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[Enigmaster]

[Q] Editing software

[Nik_Doof]

Photoshop is the best around for images, but The Gimp is catching up in term of functionailty. http://www.gimp.org/ and its GPL (free!). Availble for Linux, Windows and MacOSX. Windows: http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/

As for video, i use iMovie on my Mac, not had much experience in this area...maybe someone else can fill in the gaps

[Enigmaster]

Cheers Nik_Doof, downloading as we speak (type?).

Now, those gaps anyone?

[Marrec]

iMovie is a great editing tool... if you have a Mac. *poop*

Otherwise... Um, if you can get Adobe Premiere... in a way that would let you NOT spend hundreds of dollars, that would be special. Premiere is my favorite.

Disclaimer:
I, nor the sexy people who run this site, do not advocate the idea of illegal file swapping with BitTorrent which is what I used to get Premiere and is the best way to get it without paying anything at all... er, don't steal things.

[Nik_Doof]

[burningsquid]

I hear tell virtualdub is good for simple video editing, I wouldn't know, i'm an iMovie guy.

For doing things like extracting audio tracks from videos and basic video cutting, I use quicktime pro. It's well worth the $30 just as a video converter, it reads and writes something like 100 formats.

For audio editing, I like Audacity. It's free and relatively powerful.

Virtualdub: http://www.virtualdub.org/
Audacity: audacity.sf.net

[Nik_Doof]

Yah i've just started playing with Quicktime Pro recently, found it easy to rip out the audio track very quickly...but bar that i've not done much, just got it for the Codecs

[skilletaudio]

There was a freeware movie studio I used once..I think it was called Zweistein. Im not video guy, so I cant tell you how awesome it is, but it was pretty versatile.

[Marrec]

[KSG]

Gimp question. I hope this is on-topic enough, since I'm basically just asking for more detail.

Right, so, I have Gimp, and a .gif that has something hidden in it via two different blacks. How do I change the palette so that one of them is, say, red? I've glanced through the help file and a few Google results, and all I can find is how to set a palette when converting from RGB...which I already know, and which doesn't help. There's no re-index option when you open a .gif, there are only options to convert to a less useful format. Can Gimp even be used for solving such puzzles?

[Seej]

If the two different blacks are on different layers you could select one layer (right-click and look for the thingy that shows all the different layers in your image). You could then select a particular layer and go to image-colours and change the hue/brightness etc.

However, I'm guessing that it's more simple than that in your case. If it's just a flat image then right-click for the menu and go to select-select by colour, set the threshold slider down to the minimum and click on the black bits. You should then select all of one colour of black (which you can then use the fill tool on) and none of the other.

If I'm not explaining myself too well then feel free to email/PM me and I'll sort out some screenshots for you

Oh, and I like using Pinnacle 8 for video....

[KSG]

Tried both, neither worked. I think I explained my problem wrong.

It's a .gif. No layers. Both blacks are pure black, 0, 0, 0, or #000000. The actual gif color index has two entries for black, and if I can manipulate the palette so that one of them is no longer black, the pixels using that second black will become another color, and hidden messages can be revealed.

The example I'm using to try this is from soogees-alice (which is both solved and OOG, but I want to learn to do this now, rather than when I really need to). So if you happen to have been doing the soogees thing, you know what I mean now.

[step]

From the Dialogs menu select Colormap. This will allow you to edit the indexed color values for the image.

[djrazz]

fro video on pc use sonic foundry vegas or adobe premiere
vegas is easier to use premiere is more powerfull

[KSG]

Thanks step, that was it. For anyone following along, my version has it as Dialogues>Indexed Palette. (Which I can't believe I overlooked.) Thanks again.