Monday, March 09, 2009

SeatKarma Helps You Find the Best Seat in The House [Tickets]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/rD6IEYRuHlo/seatkarma-helps-you-find-the-best-seat-in-the-house

SeatKarma is an event search engine that scours ticket resellers to find the best second-hand market prices for the sporting, theatrical and musical events you want to attend.

On top of the basic ticket price aggregation, Seat Karma has seating maps for over 1600 venues—similar, but more comprehensive than previously reviewed SeatQuest. Of those venues, 1300 of them are live maps where the available seats are mapped out with markers to give you an idea of where you'll be relative to the action. Out of the live maps, there are currently 140 venues with actual photos taken from the stands in various positions throughout the venues to give you an actual perspective on how you'll see the court or stage. For venues that have more complicated seating arrangements than simple stadium tiers, such as small theaters, Seat Karma has 3D-style seating maps to show how the various balconies mezzanine levels overlap.



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Six Best Video Editing Applications [Hive Five]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/s3IL5w8t52w/six-best-video-editing-applications

You want to be the supreme ruler of your own virtual cutting room? Better break out the checkbook—your film-chopping powers aren't going to come cheaply.

Photo by FaceMePLS.

Earlier this week we asked you what video editing software you thought was best. You responded in force, and we're back to share the top six tools Lifehacker readers use to edit their videos. While we normally limit the Hive Five strictly to five options, given that several of the options here cost more than a used car, we've expanded this Hive in order to provide a balanced spread. In this particular Hive Five, we can't promise cheap and open source, but we can promise that the contenders are—price tags and all—worthy of inclusion. A final note regarding pricing: many of the video editors can only be purchased as part of a bundle of software. For example, Adobe Premiere is part of the Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium bundle, and also includes, among other software, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects.

Sony Vegas Pro / Windows / $450

Sony Vegas Pro has the distinction of being frequently noted as an overlooked but high-powered underdog by many readers. While it doesn't sport as flashy of a resume as say Final Cut Pro, it is feature-packed. Vegas Pro had the ability to mix multiple video formats and resolutions without recoding, a full seven years before Final Cut Pro ! added th e same feature. Vegas Pro started life as an audio editor and was later bought by Sony, but between its roots and Sony inheritance it brought superior sound editing tools to the table before its competitors, and still boasts impressive audio capabilities. Like Final Cut Pro, Vegas Pro has support for add-ons for Vegas Pro, which are actually user scripts coded in Visual Basic or Java Script, cranked out by communities online. Vegas Pro has no specialized hardware requirements and operates on nearly any Windows based machine, giving it both a price and compatibility edge over more expensive and hardware dependent video editors.

iMovie / Mac / $79

When your Mac-loving friends get that look in their eyes and say things like "It just works!" they're under the influence of gems like iMovie. iMovie is a consumer-level movie editing tool available as part of the iLife bundle of media tools. It features professional touches like frame stabilization for smoother movie playback, has drag and drop editing, easy to configure transitions, and even easier special effects for headache-free movie editing. You can get down to the dirty business of creating your stop-motion Lego mini figure space opera without needing to get bogged down thanks to the simple time lines and the easy to use interface in iMovie.

Adobe Premiere Pro / Windows/Mac / $799

A veritable wise old man in the video editing world, Adobe Premier has been around for 18 years. One of the! stronge st selling points for Premier, aside from the rock-solid editing provided by nearly two decades of improvements, is the tight integration with other software packages in the Adobe Creative Suite, like Adobe After Effects. Premier lays claim to having some of the fastest HD video importing around, and even supports importing video projects from Apple Final Cut Pro. One of Premier's killer features is the built in speech-to-text function, which creates a search ready index of spoken words in your video. No more scrubbing through hours of footage looking for an exact quotel; you can search directly for it.

Final Cut Pro / Mac / $1299

Final Cut Pro has built quite a resume in a very short period of time. Several Hollywood movies have been edited using just Final Cut Pro, including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, No Country for Old Men, and Cold Mountain. If it's good enough for academy award winners, and assuming your pocket book can handle it, it should be more than good enough for your next epic masterpiece. Final Cut Pro supports non-linear and non-destructive editing of a wide variety of video formats. You can easily mix video files of varying formats and resolutions without having to spend time recoding the files. There are extensive tools for filtering and color correcting your video built right in with support for third party plugins. Since version 4 you've been able to apply effects in real time thanks to the introduction of DynamicRT.

Windows Movie Maker / Windows / Free

Although Windows Movie Maker has play! ed secon d fiddle to the robust iMove in the consumer market—especially since were released around the same time—it's tough to beat free when all you need is basic editing. Windows Movie Maker supports video transfer from most consumer camcorders via FireWire and USB, and sports a time-line-based interface for easy drag and drop shuffling of your video clips. Windows Movie Maker supports over a 100 transitions and movie effects, and the Vista version has Direct3D integration for even higher quality effects. All effects are grabbed from XML, so you can create your own with a little know-how, or look to repositories on the web to find more.

Avid Media Composer / Windows/Mac / $2500

First released in 1989 for the Mac II, Avid Media Composer is the dominant application in professional broadcast and moving editing. Avid Media Composer has extensive support for multiple cameras, making it easy to group and select the best shots. There are a host of effects like inter-frame cloning and removal of imperfections when importing non-digital sources. Avid Media Composer stands out from other high-end video editors by including non-Avid products in its software bundle. Rather that reinventing already excellent products from other companies, Avid bundles software from third parties to fill needed roles like Sonicfire Pro for advanced audio editing and Sorenson Squeeze 5 for DVD compression. The newest version of Avid Media Composer can be used as a stand-alone application, unlike prior versions which were tightly integrated with bundled hardware and network storage tools.

Now that you've seen the contenders for top video editor, it's time to log you! r vote:< /p>

Best Video Editing Software?
( surveys)

If you have something to add—especially if you voted Other—sound off in the comments below to share your video editing tips with your fellow readers.



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Avoid Mediocre Portraits with These Tricks [Photography]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/HCo86k0PGXM/avoid-mediocre-portraits-with-these-tricks

You have a camera and a willing subject, but you're not sure how to break your portraits out of the flat blandness that plagues many snapshots. Avoid boring compositions with these tips.

Photo by Kevin N. Murphy.

Over at the photography site Digital Photography School, they've put together a list of best practices for avoiding the boring portrait blues. They all focus on breaking out of your default camera-pointed-right-at-subject's-face/subject-starring-down-camera-like-hungry-wolf setup. The photograph I grabbed from Flickr here is an example of tip #7, introducing a prop into the photo. Another way to go about injecting interest into your photos is to take a well-established rule of composition and break it:

The Rule of Thirds is one that can be effective to break - placing your subject either dead center can sometimes create a powerful image - or even creative placement with your subject right on the edge of a shot can sometimes create interesting images.

While the tips they offer are all about composition, don't neglect the hardware side of things. Check out previously reviewed list of photography hacks from David Pogue to increase your photographic arsenal cheaply. If you have a favorite portrait to share, link it and explain its craft in the comments. Photo by Gianmaria.

10 Ways to Take Stunning Portraits [Digital Photography School]

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Translate Entire Documents and PDF Files with Google [Translation]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/rF_8QAQc4zM/translate-entire-documents-and-pdf-files-with-google

No need to copy all the text of that Dutch document or Portugese PDF and paste it into Google Translate. The free service can now translate entire files if you give it the URL.

Whether a file has been indexed by Google's search servers or not, paste in the link to the document, and Google Translate will convert it to HTML, translate it, and present you with the page in a handy viewer. You usually have to know the original language to help Translate get started, and Google Operating System's Alex noted that it only gave back the first nine pages of a PDF he gave it. For technical documents and other works you need a quick, mostly-legible read on, though, Google Translate's document tool is a killer app.



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New Printing Technology Makes Your Home Photos Into Spooky 3D Images [Photography]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/1Y1loQvQ9x4/new-printing-technology-makes-your-home-photos-into-spooky-3d-images

This one is creepy: The new Shapeways' Photoshaper is the latest "printing" technology, turning any home photographs into a 3D plate which—when looked through light—will reveal the original image with a spooky ghost effect.

Photoshaper can be used by anyone with a digital camera and an Internet connection. Basically, the service will take any digital photograph you can send them using their web site, creating a 3D image out of it.

First, to create the 3D information, Photoshaper analyzes the photograph, converting it to black and white. It then uses the resulting picture as a guide to create the 3D layers: Darker tones correspond to thicker parts of the plate, while lighter tones correspond to thinner parts.

The plate is made then using a 3D printer, which lays down multiple layers of resin like an inkjet printer. The resin layers solidify instantly, allowing for more to be printed on top, constructing the 3D out of multiple paper-thin surfaces.

The result is a slab of white resin with a weird, rough surface. When you look at it straight on, it resembles a negative of the original image, but much less defined than a real negative. However, when you look at it through the light, the image appears magically in front of you, with a spooky effect.

At least it is spooky for me. I don't know about you, but this freaks me out. [Sh rugged apeways]



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