November, 2012

Step by step guide to Video editing on an iPad

This is a guest post by Neil Davidson. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guest post guidelines.

This is a basic guide to editing in Pinnacle Studio on the Apple iPad. If you are new to editing, you will find it useful to familiarise yourself with some of the terms used. But luckily for you, many of them are self-explanatory e.g. a ‘splice’ is literally a cut in a video clip. A ‘transition’ is a visual effect that takes your from one clip to another in a particular way. Also, if you are used to Apple touch screen products, you will find Pinnacle very intuitive.

Pinnacle can be downloaded for free for the App Store (for a limited time only).

1) Starting a new project and giving it a name

To start a new project you need to click the ‘+’ button. This will make a panel appear in which you need to name your project. You will then be taken to your workspace.

The layout of your workspace

You will see from the image below that your workspace is laid out quite efficiently. It consists of:

– a function window (top left): allows you to switch between different functions e.g. transitions, music files on your device, video & other media (e.g. photo) files on your device and title templates.

– source/project window (top right): will display videos that you select to view before you touch, hold and drag them into your timeline or storyboard. It is also your project window as this is where your work in progress will play back.

– the storyboard (mid-portion of your screen): this is where you will see each element of your timeline in smaller chunks.

– the timeline: this is where you will be working from (this is divided into one video track and multiple audio tracks).

2) Rebuilding your video library

You will see in the video window in the top left panel that I have been given the option to ‘rebuild’ my video library. This means that all of the video I have on my iPad is not currently accessible via Pinnacle. If I click to rebuild, it will bring any new media (video/photos) into this window so that I can use it in my project.

Tap your media to preview: When you tap a video or image in the video window (left), it will display it in the project window (right). You can select the play button to play the video.

Touch and hold your media to drag it to the Storyboard or Timeline. See image below. You can adjust the scale of the timeline using the two finger expand/shrink technology that you will be familiar with from using the iPad or an iPhone. This is helpful in terms of giving you more control over where to make cuts/splices and where to place transitions etc.

Highlight a clip by touching it. Tools appear highlighted (they are grayed out when you have no media selected) – see the centre of the screen – just above the story board.
– the microphone – allows you to record voiceover

– the razor blade – allows you to splice the clip where the yellow marker is lying

– the trash can – allows you to delete a clip

3) Making a splice

– Touch and slide your media to adjust its position on the timeline – so that the yellow marker is lying on the bit of the video clip where you would like to make the splice.

– Tap the ‘video’ button that appears. This makes the splice.

– See image below – you may want to delete one part of the clip. You have two options. Either touch the clip to highlight it and click the trash can button above the timeline. Or, double tap the clip you want to delete and a panel will appear as shown below. You can also use the trash can function from this panel.

4) Adding transitions

Once you have cut your videos and are happy with the footage you have, you can add transitions to make the cuts smoother and easier on the viewers eyes. Pinnacle has a a few basic transition functions for you to use. They are divided into three sections: basics, pushes and slides. Click on the lightening bolt in the function window (top left) to reveal your transition options.

I have use a few different ones in my final video so that you can see the difference.

To add a transition to your project, you simply need to touch, hold and drag the chosen transition to the point on the timeline where you would like it. You can move them to a different place on the timeline in the same way if you put them in the wrong place. You will see that they are displayed as purple items on the timeline.

You can also edit the duration/length of a transition. The default is one second. To change the duration, touch the transition and two extra yellow markers will appear around the edge of the transition. You can then touch the yellow markers (boxes with small arrows) at the bottom of the timeline to stretch or shorten the transition.

5) Sound

a) Adjusting the volume of your clips

By double tapping a clip in the timeline you will bring up a function panel (as mentioned earlier). You can see from the image above that this allows you to control the volume of this particular clip and also the fade of the sound as it comes in and out.

b) Adding narration

You can see from the image below that if you click the microphone, a function appears for you to record some narration directly into Pinnacle – where you want it on the timeline. Once it has been recorded, the recording will appear as a chunk on the audio track of your timeline, just like the video clips on the video track, and it can be moved about in the same way (i.e. touch, hold, drag).

c) Adding music

By selecting the musical note in the function window in the top left, you can access any music stored on your iPad and use it in your video project. It functions in the same way as the visual media.

6) Titles
A finishing touch to your video are titles. The title templates available on Pinnacle are in two categories; motion titles and standard titles. In my video project, I have use a motion title to open and a standard title to close – to demonstrate the variety.

The titles function like the other elements. Select the ‘T’ option on the left of the function panel. You will then see the title options available to you. Touch, hold and drag a title template to your chosen spot on the timeline. Tap ‘Your Text Here’ in the project window in the right and a keyboard will appear so that you can add your own text. You can also drag the text box to place the title in your chosen spot on the screen.

7) Rendering
Pinnacle will tell you when you need to render your project so that you can watch a smooth preview of your video. Click the two cogs, next to the undo button (back arrow), to render.

8) Exporting
Click the top right icon (box with forward arrow) to export your video. Pinnacle allows you to export/share your video to a few different platforms, or simply as a video file on your iPad.

This was a basic introduction to Pinnacle Studio. Pinnacle has other functions that aren’t covered in this article such as the montage feature. It is also possible to record video directly into Pinnacle. Pinnacle is available as a free app for a limited time only.

Author Bio:
Neil Davidson is the Founder of My Web Presenters, who are a leading web video production company specialising in video spokesperson videos. They work with businesses of all sizes to create and market compelling and emotive videos. They also write a video marketing blog regularly so please check it out.

Bored by Facebook?

This is a guest post by Daisy Atkinson. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guest post guidelines.

This is something I’ve been hearing a lot lately, and just mentioning the name to a friend while he was excitedly tapping away on Twitter, seemed to bring him up short. ‘Well, I never really use Facebook these days, there’s no need.’

Now this really shocked me. Throughout school and university we, like everyone else we knew, had communicated tirelessly through Facebook. The popularity of which caused some people to shut down their profiles during exam time just to avoid failing from ‘Facebook addiction’.

So why is interest for the network now waning? Facebook engulfed the popularity that Myspace once had, but now, with the advent of an entirely new generation of social networking tools, each with their own unique selling point, has Facebook had its day?

Survey and Statistics
A poll conducted by Ipsos, taken from a sample of 1,032 Americans, revealed that just over a third were using Facebook with less frequency than they did six months before. Those polled described the reason for this being that Facebook had, for them, become ‘boring’, ‘not relevant’, and even, ‘not useful’. This is a shocking report when, in a digital age, the importance of social networks
has never been so apparent for communication, marketing and research both at work and at home. What is even more surprising is the idea that the most prominent social network of this digital era is now losing clients.

According to another survey of 1000 Americans, an astonishing 80% also admitted to never having bought products as a result of advertising on Facebook. From a business perspective, this is an extremely worrying statistic, especially for the thousands of companies using Facebook for the purposes of e-commerce.

It is to be expected that Facebook’s most popular age bracket for users is 18-34, as this encompasses the generation in which it began, however, what is slightly surprising is that Facebook retains its popularity with this demographic when there are far more complex social networks available to what I would consider to be the age bracket most fluent in social networking.

Complaints about the network often concern the enormous catalogues of photos that stagnate on profiles, or vast amounts of spam from the variety of games available on a network that was never designed to be an interactive gaming site. I must admit that I recently fell victim to Tetris on Facebook one boring Tuesday evening, but with my attention now firmly turned towards the burgeoning social networks, neither has held my attention in recent months.

There are other options out there that are not necessarily bigger than Facebook, but a hell of a lot better in satisfying your specific needs.

Twitter
Even one of Twitter’s directors recently stated that he still hadn’t figured out the basis of Twitter’s appeal, but in my opinion the key lies in its constant state of flux. The ability to post photos, videos, comments, links, and likes cover a lot of the popular aspects of Facebook but with much faster and simpler processes.

Instagram And Facebook
Instagram is the new and more interesting approach to photo media, as it allows the user to have a more interactive relationship with their product by altering the outlook of photos. Facebook has played a blinder by getting involved with this application, as it has revolutionised the users’ approach to storytelling through photos, and has enabled Facebook to adapt to its requirements through Timeline, making the photos more accessible according to date and event.

Before the arrival of Instagram, unless there had been a particularly interesting event in the last few days, Facebook didn’t produce anything more appealing, visually or textually, than any other social network.

Of course the simplicity and size of Facebook has attracted, and will continue to attract even older generations wishing to publicise their antics online, but the functionality and appearance leave a lot to be desired for the more discerning social networker.

Facebook chat for instance, while reaping the benefits of its new arrival during what I consider to be its most progressive stage, is still one of the most limited real time conversation applications around today.

Despite its relative drawbacks, the social network has successfully retained a global following for a number of years, and through some trial and error periods spent optimising layout, has stayed ahead of the social networking game since its
creation in 2004.

If Facebook continues to create connections with developing applications like Instagram it may survive a little longer, but my prediction is that this generation of more demanding social networkers will flock to something new and shiny for a piece of the action.

Author Bio
Daisy Atkinson is an English graduate from The University of Liverpool. She currently works as an online marketing intern at Quick Lingo, for whom she
writes articles, manages their news portal, The Daily Polyglot, and operates their various social media platforms. Daisy also writes for FE News and for a number of other online publications.

10 Platinum Ways How Digital Electronic Signatures Have Altered Business And Corporate Dealings For The Better

This is a guest post by Anna Stacy. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guest post guidelines.

Mull over the last decade and you’d witness that a vast majority of business and corporate processes have shifted to a more technologically rich environment – the World Wide Web – and that too at an astounding rate.

Today, over a billion people worldwide are investing progressively in business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B) and even government-to-consumer (G2C) processes on the Internet, which has become the ultimate breeding ground for various business brands.

With the emergence of fully automated processes, things have become even more convenient. Similarly, electronic signatures have enabled various business transactions online to be approved, accepted or signed without turning towards the traditional – rather more costly – ways of paper-based hand signatures.

Electronic signatures offer a paper-free way to digitally sign a document using a verified electronic symbol [image] or process associated with a document. To understand the process better, check out the ten platinum ways that have minimized much of our everyday business problems or issues pertaining to the driving an e-business more smoothly and productively:

1. With the automation of the verification or signing process using electronic signatures, it offers a more easy way to execute various transaction processes online and reduce the time it, otherwise, takes for businesses, governments, and citizens to make any sales or purchase orders, gather any management approval or even apply for a government program or job online.

2. You can easily execute any business deal or perhaps sign an important legal document sitting in one corner of the world across another safely and securely.

3. You can sign documents frequently and transfer it online. If, for instance, the technical security (such as encryption on transporting data online using the Internet) or your organization’s internal security (such as for clearing gateways) is breached, hacked or failed to offer the essential security, your data can fall in wrong hands and consequently, misused or mishandled for selfish gains. However, with electronic signatures, your documents are completely processed in a secure and automated environment.

4. Traditional paper documents are manually analyzed or carried out with limited computer support; however, unencrypted digital signatures can be analyzed in a completely computerized way, without any third party involvement of any sort.

5. Electronic signatures can confirm the identity of the signer, verify the genuineness of a document, and also enable non-repudiation from the legal perspective.

6. For business transactions, these electronic signatures can offer a greater efficiency and fast turnaround, while eliminate any costly printing requirements including paper cost, or time consumed in fixing typing errors. You can accelerate sales, track all business contracts in real-time, and also automatically store and manage all the signed agreements in a secure vault maintained virtually.

The manual process involves painstakingly going through the process of purchasing paper and that too of high quality, getting the document printed on it, then signing it manually and sending it via fax or scanning it and then emailing it and vice versa when received by the party. Not to mention the high maintenance charges that your printer, scanner and fax machines takes…to simplify the calculation, digital electronic signatures can reduce this entire process and cut down your expenditures cost to thousands of dollar per annum – that’s almost 70% of cost cut down for you. The cost of sending each item is virtually NOTHING! No paper cost, no stamps, no envelops or fax paper. Instead of relying on expensive courier services.

7. Many laws and regulations have been made in attempt to address the effectiveness of electronic signatures in order to accommodate any technology changes over time since, by all means, this digital process offers more flexibility depending on the assurance-level requirements for any particular business or personal work execution or deployment. A bill was passed by the US government to legalize this digital signing process in order to authorize contracts electronically, rather than people relying on handwritten signatures.

This isn’t just limited to the US, legislations concerning the validity of digital electronic signatures have been passed in the European Union and the European Economic Area, China, Switzerland, Turkey, Korea, New Zealand, Moldova, Peru, India, Russian Federation, Guatemala, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Malaysia, Uruguay, Japan, Philippines, Switzerland, and also United Nations Commission on
International Trade Law.

8. Using electronic signature capabilities, your organization can bring in more of the traditional paper-based processes online, reduce business costs, and invest the amount saved on more productive ways to expand the business. Where time is money, imagine all the valuable ways to expend this time that you can save and conquer heights of success and business prosperity.

9. Not only this, this process use highly advanced and 100% secure means which leads to gathering trust of more customers or key stakeholders and hence increase customer satisfaction owing to the sense of their information’s authenticity and integrity that you provide them with. The process involves information being delivered from one party to another, one desk to another or even one country to another without any human involvement. No one can, hence, copy the signature and use it for malicious self-desires by some third party intrusion.

10. Companies can easily dispatch product notices, bank balance statements, and other disclosures to their customers via the Internet in substitute to the time-taking postal
service.

If you haven’t switched to this innovative and highly-advanced process of document signing yet, you’re missing out on many added benefits that you can otherwise seek with process of digital electronic signatures.

Author Bio:
Anna Stacy has in-depth knowledge and experience of Electronic signatures solutions. Her basic forte lies within process optimization and process re-engineering, and has a long-term obsession with e-sign. She is a leading source of what’s hot and what’s not in the online digital signature space.

Transfer/Merge Your Google Plus Account

For whatever reason you want to transfer your Google+ account, follow below steps and you’re account will be transferred.

Transfer would take 7 days.
You can cancel transfer any time, after the transfer request and before the transfer.
After the transfer, you can’t initiate the transfer again for 6 months.

This tool transfers your Google+ circles and other connections from a “source” account to a “destination” account. It also replaces your source profile with your destination profile in other people’s circles. The source and destination accounts must have the same name.

The transfer begins 7 days after you request it. To cancel the transfer before it starts, sign in to either account on Google+ and click Cancel Transfer at the bottom of the page.

You cannot cancel a transfer from the mobile app.

Once the transfer begins, you’ll have limited access to Google+ on both accounts. Transfers typically take about 48 hours. After the transfer begins, you can’t stop or undo it. You can transfer your connections to or from a Google Account only once every 6 months.

After the transfer

When the transfer is complete, your circles, blocks, and ignores are copied from the source account to the destination account. Circles in the destination account with the same names are merged. Content from your source account (such as profile information, posts, or comments) is not transferred to the destination account. Similarly, authorship information and Google+ pages that you manage with your source account will not be transferred to the destination account. However, this content, pages, and authorship information still exist in your source account.

After the transfer is complete, your source account profile will still exist in your source account. However, it will be replaced with your destination account in other people’s circles. Don’t worry if you see that the number in the “Have you in circles” feature still shows that people have your source profile in their circles, as the count may take a few days to update. If you no longer need your source account Google+ profile, downgrade the profile associated with your source account and select Delete your entire Google+ profile. Before downgrading, we recommend downloading your Google+ data from your source account at Google Takeout. If you choose to keep your source account profile, to avoid confusion, you may want to delete any content (including posts, comments and photos) that was posted by the source account and uncheck the option that helps others to discover your profile in search results.

How-to Transfer your Google+ Account:
Goto Google Takeout

Select “Transfer your Google+ connections to another account” link.

Now provide both source and destination login credentials.

Click TRANSFER to request the transfer.

Within 7 days the transfer will be initiated. You’ll also receive a confirmation email to your destination email.

Google Nexus 7 Tablet In India

Google is all set to launch its entry level tablet Google Nexus 7 in Indian market for a price tag of Rs. 19,999 which is almost twice as much as it’s dollar rate in United States(which is $199).

The 7-inch Table, built by Taiwanese manufacturer Asus, has the following features:

OS: Android Jelly Bean (Android version 4.2).
Processor: Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, which clocks at 1.3 GHz.
1280×800 resolution with 7-inch IPS display screen.
1GB RAM.
1.2 megapixel front camera.
4325 mAh battery.

1. 9hrs HD video playback
2. 10hrs Web browsing or e-reading
3. 300hrs Stand-by time

..and ofcourse supports large number of apps present in android market place!

It had a 8GB variant which was replaced by a 32GB variant for the same price in the US market. Not to forget, it also has a 3G variant.

Look at some of the offers present on Amazon for Nexus 7