Some creative people can be very inflexible when it comes to their workflow.
Whenever I ask my boyfriend to create music, it has to be done in one sitting, since the trial version of his software lets him use all of its features and export to a sound file, but he won’t be able to edit it again once he exits out of it. Which is pretty generous for a trial version, but still it is very tempting to just download a cracked copy on torrent.
Below are some videos for a school group project.
My son and his classmates did the research and the talking. The fishies in our home Aquarium did all the swimming and looking cute. My boyfriend did the music in Fruity Loops for both videos above, as well as the one below.
Fruity Loops is a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). You can make purely digital sounds, or you can record from an instrument with an interface that picks up sound waves and sends these to the computer. It’s among the most popular in its class, and costs an arm and a leg, as Americans like to say. Over here we might say, you can sell your kidney if you really want all of the plugins. Depending on the number of core features and plugins, it can range from about PHP5,000 to PHP47,000. Check out the prices here. I don’t support piracy but my boyfriend does, and he keeps pestering me about getting that cracked copy instead. He had one in his old laptop, but it has since died, and he’s not getting a new one so I get to decide whether it’s the pirated or trial version.
I would use something else like Cakewalk which is free, or LMMS which is free and open source, though a bit difficult to use, except that any DAW is rubbish in my hands. I can play on a guitar, I can sing, I can manipulate sound digitally in an audio editor tool such as Adobe Audition or my open source favorite, Audacity. Hell, I could copy commercial jingles by ear into an old Nokia 3210 phone composer. But when it comes to creating original compositions, I just don’t have the talent.
I edited all of the videos here using Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects CC and while I might have gotten somewhat similar results with open source tools such as Lightworks or Openshot, both of which are capable of keying or cutting out the background of a video shot in front of a green screen, I would not have been able to accomplish the text motion effects on these, and the only open source software capable of that is Blender which I have only just begun to attempt to learn. In After Effects, it’s fast and easy. It’s an issue for creatives who would like to switch to open source software: video editing, on a professional level, is not impossible but it is very difficult to set up, as in the case of Da Vinci Resolve. Between Lightworks, Openshot and DaVinci Resolve, Openshot is the easiest but it’s buggy. Lightworks is better, and can be set up fairly simply but you have to be careful and you need to know what you’re doing. I was never able to get Da Vinci Resolve Lite running on my system, the requirements were too high when I tried.
Open source, according to wikipedia, “is a type of computer software in which source code is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose,” although some license agreements are worded so that no one can sell their open source software, and no one is allowed to take credit for software that someone else has created, they can only take credit for what they added to it.
I like to think of myself as a supporter, though I haven’t technically done any supporting yet, as in making donations or any sort of contributions to those projects that I’d like to help out in. So I guess it’s more accurate for me to say I’m an intermediate user of open source software. I’ve learned to install, configure and actually produce content with these in different PCs and laptops.
Open source tools for image editing.
The above video is a sort of Intro to two open source graphics software, Gimp and Inkscape. Gimp is often compared to Photoshop while Inkscape functions like Adobe Illustrator. I’ve also included a side by side demo of me using both.
Gimp, Inkscape, and everything else linked here can be downloaded from their respective websites. Avoid downloading from other sources unless you absolutely know what you’re doing. In an unofficial copy, someone else could have included a little something extra that may cause your system to be unstable, or worse, they could have bundled in bloatware or even malware. The same principle applies to downloading pirated copies of paid software like Microsoft or Adobe products: you can get it to work, but you’ll never know what monsters might lurk beneath the surface.
One of the things that, as far as I know, can be accomplished better in open source software than in some of its proprietary counterparts, is image stitching. Though set up can be a pain, Hugin beats the big name photo stitchers such as Microsoft’s Image Composite Editor and Canon’s Stich Assist. I haven’t tried Photoshop’s tool for creating panoramic pictures but I heard it’s good. However, among software dedicated to photo stitching, Hugin is one of the best. Though admittedly, its interface looks dated, to some even ugly.
Problems definitely come up when doing it the hardcore open source enthusiast way, running all of the above mentioned open source software on an open source operating system, such as Ubuntu Linux. My printer model, Canon G2010, won’t work with the cups printing system, which is what Linux uses to communicate with printers. I’ve searched and searched, it seems that other people have tried and they couldn’t get it to work either, and someone has listed the model as a paperweight in Linux. In Windows it works perfectly fine, since it was created with Windows and Mac users in mind. I did have other, older printer models that worked well in Linux.
Hardware can be difficult to set up with open source software, and a common strategy would be to check what others have to say about compatibility before buying anything new. However, that doesn’t guarantee anything. My wacom digitizer pen works out of the box in the Linux system I have installed alongside Windows. My favorite open source painting software, MyPaint, makes it freeze up, in both Windows and Linux. That same digitizer works perfectly with Paint Tools Sai, which is only available in Windows. That problem never occurred in a previous version of Mypaint, in both Windows and Linux, on my Samsung Windows 8 Tablet that came with its own Wacom stylus.
So as far as I, an ordinary user, can tell, these problems are completely random.
I put together a list of open source software that I like, and have generally tested to be working. I won’t be able to guarantee that these will work instantly in your system, although most of them probably will nowadays (some used to be tricky to install and configure, but have since been improved).
Trivial Visual 