Have you ever wanted to use software like the pros but didn't have the money to? Here is a short summary of alternative multimedia programs which you can use for free in your daily life.
If you like to do modelling in 3D, render your scenes or even make animated graphics out of them, then Blender should be your choice. Blender is a very feature rich 3D-Modeller that gives you nearly endless possibilities for being creative. It consists of numerous modelling tools, an integrated video editor, tools for animating your models, a ray tracer to render your scenes to pictures or video and even a game engine. There is also the possibility to write scripts that you can use within the editor to do various things like importing or exporting exotic file formats.
One drawback for beginners using this software is the very complex functionality that is sometimes overwhelming. But there are many tutorials around the web showing you how to do simple and more advanced stuff. Blender can definitely keep up with commercial programs like Maya or 3D Studio Max but you don´t have to pay a single dollar for it.
More and more people are using digital cameras to shoot photos. With Gimp you are able to work on those photos. GIMP is a powerful software to edit photos and images. Its features range from simple color and brightness management to more advanced things like working with image layers, adding different effects or even painting with a huge collection of brushes. You can load and save to different file formats. GIMP is comparable to Adobe Photoshop but (you already guessed it) it is free. There is even a "clone" for Photoshop based on GIMP called Gimpshop.
For video capturing and processing VirtualDub is the perfect tool. With this software you can capture videos, cut them, apply different video filters and export them in many file formats. VirtualDub isn't a video editor like Sony Vegas or Adobe Premiere where you can arrange your video and audio sequences in a graphical way. Its main purpose is on working with raw video data. For example you can convert from on file format to another or change the frame rate or resolution of the video. There are even batch-processing capabilities, meaning that you can process many videos at the same time. VirtualDub operates in a very fast manner, thats a big plus because processing video data can take a very long time.
With Audacity you will be able to work on audio material. The program is based on a graphical editor where you can see your audio material and edit it. You can directly record audio from your microphone or import files like WAV or MP3. Audacity has built-in tools like cutting and arranging audio. You can apply filters and effects like reverb ,delays or pitch shifting, and all of this on multiple tracks. The program can for example be used for recording and cleaning up your old vinyls for exporting them back to a format that fits on a CD. Audacity is very fast and powerful, supports VST-effect plugins and is free to use.
The VLC Media Player isn't a tool for working with multimedia data but at least one for watching it. VLC supports a great number of video formats ranging from DVD, VCD, AVI, MOV to Flash. It has built-in decoders for most video codecs on the market so you can´t do anything wrong with this media player. With VLC you can sometimes even watch corrupt videos where other programs don´t even show a single frame. It´s simple and lightweight and perfectly concludes this article on five open source applications for all your multimedia needs.
