Crafting Digital Media: Audacity, Blender, Drupal, GIMP, Scribus, and other Open Source Tools (Expert's Voice in Open Source)
Daniel James
Language: English
Pages: 450
ISBN: 1430218878
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Open source software, also known as free software, now offers a creative platform with world-class programs. Just ask the people who have completed high-quality projects or developed popular web 2.0 sites using open source desktop applications. This phenomenon is no longer underground or restricted to techies―there have been more than 61 million downloads of the Audacity audio editor and more than 60 million downloads of the GIMP for Windows photographic tool from SourceForge.net alone.
Crafting Digital Media is your foundation course in photographic manipulation, illustration, animation, 3D modelling, publishing, recording audio and making music, DJ’ing, mixing and mastering audio CDs, video editing and web content delivery. Every technique described in the book can be achieved on GNU/Linux, but many of the applications covered run on Windows and Mac OS X as well. New to GNU/Linux and a little daunted? Don’t worry―there’s a step-by-step tutorial on Ubuntu for either temporary use or permanent installation.
If you are a creative type who wants to get started with open source software or an existing GNU/Linux user looking to explore this category of programs, this is the book for you! Realize your own personal projects and creative ambitions with the tools this book will place at your fingertips.
software and freely licensed it to anyone who wanted to use it. These people weren’t necessarily paid to write programs. They included mathematicians, scientists, business people, and (yes) musicians. For the most part, they wrote the software because they needed it for their own purposes, and they hoped other people would enjoy it or (perhaps) help them make it better. Fast-forward to this century. Modern-day computer equipment can turn a decent set of microphones and audio/video equipment into
are fetched from the Internet. 37 CHAPTER 2 GETTING STARTED 38 • A PC card icon that, when clicked, informs you about additional hardware drivers that are available. These typically aren’t Free Software drivers, so they’re labeled as restricted. Sometimes, using a restricted driver can offer better 3D graphics or wireless Internet performance, but you have to rely on the hardware vendor to fix any bugs in that driver. • A network monitor icon showing two computer screens, which
instance, if the image was going to be printed three inches high, then it could be scanned at only 900 ppi, saving file space on the storage server. Graphics destined for the web are a different matter, because a computer screen has a fixed maximum resolution. The computer screen I use has 1,280 pixels horizontally by 1,024 pixels vertically, and is about 13½ inches wide by 10½ inches high. By convention, computer screens are supposed to have a resolution of 72 ppi; so, you’ll find a setting of
you’re happy with, click the middle icon of the three arranged vertically on the far right side of the main KToon window. Doing so opens the Exposure Sheet dialog, which provides an overview of the individual frames in the project (see Figure 5-7). Right-click your first image, which is labeled Drawing 1 by default, and select “Clone this Frame.” A pop-up window asks how many cloned frames you require; 23 clones, to create a total of one second in your movie, may be a good number to start with.
................................................................................................................................ 233 Getting Seq24 and AlsaModularSynth .................................................................................................. 234 Running AlsaModularSynth .................................................................................................................. 237 Beginning the Sequence