Tools

A repository of all the tools, utilities, plug-ins, add-ons, applications and resources you’ll ever need. Free, Accessible and very bloody Useful.

Software

Celtx is the creative development tool of the digital age. 100% Open Source and Free to download and use. It combines screenplay formatting with script break-down tools, research and production scheduling functions. Forget that its Free, Celtx is the best tool of its kind on the market - integrated, comprehensive, holistic and very very functional. There just isnt a reason on the planet to Not be using Celtx. (Win, Mac) www.celtx.com

Google Sketchup is a 3D modeling software tool that is perfect for building pre-visualizations for film projects. It allows you to easily and quickly layout 3D environments and spaces and plan camera movements and framings. Sketchup also draws upon the huge Google 3D model library saving you the need to build models from scratch. 100% free and cross-platform. Storyboarding is so last century. sketchup.google.com

Moviestorm presents a complete real-time animation system designed primarily for Machinima but, by proxy, highly effective as a Pre-Vis system for live-action. Moviestorm adheres to a strict movie production paradigm of Sets, Casting, Scenes and Camera and this will appeal to many directors wanting to use Moviestorm for pre-vis. Free and fully functional as well as cross-platform Mac and Windows. www.moviestorm.co.uk

FPSCreator is a game design tool dedicated to First-Person Shooter games. It can also work very well as a dynamic and proactive pre-visualization system. There is a free version that whilst it doesn’t allow for final compilation of a playable game does allow you to build complete 3D environments and navigate them with a virtual player/character. Good for brainstorming blocking, shooting and staging possibilities in real-time with a production team. fpscreator.com

Audacity is an excellent open source, cross-platform digital audio waveform editor that can work with a wide variety of audio codecs including wav, aiff and mp3. (Win, Mac) http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Blender provides a powerful, free and open-source 3D modelling and graphics application that is complete with all the professional features you could want. modelling, rendering, animating, radiosity, textures, virtual cameras…. (Win, Mac) http://www.blender.org

Directors Boards is a very useful A/V storyboarding and script management tool. Perfect for those who like to storyboard with digital photos Uses a FileMaker Pro engine but doesn’t require FileMaker to be installed. (Win, Mac) http://www.directorsnotebook.com/

Mpeg streamclip Cross platform encoding tool that is extremely effective. Will read program and transport stream formats and transcode to a host of MOV and AVI wrapped files. (Win, Mac) http://www.squared5.com/

DVD Shrink is the long standing Windows-based tool for ripping and re-compressing DVD’s. Of course many may use such a tool for illegal copies but with a good feature for selective DVD extraction its perfect for extracting individual scene clips. Such clips are great as examples for developing a films design or for those teaching filmmaking to demonstrate techniques and ideas. (Win) http://www.softpedia.com/get/CD-DVD-Tools/CD-DVD-Rip-Other-Tools/DVD-Shrink.shtml

Mac the ripper. For Mac users who don’t have access to shrink Mac the Ripper is your best option for DVD extraction. Though it lacks the detailed extraction of Shrink it can rip by DVD chapters. (Mac) http://www.mactheripper.org/

Reaper. Not 100% free but very bloody close to it ($50 for non-commercial use, $175 for pro users) Reaper is an amazingly powerful, totally functional and astoundingly efficient multitrack sequencer and audio system. Reaper is directly comparable to Sony’s Acid, Adobe Audition and Apple SoundtrackPro and exceeds all three in some areas. What is truly staggering is that Reaper has comparable features to these three apps and yet the installer is just 3.2mb in size. So why is it that Acid, SoundTrack and Audition take up multiple DVD’s..? Windows only for now but an OSX version coming soon. (Win) http://www.reaper.fm/

MindNode is a flow-chart, mind-mapping software tool for building visual flow diagrams. Its perfect for planning DVD menus and post-production workflows not to mention creative mapping of character and narrative structure. (OSX) http://www.mindnode.com/

Clipfinder - This is a batch processing application for RED R3D files. Whilst RED have their own similar tool called RED Rushes, Clipfinder is significantly more stable with a more flexible toolset. http://www.daun.ch/software/

Utilities

SxS Pro Device Driver. This allows your computer to see and read the SxS cards plugged into the Express Card 3/4 slot on your laptop or to connect via USB directly to a Sony EX1/EX3 camera.

QT Movie Notetaker allows you to annotate Quicktime video files with specific timecode references. Perfect for reviewing a work in progress or providing feedback on a video project (Win, Mac) http://www.dvcreators.net/qt-movie-notetaker/

TinkerTool is a free utility that gives you control over a huge array of customization in Mac OS. In bundles together all the open options in one place and gives you a host of options you wouldn’t otherwise be able to easily access. http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html

Aspect ratio calculator. This is a simple java app that runs directly without installing and allows you to quickly calculate pixel dimensions based on 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios. Just plug in a horizontal measurement and the utility will calculate the vertical dimension (or vise versa). Great for scaling videos for online deliver in correct ratios. Cross-platform. (Win, Mac) http://www.wideopendoors.net/design/aspect_ratio_calculator.html

FCStudio uninstaller adds in what the Apple developers seemingly ignored. Using the uninstaller you can cleanly and totally remove FCS from your system leaving behind not a trace. Perfect for re-installs or misguided updates that need to be purged.

FCStudio Preference Manager. Avoid the all to common need to ‘trash the preferences’ by using this simple utility to backup and restore your entire preference file settings. The utility doesn’t just handle preferences from FCP but all preferences for all applications in the FCStudio.

Zipeg. There are near countless archive formats around (zip, rar, iso and so on) and Zipeg, available for Mac and windows, is free and unzips them all. (Win, Mac) http://www.zipeg.com/

Video space widget. For Mac users the Digital Heaven VideoSpace calculator runs a very useful widget. Elect your video format (hdv, dvcpro, dv, prores, uncompressed, xdcamhd, imx) and the duration and the widget will do an immediate calculation o the fie size. (Mac) http://www.digital-heaven.co.uk/videospace/

Gspot. If you wrestle with online video, downloaded video and video scrounged in all manner of weird and wonderful codecs Gspot is your best friend. A simple drag and drop of the file will reveal everything you need to know about it - data rate, codec, format and what application you may need to open it. Windows only. (Win) http://www.headbands.com/gspot/

Switch. Is the free version of NCH audio editing software that functions as a simple but very effective audio file convertor. Perfect for converting OGG or FLAC files to more universal WAV or AIFF. (Win, Mac) http://www.nch.com.au/switch/

Ice Clean. The Mac OSX is a lovely efficient operating system but occasionally it demonstrates true absurdity. One such example is that all the built-in OS maintenance features are pre-set to run at ungodly hours of the morning. The geniuses at Apple obviously assume that EVERYONE leaves their computer on all night and doesn’t use sleep mode to allow for this self-cleaning. Of course if you, like me, dont leave your computer on all night because you refuse to be a wasteful, environmental vandal, and do use sleep mode, your poor Mac may never get a chance to clean itself. The answer is IceClean which is a powerful system for manually running the maintenance protocols on your Mac. http://www.macdentro.com/MacDentro/Home.html

ShuttlePXpress Driver Software. This application is required for using and configuring the ShuttleXpress jog controller for use with editing systems. The link provides downloads for MacOSX and Windows. http://www.contourdesign.com/shuttlepro/shuttle_downloads.htm

JES DeInterlacer and JES Video Cleaner are two excellent freeware applicatiosn that do pretty much exactly what they say they do. the former is a superb de-interlacer for making progressive video from interlaced sources. the second automatically cleans up digital and chromaic noise form less than perfect video files www.xs4all.nl/~jeschot/home.html

HFS Explorer is a free utility for Windows computers that allows you to see a Mac/HFS formatted hard drive (which Windows otherwise cannot communicate with) and copy files off of it to your local Windows drive. An extremely useful little tool when you need to move projects between platforms. http://hem.bredband.net/catacombae/hfsx.html

AJA Datarate Calculator - Free tool with Mac and Win versions for calcuating the size of video files using various production codecs and resolutions. http://www.aja.com/ajashare/AJA_Data_Rate_Calculator_v601.zip

Thumber is a free utility for OSX that can analyze any QuickTime movie and produce a mosaic of individual frames. Its a facinatign tool for analyzing form and colour across an entire film at a macro level. its also perfect for anaylizing your favourite films, breaking them down into moments, to see how they work. http://www.threewordtitle.com/thumber/

Audio Resources

Free Sound Project is the internet’s biggest and best collection of open-source and creative commons license sound files. Effects, foley, atmos, music, you name it. Quality is generally very good but you made need to do some file conversions; many files are in Flac and Ogg formats which are great for compressed quality but not readable by many software tools. Free tools such as Switch, reaper and Audacity can convert for you. http://www.freesound.org/

SoundSnap is an excellent free online resource of sound files, samples, loops, foley and audio fx. Files come in a range of formats but mostly Mp3 and WAV meaning conversion is rarely required. http://www.soundsnap.com

FreePlay Music is one of the most popular and diverse collections of royalty free and low-cost production music. The quality is excellent, the range is extremely wide and the costs (when there are any) are very small. Its’s a great place to source music and soundtrack elements for you short films. http://freeplaymusic.com/

OpSound is a goldmine of royalty-free, creative commons music works. Spanning all kinds of styles and genres the quality is high and the website a breeze to navigate. A great resource for temp music track to help with the edit or even to find score and sound design music when you dont have access to a composer. http://www.opsound.org/

The Sound Exchange is an online resource setup by the UK Philharmonia orchestra that provides a wide collection of music samples from orchestral instruments searchable via a range of parameters - pitch, duration and instrument.
http://www.philharmonia.co.uk/thesoundexchange/make_music/samples/library/

Jamendo is an open library of free Creative Commons licensed music. With more than 11,000 albums by nearly 7000 artists and bands it’s an impressive resource driven by a slick and well designed website. It should be at the top of any search list for music for your next film project. http://www.jamendo.com/en/

Image Resources

Stock Xchng is an open archive of royalty-free images and photography. It has a comprehensive tagging and search engine and the quality standard of the images is extremely high and available at high ppi print resolutions. An excellent resource for both pre-production visualization and planning as well as projects requiring stills such as motion graphics, title sequences and effects shots. http://www.sxc.hu/

The Internet Archive offers permanent access to historical collections of movies, music, and images that exist in digital format. Media on the Archive is either in the public domain or under creative commons. The collection is vast and in particular hosts a huge collection of early cinema that can be downloaded and re-mixed free. http://www.archive.org

Plugins

Perian for Quicktime Perian is a free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats. In simple terms it gives Quicktime the ability to play a host of different file formats that it otherwise cannot. In even simpler terms, Perian gives to QT what it SHOULD HAVE HAD IN THE BLOODY FIRST PLACE! Perian is an absolute Must have for every mac user. (Mac) http://perian.org/

Windows Media Components for Quicktime - this free download adds to Quicktime on the Mac the ability natively playback Windows Media Video files (WMV). Whilst it isnt marketed nearly so well as codecs like FLV (On2) and H.264), WMV was for a long time the hands-down winner of the ‘best quality for smallest file size’ competition. FLV and H.264 have certainly stollen some of WMV’s thunder but WMV still holds it own. And of course the VC1 codec ratified by SMTPE is used in the Playstation3 and is one of the standard codecs for BluRay media. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/wmcomponents.mspx

Avid DNxHD lossless intermediate codec - Avid DNxHD was one of the first professional lossless compression codecs available and along with other third-party formats like Cineform, was the impetuous for Apple to create ProRes. The advantage with Avid DNxHD is that it does not require that you own an Avid system. DNxHD is free for anyone to download and use. It utilizes QuickTime and the MOV format and is available for both Mac and PC making it completely cross-platform. DNxHD uses the same 4:2:2 colour space as ProRes with very similar lossless compression and creates files of the same quality and size. (about 1gb/min for HD) http://www.avid.com/dnxhd/

Apple ProRes decoder - this plugin allows Macs that dont have FCP 6 installed to still read and playback ProRes encoded files. Very handy when you need to be able to give the ProRes files to soemone to watch who doesnt have FCP6. http://support.apple.com/downloads/Apple_ProRes_QuickTime_Decoder_1_0_for_Mac

Apple ProRes decoder WIN - As above only this one allows for ProRes files to be played back and decoded on Windows systsms. For Windows based NLE’s that can work with Quicktime (Such as Premiere and Vegas) this can be very useful to allowing file sharing without transcoding. http://support.apple.com/downloads/Apple_ProRes_QuickTime_Decoder_1_0_for_Windows

RED Adobe CS4 Installer - This plug-in allows Premiere pro CS4 and After Effects CS4 to directly import and edit native RED camera R3D files. http://www.red.com/support/release_history/15

RED Apple FCP Installer - This plugin finally allows FCP to read native Redcode files from the RED camera. FCP cannot work with the R3D format natively but this tool allows FCP’s log+transfer utility to re-wrap the R3D’s as MOV files. http://www.red.com/support/release_history/8

Online Tools

Kuler is a dynamic colour palette utility for coordinating and selecting colour in swatch groups. It allows you to build co-ordinated colour groups and themes and is an excellent tool for production designers to hep with pre-visualization and collaborative communication between design departments such as wardrobe, set and props. kuler.adobe.com

MoodStream is an incredibly dynamic and flexible media brainstorming and visualization tool. Built form the massive archives of Getty Images, MoodStream allows you to assemble and collect together images, video and sounds into palettes of media. A superb tool for production designers as well as motion graphics artists looking to trigger new ideas of image assembly. Similarly for Directors and Producers MoodStream can be an amazing tool for preparing a visualization package to help illustrate visual concepts and ideas to the production team. moodstream.gettyimages.com