A little while back I was contacted by the nice people at a site called JewelBeat Royalty Free Production Music.

They wrote:

Hi, I am writing in from www.JewelBeat.com I want to send you 1 CD and 1 DVD with over 800+ music and sound effects absolutely FREE for you to use.

JewelBeat is all about royalty free music and sound effects.

Clearly nobody is that nice and I knew there had to be a catch:

Dear Sue, Thank you for your email and the offer of the music and sound effects.

I have checked your site and everything looks good!

Please understand I am not trying to be rude here but I have questions.

Do you actually own the rights to the music and effects you are giving away?

Why are you giving all of this away?

Please tell me what you monetization strategy is or why you are doing this.

I know it is very sad these days to have to ask these questions but I have a number of readers who would LOVE your site.

They trust me (I think) so I need to know whether I can refer them to you with safety.

They replied:

Hi, Great to hear from you.

No worries, we understand your hesitation – hence the phrase – no free lunch so what is the catch right?

All we are looking is for people to try our music and have them visit our site.

Actually we will be launching a paid section in a few weeks from now. Not to worry all the free music you see now will always be there and will stay completely free. In fact more will be added.

To top it off, our paid section will be free to personal and non profit use as well.

We will have over 30,000 tracks in the paid section and all at a low flat price of $0.99 regardless of length, use etc with no minimum purchase amount or subscription.

Ok, so the long and short of it was that they sent me the CD and the DVD and I am pleased to say they were both filled with chunky audio goodness!

There are lots of sound effects on the site as well as a huge range of music clips that can be used individually or looped for background music… and did I mention it was all for FREE!

Click the link below to take a look for yourself and just scroll to the bottom of the page to get your hands on the free stuff!

JewelBeat Royalty Free Production Music

Just saw a press release from Muvee today announcing at CES in Las Vegas they will be demonstrating a new feature in their muvee Reveal™ version 8. It is a new music trimming feature integrated with the muvee Reveal auto video software.

According to muvee the Music Trimming Tool can be used with multiple music tracks to create personalized musical collages to fit the action of the video.

PR Type Person Blurb as follows:
“In earlier versions of muvee Reveal, users were able to use multiple songs, they had to always start the song from the beginning,” explained Terence Swee, muvee CEO. “Now, with the new Music Trimming Tool, you can select the middle section of the first song, the last section of the second song, etc. and muvee Reveal will seamlessly stitch the multiple music segments together, automatically cross fading between the tracks. You can even ask Reveal to normalize the volume between music segments so you get a consistent sounding medley in the end to use as the bed for your production.”

More PR Type Blurb not as a quote but just as gushy!
The new Music Trimming Tool was developed in keeping with muvee’s commitment to taking the complexity out of movie making and making it easy enough for even the most inexperienced users. The company’s fast, automated approach also appeals to consumers who want to quickly create and share professional-looking home movies with friends and family, but don’t have the time to edit.

To be honest I quite like the muvee products especially for people who really are not into futzing around editing home video projects. Although it seems quite unlikely that Reveal™version 8 can do what it says automatically… it actually can!

Click here to see a review of muvee Reveal

Or Click Here to Check Out muvee Reveal for Yourself

A week or so ago I posted a list of free utilities to help for those of you using your general purpose computer for video editing. In the course of doing something mindless today I suddenly remembered two more that I completely forgot at the time.

Not sure really how I could forget these because both of them are great tools to have.

The first one is an audio editor and audio manipulation software. I know I already recommended Audacity in the last post on this subject but this one is a little more user friendly.

The program is called Power Sound Editor Free and is just crammed with features and functionality… and beside, ya can’t beat the price!

You can take a look at it here at Power Sound Editor Free

The other free software I forgot to mention is specifically for those of you doing DV.avi video capture from standard definition tape based camcorders.

Most video editing software is actually four or more types of software crammed into one. Video capture, video editing, video titling and video output of some kind like DVD or whatever. Most of the consumer level video programs tend to be “jacks of all trades and masters of none.”

DV.avi capture can sometimes get a little problematic because the sheer size of the files being transferred and more importantly, the sustained rate at which the data has to be transferred. The video capturing part of the software can’t stop the process of transfer to catch up if the computer is struggling.

If the video editing software does fall behind then the program starts to “drop frames.” That means it just skips a few frames to catch up.

The correct and tolerable number of dropped frames is actually ZERO! Ifyou do get dropped frames then in the editing stage or the rendering stage you will have problems.

The answer to that is another very small and very simple little utility called WinDV. It is a standalone program so you don’t actually install it, just plonk it down on your hard drive wherever you want…don’t forget where!

Because it is purpose built for only capturing DV.avi it manges the Windows memory system very well and I think you have to be kicking your computer while you are capturing video to get it to drop frames.

You can download it at this link here: WinDV

Ok, this time I think that’s all… but then again I may think of something else!