The free (useful) software thread

[Guest bbq_sgt]

A Fantastic alternative to Windows Explorer:

 

http://www.explorerxp.com

 

Has a tabbed-window interface (great for copying/moving files between different folders), selection of files using wildcards, better renaming functionality than native Explorer.exe (although "Better File Rename" is still better overall) and displays the size of subfolders right in the file listing. And it's fast and has a small memory footprint as well.

 

The only major drawbacks I have experienced with ExplorerXP is it lacks Network browsing and Thumbnail views (although the author says those 2 items are at the top of his TODO list)

[Guest SermonOfMockery]

http://www.carr-engineering.com/dvio.htm

 

home of a kickass DV capturing utility for windows. it does absolutely nothing but capture DV footage, has only one screen with no options other than choosing a file name, and it works perfectly!! and, of course, free. premiere pro and vegas both don't want to talk to my camera, but this did the trick, so check it out if you want a no-frills, low memory-usage solution.

[Guest firemind]

http://www.lividinstruments.com/software_batch.php

 

free video compression application for the mac

[Guest ai]

Panotools software family

-Optical corrections based on the specifications of the lens of your camera (barrel and pincushion) (very cool)

-Can stich many photos together or stich 180° photographies and transform them into a panorama.

-Can correct perspectives manually or automatically etc.

 

There are plenty of apps built around the open source PT librairies

This seems to be a good gui:

 

http://hugin.sourceforge.net/

 

there is a mac port in beta right now:

 

http://homepage.mac.com/ippei_ukai/software/

 

Powerful tools. No equivalent in photoshop. And free (some apps are commercial tough)

Edited April 21, 2005 by ai

[Guest firemind]

http://richardrosenman.com/photoshop.htm

 

Some quite cool free photoshop plug-ins, including color correction, grid generation, glows, a noise generator, distortion plug-ins, etc.

 

Scroll past the first 4 pay plug-ins and you'll see the list of free ones. Gotta say 20 bucks for a bokeh plug-in is a steal though, hopefully his AE version will be affordable as well, as compared to lenscare or irisfilter.

[Guest nutrition_facts]

hello... been lurking around this forum for a couple of days.... in spite of finding a lot of useful info (namely the topic about mk12's brazil short), didn't really feel i could contribute... but to this topic i think i can

 

check out http://squerk.org .... in http://work.squerk.org (internet explorer only as of yet, sorry *blush*) you'll find some nice free software (in the resource section).

 

one is for stop-motion animation, another is for making cut-outs of 3d (polygon only, no nurbs) models, for making them in real world paper, cardboard or whatever suits your fancy... the others are links for free creative-oriented programming environments (processing, pure-data and eyesweb).

 

the other sites under squerk.org are for a media forum (contributions are more than welcome), a small site for my mixing alter-ego, and a friend's portfolio when she gets around to organizing it.

 

in http://work.squerk.org you'll also find some of my work although it's slightly out-dated... hopefully duruing the holidays i'll have time to put up new stuff.

 

cheers

[Guest mofx]

Whats up first post,

Before I post my free software selection, just wanted to say thanks to everyone on this board you have helped me in so many ways so I thought I would try and repay a little. Don't know if anyone has posted it before, if so sorry, but since I'm pretty poor. I've started using Blender 3D, and I have to say I'm pretty impressed by it, now I'm no 3D wiz but it allows me to do everything I can put my mind around, plus it has a pretty large community for help: Check it out

 

http://www.blender3d.com/cms/Home.2.0.html

 

_peace

[Guest sianto]

I use Sinedots in AE 6.5. Never had a problem. It can get a little heavy on processing, depending on the parameters you set. But it does not crash, not on my machine.

 

Also, theres AEFlame, a really cool fractal plugin for After Effects.

 

http://www.andrewdavidson.com/aeflame/

 

 

Regards!

[Guest igorschmigor]

it's been mentioned somewhere else but also belongs in this thread, i believe:

CinePaint, something like Photoshop for animations if i got it right. Free at: http://cinepaint.sourceforge.net/

 

A free storyboarding program from the makers of Mirage: Boardomatic

description and download-link at:

http://www.bauhaussoftware.com/downloads__freebies_BOM.php

you have to register at their forum though.

Edited August 1, 2005 by igorschmigor

[Guest duncanjm]

Do not underestimate the power of: ArtOfIllusion!

 

http://aoi.sf.net

 

I use it with Wings3D (mentioned at the start of this thread). For a tute, see:

 

http://www.beatgroover.com/aoi/tute/

Edited August 9, 2005 by duncanjm

[Guest firemind]

Free camera tracker, exports to maya, xsi and max:

 

http://www.digilab.uni-hannover.de/download.html

[Guest Sao_Bento]

Free camera tracker, exports to maya, xsi and max:

 

http://www.digilab.uni-hannover.de/download.html

53746[/snapback]

For non commercial use, and for Linux and Windows only, but a good find none the less.

[Guest DRNZ]

decent free 3-D app for Mac/PC/Linux-

 

www.blender.org

[Guest vuzz]

This is a great little Mac utility for doing system maintenance and customizing your mac. You can do a bunch of stuff but one I dig is setting screen capture to any format you want not just pdf.

 

http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html

[susitres 0]

My first post here:

 

Context Free

 

Features

 

Simultaneously available for Macintosh, Windows and Posix/Unix.

Progressive image update: watch it generate

Save generated images in PNG or SVG format.

Produce animations

Edit grammars and re-render easily.

Render very large images (as large as 100 Mega-pixels).

Can handle generated images with millions of shapes.

Carefully tuned graphics rendering

Many built-in examples

Automatic checking for updates (Mac only).

It's free, as in beer and as in speech.

 

Context Free Homepage

[igorschmigor 2]

ImageSorter

 

Creates thumbnails of your pics and orders them by color.

 

 

From this:

 

to this:

 

or this:

[f3rry 0]

http://www.irfanview.com

 

Great picture viewer, nice alternative to ACDSee (which gets more and more bloated with each new release) and supports more formats too!

 

Sorry mac/linux peeps, Windows only.

 

 

for image viewing I highly recommended XnView. Amazing. Simply amazing.

 

http://www.xnview.com/

 

 

Ft

[eatmydear 0]

this seems to be quite a cool piece of software for photorealistic landscape rendering and it's for both platforms.

 

http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/tg2/tg2tp/index.html

[roygbiv 0]

This has come in really handy for me when working on XP platforms:

 

folder size tab

[igorschmigor 2]

This has come in really handy for me when working on XP platforms:

 

folder size tab

Very useful. Thank you!

[DanielSmith 0]

i have used kind of screen capture software called ACA Capture Pro, i think it can handle it .

[kitkats 0]

http://www.inkscape.org/

 

Open source vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator.

 

OSX, XP and Linux. It natively saves to SVG but you can export as AI to get your vectors into After Effects.

[payton 0]

for image viewing I highly recommended XnView. Amazing. Simply amazing.

 

http://www.xnview.com/

Ft

 

i need to agree.

 

irfan view is kinda joke compared to this.

[jan 0]

Free and open source vector and bitmap animation software

Pencil

[Null Object 0]

I didn't find a link to this on the board. I hope yall can get great use out of it. I have.

 

 

FFMPEGX

 

one of the best compression and conversion platforms available and it's open source. It converts just about anything to just about anything. H264, 263, AVI, MOV, MPEG, IPOD, PSP, DIVX, DVD, FLV, blah blah blarg

 

http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/