At our next meeting we will take a look at the latest release of the Mac OS X Operating System, called Yosemite which freshens the look of the desktop while retaining the traditional OS X feel and brings further enhancements in terms of built in apps and integration with mobile devices.
Peter had arranged this at the Wooden Fender at Ardleigh near Colchester after a suggestion Anne had made.
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This proved to be an excellent choice and everyone had a great meal. The room was good and not noisy and service was excellent in addition Peter had managed to get us a 10% discount by registering for their Newsletter. We may well make a booking for our Summer social evening there.
Previous Meeting of 19th November 2014 Video editing + Video Evening
Peter kicked off with his video of a flight from Lee on Solent around Portsmouth, Southampton and the Isle of Wight in a 4 seater light aircraft. Peter pointed out the Spinnaker tower in Portsmouth, the Needles, Carrisbrook Castle and more on the Isle of Wight. Flying back across the Solent they took a closer look at a large cruise ship before returning to the airfield for landing. Peter has been using two pieces of editing software on the Mac, VideoPad, a free package and Wondershare Video Editor. He rarely uses iMovie, as it doesn't go down to individual frames when editing and arranging sequences. VideoPad opens with the typical splash screen allowing you to select where to store the project file, typically separate from your original video files. The editor is none destructive, saving edits to the original files within the project space, only creating the final output file when you choose to encode. Peter used this software to produce the video of the flight that started the evening. VideoPad is free in this form and allows you to edit a couple of tracks, it can be unlocked to support more tracks and features relatively inexpensively at £45. It is available for the Mac, Windows and also for Android and iOS phones and tablets. Wondershare Video Editor has the typical layout for editing with media files in the upper left of the window, preview to the upper right and the time line in the lower half. Like most editors you can switch from time line to a block view if required. Starting a new project has a number of options to select from resolution to 4:3 or 16:9 widescreen aspect. Peter always uses 4:3, this is what his camera supports without throwing image data and content away. When importing clips Wondershare has a number of options for adjusting the balance but also rotation the video image. Anne found this interesting as she has a number of clips where she rotated the camera and the resulting clips now play on the PC rotated 90 or 180 degrees. Wondershare is available for Windows and the Mac, priced at $29.99 for a 1 year license, or $39.99 for lifetime updates. Anne brought along a DVD she had made of a river cruise through 7 countries on the Danube and showed us some of the second half as time was somewhat limited. Anne and her friends travelled by train from the UK to Germany to meet the river cruise boat. Along the journey they took a number of excursions by coach, seeing gypsy houses in Romania, and cities such as Bucharest with Ceausescu's Palace, Budapest with it's Parliament building and Heroes Square, Belgrade and Bratislava.
Rounding out our evening Gareth showed some open source / free video editing tools for Linux. Ubuntu ships as standard with OpenShot Video editor which works quite well with one exception - the videos shot on Gareth's Digital SLR causes it to crash while videos from other camera's are fine. This led him to search for other tools and found Pitivi.
Pitivi has been around as a project for 10 years and is also available in Ubuntu and other Linux distributions but the version shipped by default is very old. Gareth therefore downloaded the latest nightly release from the Pitivi website which has had a lot of development work put into both the user interface and features.
Not surprisingly the user interface looks very similar to other editors, time line at the bottom, media top left, preview top right. Starting a new project you have to choose from the typical settings e.g. 720 or 1080p video resolutions and where the project will be saved etc. You can choose from the various screen aspect modes, 4:3, 16:9 and more.
To demonstrate Pitivi we created a new project and imported some media, actually the Arduino clips taken from YouTube which we played at Peter's recent meeting on that topic. Initially Pitivi projects contain a single audio and video track, however if we add extra content below the current track it automatically adds another. Transitions can be created by dragging clips such that there is overlap within the time line.
Multiple video and audio tracks can be faded simply where there is overlap by adjusting the opacity level of the tracks. Similarly this can be used for adding a title track and fading in the audio/video or placing the titles over a moving or still sequence. Unlike some other Linux editors that use external additional utilities to provide titling and transitions, Pitivi has a large selection of titling styles and transitions available out of the box.
Like editors Peter demonstrated on the Mac, the original video files are not modified, rather the project file stores the various edits, then when ready to export the video you can choose the file format, compression options and codecs to use for the final video.
| ICENI Future programme 2015 | ||
| February 18th | Mac Evening | Gareth |
| March 18th | Windows developments (Windows9?) | Michael |
| April 15th | AGM + extras | All |
| May 20th | Social Media | All |
Meetings are now on the Third Wednesday of the month unless otherwise stated.
Our meetings are held at the Bourne Vale Social Club, Halifax Road, Ipswich IP2 8RE , for a map and other details please see the website.
http://icenicomputerclub.org.uk
Currently both visitor fees and membership fees are in abeyance until the next AGM .
We are continuing our publicity for EAUG events , however their website has not been updated for a year now. So if you wish to know information please phone one of their contacts.
Meetings are at the Great Baddow Village Hall, on the second Tuesday of the month
opening at 7:30 p.m. for a start at 7:45 - 8:00 p.m.
http://www.eaug.org.uk/mtg.htm
For directions see below (note the new web addresses)
http://www.eaug.org.uk or 'phone one of the contacts on http://www.eaug.org.uk/ppl.htm
Drinks usually available.
See the Membership page of the website for more information:
"ICENI does not have any Insurance cover for computers or other equipment so please be advised that you bring machines to the club at your own risk."
However many household insurance policies will include cover away from home often with no increase in premium. (Ed.)
Our website has had to be moved since BT is no longer giving free hosting to customers and Peter was running the old website on his account. So Gareth has been fortunate to register a web address of our own and has generously hosted it on his own woolridge domain. All our old website data has been ported to the new site and a redirection placed on the old address. The old site will disappear some time soon.
If anyone would like a copy of the CD of our old newsletters this could be arranged.
I am open to suggestions on what people would like to have included in the website.
Our website URL is
http://icenicomputerclub.org.uk
Email to: iceni@woolridge.org.uk