The Friday Roundup – Pan and Scan, Pan and Zoom and Free SFX

So this week I am afraid it will be a very short Friday Roundup.

Apart from the fact that things have been a little quiet on the news front I have also been working on the site to keep it maintained.

To that end I have been going through a lot of old posts and giving them a bit of a spruce up as well as updating the information on them.

So, pathetic excuses out of the way, here’s what we have for this week!

Free Sound Effects

I was sent a link to this site the other day and after having checked it all out I can highly recommend taking a look.

It is a new royalty free service providing music mainly but also some other effects as well.

The reason it is worth wandering over and slapping down you email address is that they are offering a bunch of sound effects for free.

There are about 170 individual .wav files of many common effects like windows and doors closing, ambient room sounds and a whole lot more.

Now in order to get the freebies go to the link below.

Once you try to download there will be a popup to provide an email address.

I see no problem in doing that as later I can always unsubscribe if they drive me nuts.

Wait a while and you will get a confirmation email and after that a link to download all the goodies.

They are very high quality and you can’t beat the price!

• FREE SFX – Wave Brigade – Royalty Free Sound Effects for Film and Video

Pinnacle Studio 20 Ultimate | Pan and Zoom Tutorial

As opposed to another article this week on cropping and panning old movies for TV and how bad it was, this one is different.

Pan and Zoom is a pretty standard feature of most video editing software these days.

In fact I can’t think of one right now that doesn’t have it in at least some rudimentary form.

Pan and Zoom can be used in a number of way and is a tool well worth learning and well worth not overdoing like any tool!

Pan and Scan

One of the great tragedies of the introduction of television in it’s original format was the introduce of what we would describe today as standard resolution.

Now I am not talking about the actual pixel size and sharpness part of resolution here.

I am talking about the aspect ratio of 4:3.

The downside of that was that nearly all motion picture movies from a time well before the introduction of television had been shot in what we would call today, “widescreen.”

Actually it is an aspect ratio of 16:9 or thereabouts.

To see just how bad the adaption of these big widescreen movies to the confinement of the TV box has to be seen to understand why it was a tragedy.

• Scorsese, Pollack, Mann & Hanson on How “Pan and Scan” Ruined Films for Decades