If you want to start making digital movies, distribute what you’ve made, or add music or QuickTime VR to your Web site, the Internet has plenty to offer when it comes to digital media. Everything, from tutorials on moviemaking to sites that help you create music, is just a mouse click away. Here are five you won’t want to miss.
For beginning and intermediate moviemakers, this is a great place to start (or continue) on the road to digital moviemaking. On The New Venue’s FlickTips page, you’ll find tips to help you produce, compress, and stream your final product on the Web. There’s also a weekly feature that might inspire a first film or get you past your directors’ block. When you’re done, learn how to submit your digital film to The New Venue and find out what the world thinks. You will need QuickTime and Flash to view the site properly.
Whether you and your Mac go way back in music making or you’re just looking to get started, Beatnik is the best place to begin. If you’ve already installed the Beatnik software, the site will come alive with music and sound (on slower connections, this might be a real bottleneck). You can get everything here, from tips on making music to software that can be used to make music. My personal favorite is the Mixman eMix, which lets you remix a handful of popular songs. I made a Britney Spears song without the annoyance — that being Britney, of course — but you might like her. If so, you can have a whole five minutes of her singing a cappella. Also, the site has myriad tutorials that are broken down by skill level.
https://www.vrbakersfield.com/vr_links.html
The name is rather self-explanatory, but this site is more a listing of other sites where you’ll find information on QuickTime VR than a collection of original information. VR Tips, Techniques, and Trade Secrets is geared toward people who have more than a simple curiosity about QuickTime VR. I found sites on making Fisheye photographs as well as sites on making simple panoramas. If you’re looking for more in-depth tutorials, you’ll find them here as well. The downside: as mentioned earlier, this site is a list of sites where there’s no breakdown into skill levels, which means you’ll spend lots of time looking around. It does, however, offer different subheads for equipment, forums, tutorials, and VR scripts.
This site is great for advanced Flash users or anyone with an interest in using Flash. The site offers around two dozen forums that are broken down by subject (which makes for easy skimming). Post your questions and get information. Also available are online tutorials as well as downloaded files you can add to your site (if you do, be sure to give credit).
A site that fits the bill for any user, advanced or beginner, AtomFilms is mainly a great entertainment site. The directors here use everything from Claymation to Flash animation when making their films, and you can spend hours here watching films if you’re not careful. Unfortunately, not all the content is great. Some of it is pointless or inside humor that you and I aren’t supposed to get .
Assistant Editor BRETT LARSON’s lifelong goal is to view all four billion pages on the Web, one page at a time.