Red Giant Software

Not only a great selection of post-production software and add-ons, the website also has a great selection of videos and tutorials on how to get the best out of these products. From Grading software with fabulous presets, to lens flares, text effects (including the ubiquitous Matrix generator), vintage effects, state of the art video noise reduction, ray effects, keying software, oh to name just a few!
But Red Giant’s “Pièce de Résistance” is its Trapcode Collection of particle generators, most notably “Particular”. This effect comes in many forms and categories and Red Giant have been wise to subdivide its possibilities into various different versions of software. Also worthy of mention, and one of my personal favourites, was “Psunami” which is a sea generator like no other. Incredibly realistic, you can also have huge control over its environment including camera angles giving you the power to make some amazing effects which would only otherwise be possible shooting from a helicopter. In can take a while to render but its still significantly faster than doing it on 3d modelling software, and the wire mesh preview gives almost realtime rendering which is ideal.
So check out the website, the software, Red Giant TV and give their demos a try. It’s not so much whether you’ll buy something because you will, but more that you find the perfect solution from its vast array of offerings.

Movie Poster Font

Give your movie poster a touch of class by using that font Hollywood uses on the base of all of its posters.
Download it free from www.abstractfonts.com
The small credits “Directed By, Written By, Produced By” etc… are all achieved using one lowercase letter shortcuts. There are also extras like DVD and Caption logos and much more. It couldn’t be simpler. Great stuff.

Mailchimp

Get visitors to your site to subscribe to your mailing list.

This is a great and FREE site. Mailchimp is the answer to your mailing list needs. It can help you set up a variety of forms such as mailing lists or questionairres; it’ll help you customise these forms with your own design and provide the code for embedding it in your own site; non-coders can get a link to their own page created especially for their form; it  protects you against spam and webbot attacks and allows visitors to your site to subscribe/unsubscribe safely.It will let you plan email campaigns, filters results from your database and…..oh everything! OK, if you’ve a serious amount of subscribers and mailout every week, you’ll probably have to pay a premium to upgrade your service, but the limits for free customers are very generous and if you’re just starting out with mail management, then you can’t go wrong registering with this site. There are even plenty of tutorials and prompt boxes to help you along.

Heartland Production

If you ARE doing a Richard Curtis tribute, why not set that rustic wedding scene in Cornwall. This UK Video Production company also does a great little sideline producing its own aerial video which you can purchase. A few seconds of that in your film will give an epic-budget feel, for a modest price. Their previews are a good size too.

Aeronautic Pictures

You’ll probably find that concorde shot here, but they do have plenty of other categories too. Previewing shots, despite a watermark, are disappointingly small and the site could benefit from a type search facility, especially given the extent of its online library. Being an American site, most footage is American (figures )so perhaps best avoided if you’re doing a Richard Curtis tribute.

Artbeats

I’m still quite new to this site but it’s an impressive catalogue of stuff, much shot on Red and showcased well with good quality Quicktime streams. Register and you even get a free HD clip to download every week! As well as that there are free tutorials that, I presume, are there to inspire you with ideas for what to do with the footage you could buy off them. These ideas are ok but not as inspiring as Video Copilot. They also have affiliate programs and an option to submit your own footage to them for approval.

All in all you cannot fault the quality of their footage – but this is reflected in their prices.

Pond 5

A great selection of royalty-free stock video, sound effects and music. Plus you can also sell your own files through them. They have an extensive category listing and in each category, the layout allows you to hover your mouse over a clip and get a 5 second preview of the clip – saving you masses of time previewing. The site looks great. However, I’ve not yet purchased anything through them, so if you have, send me some feedback.

meebo

I have recently added this clever live chat widget to my webdesign site Actor CV – allowing people to ask me questions live when I am online. You can even connect through it to a host of other popular accounts including Facebook, Instant Messenger, MySpace and Yahoo to name but a few.
Add on top of that the ability to video conference and the fact that all this is FREE, then you really have nothing to complain about.