Punchline – Professional Titles and Transitions Plug-in for Final Cut Pro X
Final Cut Pro X is an awesome application, but the titles and transitions that come with it can get old pretty quickly. So it’s always a good idea to supplement your collection and if you’re not an accomplished Motion user, that means buying an off-the-shelf package.
Punchline is SugarFX‘s latest plugin for Final Cut, bundling a collection of professional titles and transitions together to give your videos a slick appearance. Once installed the suite appears in the in-app browser alongside all your regular elements. To use any of them you just drag and drop onto the timeline as you would any element.
There are 32 elements in the suite, including 11 titles and 21 transitions, all of which are fully customisable so you can put your own spin on them. There are a variety of looks on offer, but they’re primarily of a panel or grid design and, from my point of view, well suited to more action based footage, due to their kinetic design.
Drop a transition on the title element and you can finetune the look to get it the way you want. The colours (background, line and text) can all be tweaked and the font typeface, style, size and tracking can all be changed as required. In addition you can change the blending mode for the text to give it either a bold stand-out or transparent look.
The transitions follow the same look and feel as the titles offering arrows, centre-in/out, grid, panel and slant elements. Colours can be changed as required and the blending mode changed from punchy normal to softer overlay. It’s a versatile collection that offers greater variety and flexibility than some other suites.
Punchline’s a strong and professional looking plugin that works perfectly with Final Cut Pro X. Advanced features such as the ability to configure individual panels by simply dragging markers on the timeline make this a worthy addition to any Final Cut user’s arsenal of titles and transitions. The elements all have a similar style that evokes speed and motion and would work particularly well with any kind of racing or outdoor pursuits footage.
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Bodum’s Pebo Vacuum Coffee Maker – Perfect for Coffee Geeks Everywhere
I‘ve never been much of a wine drinker, but I do love a good cup of coffee. And while I don’t go to the effort of roasting my own beans, I do take some care to enjoy a good blend brewed properly. The vacuum brewing method apparently retains all the oils that are lost with other techniques, however you will have to wait for between 5 and 11 minutes depending on the amount of water you use. The Pebo is yours for $80USD.
Expendables 2 – Trailer
SmartTalk Solar – Hands-free iPhone Speakphone
Speaker-phones for cars are all well and good, but many of them have a glaring Achilles heel – they all need charging up regularly. This particular model, from Griffin, has no such issues because it taps the sun for its energy thanks to an internal rechargeable battery and built-in solar charger. Amongst the $69 SmartTalk‘s neater features is MultiPoint pairing which enables you to connect two different phones simultaneously – perfect for his and hers voice calls.
Read MorePlaceTagger – Cool New GeoTag Apps for iOS and Mac
As we have often lamented on this website, DSLRs don’t often come with GPS capabilities and this means that the task of geo-tagging your photos (adding GPS location co-ordinates to each image) is a royal pain in the arse. Fortunately some bright spark invented the GPX location file which enables you to record your location on a GPS enabled device and then match up the times of the photos with the GPS file to give accurate geo-tagging. Phew.
The latest geo-tagging app to utilise those awesome GPX files has hit the App Store and is called PlaceTagger. It’s available in both iOS and OSX formats for recording of location (on your iPhone) and tagging of your photos (on your Mac). This new version brings geotagging to the iPad, enabling you to use the Apple Camera Connection kit to geotag JPGs directly on an iPad. If you’re a DSLR user who’d like to streamline location data in your images EXIFs then look no further.
Read MoreTriggerTrap Mobile – Use Your iPhone to Control Your DSLR for Awesome Time Lapses and Triggered Photos
The speed with which technology progresses never ceases to amaze me – even more so the convergence of that technology, where one kind of tech crosses over into another. And that’s precisely what TriggerTrap is about – it leverages the power of your iPhone to bring innovative new forms of photography to the table. Even better it’s very modestly priced at about $20 for the cable/dongle for the iPhone and $10 for the accompanying iOS app.
Amongst the features that TriggerTrap makes possible are timelapses (including both eased and HDR timelapses), sound activated exposures, shock and vibration exposure, metal and magnetism proximity sensors, facial recognition and motion detection. It also includes a cable release mode for standard long exposure shots and a star trail mode to make those trendy night-sky photos that are all the rage now.
We’ll be reviewing TriggerTrap Mobile soon.
Read MoreMetroTalk – An Awesome Google Voice Client for Windows Mobile
Damn if these Windows Mobile apps aren’t starting to look very tasty. MetroTalk is a fully featured Google Voice app designed to make the most of Metro. It has full Mango support and includes push notifications to let you know when you’ve received an SMS or voicemail.
Read MoreMetanota – Slick SimpleNote Friendly App for Mac
SimpleNote is a cool cloud-based service that enables you to store plain text notes online and access them anywhere with slim apps on mobile, laptop or desktop devices. MetaNota is a Mac OSX application for writing and keeping notes that can sync with SimpleNote. It’s a great looking app, with full tag management and intelligent auto-formatting. It’s currently available in a free ad-supported format, but there’s a pro ad-free version coming soon if you like it.
Read MoreKippt – Slick Web Clipping Service
If you find Evernote to be a bit too ‘kitchen sink’ for your web clipping needs, then might I suggest you have a gander at Kippt. This cool free service enables you to bookmark cool stuff, read articles later, share your finds and perform fast tag based searches on it all.
Minimalist Wallpapers – Spring Collection
It’s been a wee while since we did a nice round-up of minimalist wallpapers and so, in order to save you all from the pain of clicking endlessly through the main online wallpaper archives, I’ve done it for you. The signal to noise ratio in ‘minimalist’ walls is higher than ever, some people clearly believe the word is Greek for ‘Acid and Neon Nightmare’. Anywhere, here we go.
Hearty – by Tito – Download
Grungy 2 – by Alexander GG – Download
Blur – by murasaki55 – Download
Vintage – by ApproxArt – Download
The Final Frontier – by PhilippIllgen – Download
Christmas – by JK99 – Download
Orange in Aqua – by Tiberium - Download
Crossing the Gap – by GJvdH – Download
Amazing Mily Way – by Jonathan Besler – Download
Stillness in the Storm – by Ben Gustafson – Download
Win a Canon 5D Mark III with CameraBag 2 Photo Competition – Plus We Have Five CameraBag 2 Licences Up for Grabs
We took a brief look at Camerabag 2 back in February when the software was first announced. It’s now our go-to instant effects app, with considerably more flexibilty than Analog or Snapseed. It enables you to apply a variety of Hipstamatic or Instagram style effects to your photos using a cool layered interface that can fine-tune the effects to your pleasure.
To celebrate the on-going success of Camerabag 2, developers NeverCenter are giving away a Canon 5D Mark III and some free licences to their product. In order to be entered into the competition you merely have to post an image that has been altered in some way with their Camerabag 2 software and tweet the following phrase: ”Here’s my entry to win a free Canon 5D Mk III in the @Camerabag 2 #giveaway (http://bit.ly/cb2_5d)”. There are 30 day trial versions of the software available at the website so just download a PC or Mac copy and have a play with some of your images.
We also have five licences to the software to give away. In order to win one of these, simply tweet this story with the tag @geekosity and we’ll draw five names out of the hat in a couple of weeks time.
Good luck to everyone.
Read MoreTV Premium – Watch UK TV Channels Live on iPhone and iPad
Well, I can’t see this one lasting very long at all, so enjoy it while it lasts. TV Premium is an app that broadcasts pretty much every single UK (and many US) TV channels live and in the clear to your iPhone or iPad. It costs one dollar and there is no subscription fee or further ‘in app’ purchase required. Even more amazingly, it actually works. So if you’re a UK expat missing your TV shows from the old country or just someone who fancies watching the quality output the BBC produces, then get all over it while you can. Let the countdown until removal for copyright infringement or until over-subscription causes the video feeds to become unwatchable, begin …
… and it’s gone and the feeds have stopped functioning in the app. Ah well, you know how it goes, if it sounds too good to be true …
Read MoreScreen Filter – Advanced Night-Time Screen Dimmer for Android
The built-in screen brightness features that come with Android devices leaves something to be desired – it’s a very blunt tool. Screen Filter brings a bit of science to the subject by dimming the screen in such as way as to reduce brightness but preserve screen legibility. It’s a great app to have on hand for reading ebooks at night while not disturbing your partner or for in-car use so the screen doesn’t hurt your eyes at night.
Read MoreGet Fit and Stay Fit – The Best Health and Fitness Apps for iOS
The health and fitness section of the App Store is one of the busiest areas of the shop, featuring thousands of apps that promise to get you healthier and fitter. It’s also fair to say that the health and fitness section of the App Store has the widest range in quality of those apps outside the wretched ‘Entertainment’ section. With so many fitness apps vying for your dollar-spend and with so much blatant copying going on, it’s difficult to separate the good from the bad, the flab from the fit and the snake oil from the Omega 3.
In this feature we’re looking at a total fitness suite, a selection of apps that will cover your entire fitness regime, from exercise tracking to health monitoring and food consumption. With summer on its way in the northern hemisphere, why not spend a couple of bucks, bust out those trainers and get trim for the warm season.
Read MoreAustralian High Court Toss ‘Piracy’ Case Brought by US Studios Against ISP iiNet in Landmark Ruling
When will the media companies get the message? Their insane crusade against ‘copyright theft’ is getting them nowhere, it simply alienates the self same public that they’re trying to market to. In the latest setback for the American film and TV studios and the American government who feel that they can set the legislation of any country, not just their own, the Australian High Court has tossed a case brought against large independent ISP, iiNet. Full story over at Delimiter.
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