whether you should rethink your partitioning scheme. The full version will be available as soon as Apple begins shipping Leopard; see the FAQ at the link above for details.

But there's more! You can save 25 percent if you pre-order "Take Control of Customizing Leopard" along with buying the early-bird edition of "Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard." In this title, Matt Neuburg helps you customize your new installation, with a special emphasis on new tweaks to old features and on helping you start using new features, such as Spaces and Time Machine. We can't say much about Leopard until our non-disclosure agreement is lifted, but we plan to make the full ebook available to those who pre-order via our Check for Updates mechanism as soon as Apple begins selling Leopard.

For those of you who want to learn all about Leopard, we recommend our "I Love Leopard" bundle, which saves you 30 percent and includes the above-mentioned two titles; it also includes three more "Take Control of... in Leopard" pre-release titles: Sharing Files, Fonts, and Users & Accounts. We expect to ship these three additional titles at the same time as (or very shortly after) Leopard's release. You'll find the "I Love Leopard" bundle on the left side of both the "Upgrading" and the "Customizing" Web pages.

Owners of previous "Take Control of Upgrading to..." and "Take Control of Customizing..." ebooks can take advantage of a discounted price on these titles; click the Check for Updates button in your ebook to access the offer, or send us email if your ebook is too old to have a Check for Updates button. However, note that buying either of our bundles gives you a better discount than upgrading each title individually.
Publication, product, and company names may be registered trademarks of their companies. TidBITS ISSN 1090-7017.
Copyright 2007 TidBITS; reuse governed by this Creative Commons License.

[TIPS] Google Sky - a MUSTsee

Thanks to this article by Mark Wagner (http://edtechlife.com/?p=1821) I now know about Google Sky! Check out the news video on the right of this page for Good Morning America's broadcast of the unveiling of the program. This program is free and truly amazing!

http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/Technology/story?id=3509522

Unsung utilities: DigitalColor Meter

When you first set up a new Mac, you probably spend some time digging through the Applications folder and trying out the software that comes standard on your new Mac. But maybe you don’t venture into the inky depths of the Utilities folder. If that’s the case, then you’re missing out: it’s full of handy apps whose praises remain largely unsung.

Today, one of my favorites: DigitalColor Meter. It’s an app whose functions you probably won’t need unless you’re a web developer, designer, or someone else concerned with onscreen colors, but if you fall into one of those categories—or you’re just a curious kind of person—it’s definitely worth a whirl.

If you’ve ever used the eyedropper tool in Photoshop or pretty much any image programs, you’ll “get” DigitalColor Meter pretty fast. As you pan around the screen, it shows you a zoomed-in view of the screen, along with a real time display of whatever color the cursor is over. You can adjust the aperture size, and pick what format the color is displayed as (RGB, Hex, etc.). Menu commands also let you lock a particular color, or even copy it as a text string or color swatch into another application.

For people who deal with color all day, it’s a godsend when you need to match that particular shade your client wants. For the rest of us, it’s at least a fun way to blow away a few hours minutes of the workday.

Posted by Dan Moren in MacUser

iLife '08 and iWork '08 released

Take a guided tour.
http://www.apple.com/ilife/guidedtour/

Briefly: iWork '08, Pro Application Support, new iPod game

By AppleInsider Staff Published: 08:00 AM EST

Apple's website on Monday briefly made reference to an iWork '08 application. Meanwhile, the company released Pro Application Support 4.0.1 and also put Sims Pool -- Electronic Art's latest iPod game -- up for sale on its ubiquitous iTunes Store.

Pro Application Support 4.0.1

Also on Monday afternoon, Apple released Pro Application Support 4.0.1 [7.6MB]. The update improves general user interface reliability for the company's professional applications and is recommended for all users of Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro, Motion, Soundtrack Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Aperture, Final Cut Express HD, Soundtrack, Logic Pro and Logic Express.

Sims Pool for iPod

Meanwhile, Electronic Arts has released the second of four new iPod games planned ahead of year's end. The latest, Sims Pool, encourages players to "run the table" on their iPods.

This week's Macworld OS X Hint

By Rob Griffiths (macosxhints@macworld.com)

Trim Mail attachments
If you're trying to conserve disk space, and you're a user of the built-in Mail application, you may be overlooking one source of disk space usage: attachments on e-mails youve received. By default, Mail leaves all attachments alone, even if you save them to another spot on your hard drive. Over time, you can build up quite a collection of old attachments. Deleting these assuming you've saved them elsewhere and no longer wish to keep them in Mail can save a fair bit of drive space. For example, on my machine, I have roughly 400MB worth of attached files, even though Ive saved all those files to other spots.

If you're running the OS X 10.4 version of Mail, you can use a Smart Mailbox to help manage your attachments.

Flashpix Generator.

Want to add a flash picture to your site or myspace page?

Choose a picture, a border and an effect and make your own Flashpix.http://www.profilepitstop.com/myspace_flashpix/

Then the directions are:
What do I do with all this then? - to add this flashy text to your MySpace Page, follow these simple instructions..

1. Log into your MySpace account. From your home page (click "Home" in the menu) select "Edit Profile"
   
   
2. In the text area where you'd like the flashy text to appear, place the code that you see above you at the moment
   
   Yeah, but how do I do that? - highlight the code with your mouse (it should automatically highlight when you click on it) and then copy (press CTRL+C) the code. Then go to the area in your MySpace profile where you want the text to appear, place your cursor in the text and press paste (CTRL+V).
   If you are using Internet Explorer you can click on "Copy Code" to do this automatically (you may get asked to allow the page access to the Windows clipboard)
   
   
3. Save your profile and you're done! Sit back and wait for the compliments on your cool new flashy profile to come pouring in...