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You’ve finished your movie — you’ve ‘locked off’ the edit, completed any visual effects, graded the shots, added music and done your final sound mix. So what’s left? The credits! Make sure you get everybody’s name and correct spelling as they contribute to the film. Don’t leave it until the end — you run the risk of forgetting someone, misspelling their name or giving them the wrong credit.

If you work with images or video, and in particular colour correction, it’s important to make sure your monitor is properly calibrated. After all, you can’t properly assess the colours you’re manipulating if your monitor isn’t displaying them correctly. So what exactly is calibration? Your monitor’s display is made up of red, green and blue pixels, which combine to show every possible colour. There are a number of methods for classifying and displaying colour, depending on whether it’s intended for screen display, print or video.

The release of the latest version of Cakewalk SONAR X1 is a good reason to explore virtual instruments — now a major element of better digital audio workstation (DAW) software. Also called softsynths, virtual instruments are software-only versions of what would otherwise be seen as a synthesizer, drum machine, musical sampler or some other digital musical instrument. They can work standalone or integrate with your DAW software via a plug-in standard like VSTi, DXi, RTAS and others.

Reverb is the effect a sound makes when produced in a given space. Clap your hands and listen to the sound of the room as that clap reverberates off the walls and ceiling. Clap your hands in a different space, say a church, and you get a very different kind of reverb — longer, louder, brighter. The nature of any reverb is determined by many things, including how far away the wall and ceiling surfaces are, what they’re made of, whether there’s carpet and more. More recently, a new form of reverb is taking hold: convolution reverb.

There’s a wealth of excellent creative software for Windows available as open source or freeware: from audio editors and music tools, to graphics software and 3D animation. However, there’s been nothing worthwhile in the area of video editing. This has now changed with the release of Lightworks (at http://www.lightworksbeta.com). Although this is the first release of Lightworks Open Source (and this is still a beta), the application itself has been around since 1989. It was a pioneer of digital non-linear editing (NLE) along with Avid and was truly innovative at the time.

Wondershare DemoCreator lets you make video screen captures, which you can use to instruct someone on how to perform a task. The screen captures can include narration and annotations. You can download a fully-featured 15-day trial of DemoCreator from www.wondershare.com. The trial version will place a watermark over your screen capture, but otherwise works just like the full version. You can also purchase the full version for US$99.95.

While you can do a lot with Premiere Pro and other video editing apps, Adobe After Effects (AE) goes further, adding motion graphics, compositing and other more intensive visual effects work. Here we'll show you how to do rotoscoping with After Effects. The art of roto has been around almost as long as cinema itself. Early silent movies shot on black-and-white film would sometimes have colour painted onto the image — frame by tedious frame; for example, 1925’s Phantom of the Opera.