How to stop photos disappearing from OpenOffice Impress

OpenOffice Impress (portable version) is freeware and similar to Microsoft Power Point. Impress will open and create Power Point files.

I found that when I dragged a photo from Free Commander (better than Windows Explorer and available in a portable version) onto an Impress presentation the photo would disappear if I later moved the photo to another folder or deleted it. What happened is that Impress created a link to the original file, so if I edited the photo the new version would automatically appear in my Impress presentation. This works well until you move or delete the original file.

You can prevent the photos from disappearing by breaking the link. Click Edit>Links (if Links is grayed out your presentation doesn’t have any), then click on the link that you want to break. If you want to break them all click on the top one then hold down Shift before clicking on the bottom one. Finally, click Break Link. Now all your photos and other linked files will stay in your presentation unless you open Impress and remove them yourself.

There is a way to prevent the automatic creation of links. In FastStone Viewer (portable version) I go to a full screen view of the photo that I want to add to my presentation. Then right click>Copy Image. Finally, I go to the relevant slide in Impress and right click>Paste or Ctrl+V.

If you’ve found this post helpful and/or it’s saved you some money please consider making a donation. Making a donation makes blogging a two way process: I scratch your back and you scratch mine 🙂

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Free video editing software: how to use VideoPad

I have spent quite a bit of time trying various free video editors and by far the best I have found is one called Video Pad. The other video editors I tried felt like they were made for kids, had lots of useless gimmicks, lacked essential features, and were confusing to use. Video Pad is a gimmick-free tool that does everything I need and learning it’s basic method of operation took a few minutes. I find Video Pad pretty intuitive to use: it looks like it’s modelled on Adobe Final Cut and that’s a good thing. The most complex editing job I have done with it is a two hour record of a funeral.

Some of the features found in Video Pad:

• video capture facility (I haven’t tested this)
• you can record a narration (voice over) and add music. Video Pad is ideal for adding a narration to a screen recording
• the camera’s sound track can be separated from the video and/or removed completely
• basic manipulation of the audio tracks is possible, e.g. levels, fades, and cropping. For complex manipulation you can extract the camera’s audio using Any Video Converter and edit it with Wave Pad
• you can have multiple audio tracks
• it’s possible to turn a series of still images into a video/slide show* and add narration and/or music
• plug ins are available
• you can save your project part way through the editing process and come back to it later
• multi-level undo (if you make a mistake you can backtrack through a number of steps)

The free version of Video Pad allows you to save your movies in the avi, wmv and DVD formats (the paid version allows you more formats and as far as I can tell that’s the only difference). If these don’t suit your purposes you can convert the format using Any Video Converter, although conversion normally involves a loss of quality. I find that avi is a good general purpose format.

Basic instructions to get you started

The numbers in the instructions refer to the screen shot below, and having a print out will make understanding the instructions easier. To print the screen shot click on it: after it opens in a new window right click to print. In the print options box choose the ‘fit to page’ option (it may be called something like ‘shrink to fit’).

Click to enlarge

Click on Add Media (1) and choose the videos, still pictures and audio files that you wish to appear in your final product. Then click on a file in the bin (2) and it will appear in the viewer pane (3). A still picture will appear for a period of time in your final product and you control the length of that appearance (13). When adding a video adjust the in and out points if you don’t want to use the whole thing. Click on the green arrow (4) and the item will be added to your time line (5).

In this example I’ve added two still images to the time line and the dark one (the monkey) is the active one that’s currently being worked on. Clicking on the kitten would make that clip active. What you’re seeing on the time line is the equivalent of an old reel of film stretched out in front of you and that reel of film will be your final product: you can join together lots of small films and/or still pictures to make one big film (and add sound if you wish). You can zoom in for precise editing (6).

The red line (7) marks the point in your time line which is currently being shown in the preview pane (8), and the preview pane lets you click Play and do a dummy run of your final product before saving it. What you see in the preview pane is less sharp (blurrier) than the final product will be.

Clicking on Split Clip (9) will slice your ‘reel of film’ where the red line is (7). This is very useful, e.g. if there’s a boring bit in your video split/slice at the beginning and end of the boring bit, click on the boring bit to make it dark/active, then press Delete. You don’t want to have a sudden and violent burp in your video so add a transition, which gives a smooth move from one scene to another. You add a transition to the clip before the burp (in this case the monkey) by clicking on the blue box (10). My favourite is a cross fade of two seconds, which is indicated by a gold bar that appears above the blue box. Drag the triangle on the red line (11) so it’s to the left of the gold bar and see how your transition plays in the preview pane (8).

In this video of a child playing you can see several transitions from one scene to another where I cut out boring bits.

Ending your movie

Movies look much nicer when they don’t just suddenly cease, and there are two ways of adding nice finales with Video Pad:

1. Make the final segment of your time line active and click on the blue box (10) to add a fade.
2. My preferred method is called ‘fade to black’: click here for an example. Add a blank pane (12) at the end of your video, then add a cross fade transition from your part of the time line to the blank pane. I usually add a one or two second cross fade, and in the example movie the fade to black is quicker than I’d like because it was the best option in that case.

If you want to have “this movie was made by…” at the end of your final product I recommend fading to black, then adding another blank pane with text (see below).

Adding titles and captions to your video

To make a title at the start of a video add a blank pane (12) at the beginning of your video: when setting the duration of the pane (13) consider how long your title will be and how long it will take people to read it. In the time line click on the blank pane to make it active, then click on Effect (14) to add text (a black pane with yellow text looks nice). I then add a cross fade transition between the title and the video, normally one second. Click here for a cute example.

Adding a caption (words superimposed on your final product) is easy: this video has a couple of examples in the first few minutes. Drag the red line (11) to where you want your caption to start and click on Split Clip (9). Do the same where you want your caption to end. Click on the part between the splits to make it active, then clip on Effect (14). Ticking the Background Colour option will make it easier for people to read the caption. I add a one second cross fade at the beginning and end of the caption, because it looks so much better and doesn’t startle viewers.

Adding captions in this way causes the level (loudness) of your audio track to fluctuate and that is distracting for viewers. To avoid this my work flow is thus:

1. Add everything to the time line, add transitions between scenes and so forth. Remembering that your time line will become your final product, when you are happy with it
2. Add the blank frames at the beginning and end of the time line
3. Right click on the sound tracks and unlink them (be careful not to move them after unlinking, doing so will mean that the sound and picture aren’t synchronised. You can fix this but it’s a pain)
4. Finally, add captions. Another option: in this video of a sermon the speaker referred to some still images, so I removed several portions of video and replaced them with still images (first example at 4:40). This needs to be done at this point in the work flow

If I’m doing a complex job I will save the project often (File>Save Project As). Using Save Project As creates a new project file each time (the file size is tiny) and if I mess things up I can go back to a point where everything was alright: it also protects me from power cuts and computer crashes. I give each project file a name that contains the time and something descriptive, e.g. “prior to adding the Yeti clip”. Basically this is backing up as I go.

Through lots of experimentation I have found that this work flow and project-saving makes editing a smooth process.

Video Pad is excellent software and I highly recommend it.

Update: some people are reporting that they have to pay for this software, or there are other limitations. I have never had any limitations or requests for payment and I have been unable to get to the bottom of this mystery.

If you’ve found this post helpful and/or it’s saved you some money please consider making a donation. Making a donation makes blogging a two way process: I scratch your back and you scratch mine 🙂

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* image quality will suffer greatly if you don’t resize your still images before adding them to Video Pad. E.g., if your final product is going to be 640×480 pixels make your images 640×480 pixels before adding them to Video Pad. I use Fast Stone Image Viewer (portable version) for batch resizing.

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How to monitor a website that doesn’t have a RSS or Atom feed

‘How can I be automatically notified when when there are updates or changes to website a that doesn’t have a RSS or Atom feed?’ I asked that question when I got sick of forgetting to go and check websites in order to see if anything had changed. After a bit of hunting I found Update Scanner, which is a plugin for Firefox, a web browser that I highly recommend. Update Scanner also works with Portable Firefox. Update Scanner can be used as an alternative to a feed reader, but I think that if a RSS feed is available then a feed reader is a better option in most cases.

Update Scanner is simple to use and does what it claims to do. Basically it’s set-and-forget: you tell it what web pages to monitor and it will let you know when they’re updated.

With Update Scanner you can:

• control how often each web page is automatically scanned for updates, or turn off automatic scanning and do manual scans
• set a notification threshold for each web page, e.g. ‘Only notify me if there is a change of more than 100 characters’
• have the changes highlighted in a colour of your choice, or turn off highlighting: there are individual controls for each web page. Update Scanner highlights changes in yellow by default: I leave it at that, and often turn off the highlighting when actually viewing a changed page. The screen shot below shows you how to do that.
• control the behaviour of the alerts, which are visible and/or audible
• mark all changed pages as read/visited without actually visiting them

Installing and using Update Scanner
This isn’t a complete treatment: for more information see the screen shot below and the help pages.

If you’ve got Firefox installed go to the Update Scanner installation page and click the big green button to add it to Firefox.

When it comes to opening Update Scanner you have three options:

1. Alt+U
2. Click Tools>Update Scanner
3. Click the icon in the status bar at bottom of your Firefox window – see screen shot below

To add a web page to Update Scanner go to that web page and then open Update Scanner using one of the methods shown above. Next click the button that I’ve marked as ‘Add a web page’ in the screen shot below and an options box will pop up. Set the options for that page and you’re done.

Remember that update scanner looks at web pages, not web sites. So, if you’ve set Update Scanner to monitor a site’s home page it won’t tell you if one of the other pages on that site have been changed. E.g.:

• you set Update Scanner to monitor my home page at https://practicalcomputing.wordpress.com/
• Update Scanner won’t tell you if there are changes to my About page at https://practicalcomputing.wordpress.com/8/about/. If you want to monitor that page as well you need to add it Update Scanner.

Click on the screen shot to enlarge it

That pretty much covers all the basics, so go for it.

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Antivirus, firewall, and spyware removal programs: what do they do?

Your computer lives in hostile territory where it’s under constant attack so it needs the protection given by antivirus, firewall, and spyware removal programs. Here’s what they do:

• A firewall program is your computer’s perimeter fence, designed to keep the bad guys out.
• An antivirus program is your computer’s internal security force, dealing with any bad guys who get through the perimeter fence and would damage your computer if they could.
• Spyware removers find and deal with any spies who get through your perimeter fence. These guys like to send information about you and your computer to other people, and their close relations are known as malware and adware.

That’s really all there is to it. Here’s some good software that will do the job and won’t cost a penny:

• ZoneAlarm firewall.
• Avast antivirus.
• Spyware Terminator
  (When you’re installing this you’ll see a box that says ‘How would you like to use this program? Choose ‘Protect against spyware’)

I’ve chosen these programs because they’re simple, effective, and once they’re installed they do their job with little or no input from you. Think of them as your computer’s private army.

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