Andrew Karasev asked:
Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 has higher reliance on such new Microsoft technologies, as SQL Server Reporting Services or SRS, Sharepoint with its famous workflow (competitor to traditional Lotus Notes workflow) and of course eConnect (this is rising star in GP software programming and e-commerce development). If you was GP IM user or developer for earlier versions, you probably remember that IM required GP user workstation to be up and running (and so taking extra precious user license in system manager), plus all the forms got to be closed in IM GP instance, and this is understandable as Integration Manager deployed OLE server technologies (GP workstation was serving as OLE application server). And additional complication was related to the fact that you had to login to the specific company to do integration, IM could not switch companies automatically. All these restrictions were
gone with the appearance of eConnect connector for Integration Manager 9.0 and 10.0
1. eConnect technology stack. There is no magic behind the scenes about eConnect - you can read nice pile of whitepapers and technical documents about eConnect technology, but in the beginning of the chain you see traditional and old known SQL encrypted stored procedures. These stored procedures replicate and probably improve GP traditional Great Plains Dexterity business logic. In some cases they are Dex following and do it in SQL cursors, in other cases they use SQL aggregated logic, such as Select, Insert into and similar constructions. If you look at Dexterity performance restrictions (Dex is C programming language written shell and so it in turn is two layers architecture and it is by its nature a bit slow). And consider these facts about Dexterity, you could trust us, that eConnect does job a way faster than Dexterity based old Integration Manager connectors
2. IM and eConnect. Microsoft Dynamics GP IM introduced new connectors, now you can deploy original eConnect connectors and get performance boost. If you are IM manager consultant, who used to consult for older versions: 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, 7.5, please remember this important change - eConnect IM integration integrates to dedicated GP company and so database
3. VBA scripting. Even if you are using eConnect connectors for Integration Manager, you still can deploy traditional VBA scripting techniques to manipulate integration: Before Integration, Before Document, etc.
4. Traditional IM connectors. At this time Microsoft Business Solutions keeps traditional OLE integration connectors in and, considering this nice fact, you can still seamlessly upgrade IM from earlier versions (however we discovered the fact, that if you are on version 7.5, you can’t just follow upgrade wizard, you have to upgrade in two steps with intermediate version upgrade.
Dave Jacobs asked:
Of the free image editors we have tested our favorite is PhotoPlus 6 by Serif. It allows you to fix and enhance your digital photos in a variety of ways. In addition you can create high quality bitmap images and even web animations. For these reasons it beat out the field of six or so products that can be considered free photo editors.
With PhotoPlus 6 you can enhance your digital pictures with easy creative tools, including: paintbrush, airbrush, clone, smudge and erase. To give you total control there are adjustable brush settings for size, shape, softness and fade. Few free programs allow you to work with layers. PhotoPlus 6 lets you apply bevels and drop shadows to create sophisticated-looking text and images. You can even use the layer manager to make additions and enhancements to images without affecting the originals picture, just like the professional software such as Photoshop CS3! We found it easy to adjust brightness, contrast, sharpness, color hue, saturation, remove red-eye and more! You can enhance, repair and tweak your photos for consistently great results time after time. The flexible and fun deform tool lets you rotate, resize, skew, reshape and add perspective to any selection or even specific layers. This feature is powerful, yet easy to master, providing amazing results. For professional results you can add editable, deformable text to your images and further enhance your text with stunning drop shadows and even create bevel effects. A feature we use on some of our websites is the ability to easily create animated GIFs for websites and presentations. With PhotoPlus this is easier than you think. You could pay a lot for this feature alone!
Another image editor that we like is PaintNET. This program just keeps getting better and better yet in some ways it is also getting easier and more intuitive to use. It features a number of automatic adjustments but as often is the case you will get better results if you take manual control and use your own judgement as to what looks better. This free product like PhotoPlus 6 above, allows you to work in sophisticated ways with layers. Mistakes are no problem with an unlimited undo feature.
The final product we would like to mention is GIMP for Windows. This is an open source product that is constantly evolving. We found it a little difficult to get installed properly but once installed we discovered it to be quite powerful and especially appreciated the dozens of tutorials available. We have used this product to retouch a number of photos with great results.
While none of these free products have even close to the feature set of a product like Photoshop they still will allow you to quickly and easily make sophisticated improvements to your digital images without spending hours figuring out how to make the program work! You may want to install a couple of these free image editing programs to allow you to take advantage of the specific strengths each has to offer.
Lance Carr asked:
One of the key, overriding points to keep in mind throughout the selection process is, “What is it that I am I REALLY going to do with the video editing software that I choose?” The answer to that question has to remain uppermost in your mind when selecting the best video editing software for you. It is easy to get distracted by all the “bells and whistles” on offer but the reality is that many of those features will ultimately prove useless to you.
All of the major home video editing software companies offer camcorder to DVD video editing solutions that make them almost inseparable from each other. So concentrate on what you REALLY need.
Formats. This first thing to establish is what is the format of the material you will be working with and what will be the formats that I will want to produce in the end. Input will be determined by your camcorder or your DVD recorder or whatever the source of your material is. At the moment you will come in under one of the following headings from the point of view of video editing software. These formats are what you need to be aware of in judging the capabilities of the video editing software you choose.
Input:
Standard Definition (SD)
DV.AVI video recorded to mini DV tape on a camcorder.
MPEG2 video recorded to mini DVD either on a camcorder or DVD recorder.
MPEG2 video recorded to an inbuilt hard disc drive on a camcorder or DVD recorder.
Any of the various high compression formats such as MPEG4, H.264 recorded to flash type memory on camcorders, used for computer playback or internet display.
High Definition (HD):
HD MPEG2 recorded to mini DV tape on a camcorder.
AVCHD (an MPEG4 variant) recorded to inbuilt hard disc drive on a camcorder.
AVCHD recorded to DVD on a camcorder.
AVCHD recorded to solid state (flash etc.) memory on a camcorder.
Output:
DVD. This will be in the form of MPEG2 files authored (organized and written) to the DVD standard.
Completed projects or edited material written back to the original recording device. E.g. A completed project written back to a tape camcorder for archival purposes.
High Definition material written to a standard DVD.
High Definition material written to a Blue Ray disc or a HD D…oops! I guess we don’t have to worry about that one now!
Any of a number of very highly compressed formats for viewing on computers, handheld devices or loading on to internet services such as YouTube.
As an added note here you also need to be aware of the various Dolby sound recording formats if your particular recording device, camcorder or DVD recorder uses it. Dolby licenses that technology and it may be only included with some software as an add-on.
So, your first task in deciding on what video editing software is suitable for you is to work out what your most common source files will be and what your most common output will be. That represents the core of what you will be using the software for and should be your main focus.
Bells and Whistles!
Like any other competitive market video editing software is caught up in a never ending race to keep up with technology as it develops and still make the product seem “sexy” to the customer. The point is you probably don’t WANT to buy video editing software. What you WANT is a finished video production. The problem for the software company is that they know you NEED to buy video editing software but that is not what you WANT! They have to make you WANT it! And because of that we get “bells and whistles” features that make you WANT IT but most likely will never need.
Transitions:
These are the little inserts that go in between two clips to make the scene change. If you look at a movie you will notice when the scene changes it either cuts to the next scene with no transition, this is called cut or a straight cut. It fades to black then fades into the next scene from black called a cross fade through black. Or, finally, the two scenes merge into each other softly and this one is called a cross fade. There you have it, pretty well the entire gamut of transitions that professional video editors use! All video editing software programs offer at least 50 transitions each. You can get granny’s head to separate and spin, turn into a dog and then that becomes you father’s belt buckle from which you now zoom back into the next scene!…ok I am exaggerating! The point is that newbies use ALL the available transitions because they look cool the first time they see them. The reality is NOBODY ever, ever wants to go back to their house again to look at their latest production because their heads are still spinning from the last one! Ignore transitions as a deciding factor, all video editing software programs have them and they all have more than you need.
Overlay Tracks:
An overlay simply put, is the ability to put one video in the background and have another visible on top of it. It is that “picture in picture” effect you have seen on TV and in movies. You can also put subtitles in an overlay track or still photos or a bunch of other things to really get creative. If you watch the news these days you will see the main track is the person on-air, then you may see a ticker tape readout running below, the station logo at the top right and video of the “at the scene” reporter getting ready to make a report. All of that is done using overlay tracks. You need about five for good control but you would never use more than that otherwise, once again, no-one is going to want to watch the mess you have created.
Audio Control:
There is no video editing software at the consumer level that offers truly excellent audio control and features. Got it? They are video editing programs not audio editing programs. Some have pretty good control, some don’t, if you are going to demand pro level audio then you need dedicated software for that. The ability to handle Dolby 2 channel is a bare minimum and 5:1 Surround should be standard. The program should offer two audio tracks to play with in addition to the sound in the video track. That leaves you plenty of room for music, narration or effects.
DVD Authoring:
What you are looking for here is the ability to fully author DVDs either in standard definition or in Blue-Ray if you are using high definition source material. The program should offer 10 to 20 preset menu templates for you to choose from that are fully customizable.
Smart Render:
Rendering is the term used when the video editing software is making the final file of your newly created video. Up until rendering, in any consumer level video editing software, all the cuts, additions, changes and adjustments you have been making are “virtual.” The original footage is never touched. So rendering puts all that together and produces your final file in the format you have chosen as the viewing format. Any of the highly compressed formats such as MPEG2 (for DVDs), MPEG4 etc invariably suffer from loss of quality when they are re-rendered. The degree of loss of quality varies but it is essential that any video editing software you choose has the ability to recognise those files it does not need to re-render and simply copy those sections resulting in the high quality possible being retained.
So there you have it, stay focused on what is important and keep the “gee whiz” stuff to a minimum and you will do fine!
Paul Abbey asked:
In this article, you can read a review of the some of the most popular Photo Editing Software for Mac.
iPhoto is photo editing software application and the best part of it all is that comes with your MAC. Even the pros take photos that need a bit of extra work done on them. And Mac developers have done all their best so that with iPhoto, editing images is as simple as taking them. There is a whole pallete of retouching tools available at your disposal and an array of effects to play with. When you use the Crop tool, automatic guides help you follow the classic “rule of thirds.” Adjusting shadows and highlights in a photo is also easily done. With separate controls, now you can lighten a face that was lost in shadow without affecting the brighter parts of your photo. Use noise reduction to minimize dots and speckles in low-light photos. Use edge sharpen to create a crisper photo. And use white balance to optimize colors with a click. The latest version is iPhoto ‘08 and has plenty of new features like unified search, theme-based home printing, new calendars and books.
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is one of the most popular low cost Mac photo editing software applications. It was originally developed for UNIX, so it’s an open source program with a Mac. It has customizable brushes and patterns that add-up on its drawing functionalities while the growing library supports more and more filters and effects.
Apple Aperture 1.5.4 is compatible with iPhoto ‘08, including the ability to import images directly from the most current version of iPhoto and the ability to share Aperture images with other iLife ‘08 and iWork applications using the iLife Media Browser. Powerful, Aperture features a RAW-focused workflow from capture to output that makes working with RAW files as easy as JPEG. No need to convert your RAW files before doing anything with them. Aperture automatically creates “versions” of your “master” images to preview, crop, color correct, sharpen, and apply other modifications to. And with the most powerful image processing in the world, Aperture is fast - whether you’re working with RAW, JPEG, or TIFF images.
Pixelmator is a beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editor for Mac OS X has everything you need to create, edit and enhance your images. The official website of this software is http://www.pixelmator.com/.
Jason Davidson asked:
When you are an individual who is sitting at home and you have taped your kid’s special events and you want to make movies out them, then a freeware movie editing software package is recommended for you, that is unless you already have a pre-installed movie maker on your machine.
Freeware is computer software that is available for no cost to use or it may have an optional fee but that is usually a website asking you to support them by giving them a donation.
This type of software is usually good for beginners who want to experiment with and get acquainted with a full price version before they possibly spend money on a full program. There is a massive amount of free software throughout the internet today. You can research all of the available freeware movie editing software to find the one that fits your needs the best.
When you purchase a computer with the Windows operating system on it, Windows Movie Maker comes with it, and this is considered this category application.
If you don’t have it, you can use Internet Explorer to download it to your computer for free. Other names of freeware movie editing software are Blender, Jashaka, Virtual Dub, Wax, Zwei-Stein, ZS4 Video Editor, Avedit, Avidemux, DDClip Free 2.23, Atomic Learning’s FREE Video StoryBoard Pro, and SolveigMM AVI Trimmer.
This is only naming the main ones but there are a lot more out on the internet. All of these freeware movie editing software usually have the basic functions of putting together clips into larger videos, adding simple transitions, and making basic edits.
Some of these freeware software even is equipped to add scrolling texts, add subtitles, and add custom animations.
There are also a great selection that you use online. With this type of programe you don’t have to download anything to your computer. You access the website, and you upload your videos and or photos. You do all your editing from that website. This is a good option for those that want to use an automatic editor or those that are creating videos mainly for sharing. The movies and videos that you create using the online freeware movie editing software are automatically published online so it just takes a couple of clips to have all your family and friends watch what you created.
In today’s day and age, there are many options for anyone who wants to dive into using freeware movie editing software.