Camera sales increase around this time every year and once again near the end of the year, but whether you have a new camera or not, there's a good chance that you'll use whatever camera you have more in the next few months because you'll be outside more for recreation or on vacation. But then what? If you'd like to share your images with style, I have good news.
Possibly you'll make an online photo album or send copies of some of your pictures via e-mail. Increasingly, though, the trend is toward creating video presentations that combine photos, transition effects, titles, and even home videos into presentations that can be shared on Vimeo or YouTube.
For the technologically picky, Photostory doesn't actually have a "pan" effect. Think of "pan" as turning your head left or right. Photostory Deluxe replicates them all:
Zoom or dolly: "Zoom" is a lens effect that changes the focal length of the lens while "dolly" involves physically moving the camera toward or away from the subject.
Truck or pedestal: "Truck" involves moving the camera left or right and "pedestal" moves the camera up or down.
Compound motions are also possible. For example, Photostory's point of view can be used to create an effect that's like pedestal up and truck left, which would move across an image from the bottom-right corner to the top-left corner.
When used with photos, these movements are generally described as the "Ken Burns Effect". Documentary producer Ken Burns used the effect to add motion to still pictures used to illustrate his productions such as the pictorial history of the Civil War.
I've been looking at the latest version of Magix Photostory Deluxe and it looks like a winner for those who have experience cutting together videos as well as for people who think "cut" is might happen if you walk down a dark alley and a "pan" is something to cook a hamburger in. If you're in the latter camp, "cut" simply means an instantaneous transition from one image to another without any fading or other transition effect and "pan" is a horizontal movement created by rotating the camera on a vertical axis.
Photostory Deluxe has a few annoyances, but the delights far outweigh them.
Sometimes an annoyance leads to a delight. When I started using Photostory Deluxe, I couldn't find a simple cross-fade transition. Every visual program has that effect, so where was it? The transitions panel had nothing but fancy effects and I wanted just a simple fade. Then I accidentally dragged one image partially onto another. The timeline suggested that this would create exactly what I was looking for and, when I played that segment of my test program, there was the cross-fade
The beauty of this approach is that image clips can be repositioned, extended, or shortened to control the length of the cross-fade Instead of having to deal with 2 clips and a transition effect that's applied on top of the clips, the user deals with only two clips.
Photostory offers 3 distinct views of any production you're working on:
The Overview
This view shows all of the images you're using.
The Storyboard
This view shows all images in a single row.
The Timeline
The powerful Timeline view with up to 8 tracks will accommodate multiple overlapping images, effects, titles, and audio. Each image's width on the timeline shows how long it will be on screen.
Beginners will like the ready-made templates, more than 100 transition effects, titling effects, and audio clips. As they gain experience, they'll start making their own or start productions with a blank slate.
Those who are using the program under its 30-day trial will have access to a limited set of templates, effects, and clips. After paying for the program and registering, you'll be able to download all of the additional features. If you choose all downloads, expect the process to take a bit because combined the files are around 7GB. Magix offers users the option of saving the installer files so that, if you have to re-install the program someday, you won't have to download everything again.
A built-in wizard is the perfect assistant for new users because it takes over after the user has added photos to an existing layout and creates a finished presentation. Once you have that, it's possible to modify what the wizard created. As powerful as this feature is, though, users will begin to move away from these as they gain experience with the program and desire to do more of the work themselves. You're also offered the choice, when starting a new presentation, whether to format it for standard screens or wide screens.
When the application opens, it displays a Welcome dialogue that asks whether you want to create a new program, open an existing program, or view an introductory video. I recommend watching the video. It's only a few minutes long and touches on many of the program's features. Unlike most applications that present an opening dialog such as this, Photostory closes if you close the dialog instead of making a selection.
Documentation that describes how to use the Camera/Zoom Shot feature is lacking and the program's dialog box didn't help much. Once I figured out what the dialog box was trying to ask me, adding a Ken Burns effect to images turned out to be surprisingly easy.
What I thought initially is that I could select a pan direction (and I'm using "pan" here to mean movement in any direction), set a "from" crop, and set a "to" crop. That's not the case. Pick any one: Direction (any of the standard 8 compass points), From (starting zoomed in and zoom out), or To (start zoomed out and zoom in).
So (1) direction, (2) zoom out from, or (3) zoom in to — not a combination!
Once you've made your choice, you have the option of applying the effect during the entire time the image is on the screen, waiting 2 seconds for it to start, placing the effect in the center 30% of the time the image is on the screen, or manually setting in and out points.
When combined with cross-fades and other transition effects, the result can be dramatic.
The management function is powerful. Users can add one image at a time to the presentation, multiple images, and entire directories full of images.
The ability to add audio is both useful and easy. One or more audio tracks can be included and you'll see them in the timeline view where you can increase or decrease the volume, fade-in or fade-out the audio, and shorten the clips as needed. Add an extra audio track to insert sound effects in addition to music and yet another for narration. WAV, MP3, OGG Vorbis, and WMA file formats are supported.
Users can also insert video clips that can be slowed, accelerated, or even played in reverse. AVI, DV-AVI, Windows Media 9, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and QuickTime are supported.
Photostory Deluxe includes photo editing and music editing functions. These aren't as powerful as dedicated photo and audio applications such as Photoshop and Audition, but they are surprisingly robust. The photo editor includes face recognition and the ability to remove facial blemishes.
You can show it on your computer screen, of course, but most people will probably want to share their presentations. Photostory Deluxe makes that easy: You can export the show to a CD, convert the presentation to video (DVD and Video CDs are supported), and create video files that can be uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo or shared via other online sites.
Here's 2 minutes and 30 seconds at The Wilds:
The Wilds from Bill Blinn on Vimeo.
The installer not only offers to install an application called SimpliClean, but will install it automatically unless you explicitly opt out. I don't like this process regardless of who uses it, but it has become increasingly common both with open-source applications and commercial software.
Offers should be opt-in only: That is, the installer should offer the extra software and then install it only if the user takes some action to request it.
That said, SimpliClean isn't malware and, if you want to remove it after accidentally installing it, the process is easy.
Photostory Deluxe is a great way to share your photos.It's difficult to think of an easier or more versatile way to create presentations from photos and videos. I would rate Photostory Deluxe with 5 cats were it not for the SimpliClean installation, or 4.75 cats (but I don't split cats). Overall, it's an outstanding application. Just beware the installer.
Three versions exist: Photostory Easy ($40), Photostory Deluxe ($90), and Photo Premium ($130). The premium version consists of Photostory Deluxe and Photo & Graphic Designer.
Additional details are available on the Magix Website.
Crooks around the world want your data and, when they get it, the cost of fixing the problem will probably surprise you. The average cost of dealing with a data breach is now just a little less than $4 million!
Granted, that number is for large organizations, but the costs are sufficiently high that they could put a small business out of business.
If your company stores information about 5000 clients and crooks break in, expect to incur expenses of about $150 per record. For that company with 5000 records, the cost would be $750,000. Is that enough to get your attention?
The figures are provided by the Ponemon Institute in a report that is being distributed by IBM Security. The 2015 report examines two factors that affected the financial consequences of a data breach and also uncovered the three major reasons contributing to a higher cost of data breach in 2015.
The Ponemon report notes that the cost of a data breach drops when a company's board of directors plays a prominent role following a breach.
It appears that if a company can illustrate that it was trying to use known best practices, the cost of the breach will be reduced. According to the report, the existence of an incident response team cuts the per capita cost by $12.60; encryption decreases the cost by $12; employee training can shave off $8; and business continuity management can cut overall costs by $7.10 per capita.
As you might suspect, stolen health information records are the most expensive at $363 per record, but stolen education records are high-cost items too -- about $300 record. Records stolen from retail organizations will cost the company about $165 per record, an increase of nearly 50% from last year.
The full report is available on IBM's website.
The high cost of medical records is attributed to the long-term implications of breaches involving this kind of information. The information has a long "shelf life", meaning that data stolen today could still be useful 10 or 15 years later.
Looking at average costs from country to country, the cost per stolen record in the US is $217 and in Germany, $211. As a result, US companies are looking at an average cost of $6.5 million for each event compare to $4.9 million in Germany.
Data breaches in Brazil and India carry considerably less cost to companies: The average cost per record is $78 in Brazil and $56 in India. The lower costs seem to be related to labor costs, which are lower in India and Brazil.
The cost of data breaches continues to rise because the number of breaches continues to increase, the financial fallout of lost customers adds to the cost, and companies are spending more to investigate and assess the problems.
The report says that cybercrime and insider attacks are the most expensive. And here's some discouraging information: It takes an average of 256 days (yes, that's nearly a year) for a company to spot a data breach caused by a malicious attack. Breaches that result from human error are usually found in about half a year.
The research involved the collection of detailed information about the financial consequences of a data breachs. For purposes of this research, a data breach occurs when sensitive, protected or confidential data is lost or stolen and put at risk. Over a 10-month period, Ponemon Institute researchers conducted more than 1,500 interviews with IT, compliance and information security practitioners representing 350 organizations in the following 11 countries: United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, France, Brazil, Japan, Italy, India the Arabian region (a consolidation of organizations in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia) and for the first time Canada.
Microsoft announced this week that Windows 10 will be available starting on July 29th. You may already have seen an icon in the Notification area. Click it and you'll be offered the opportunity to sign up for the free upgrade. That happened as expected on a notebook computer of mine, but not on the desktop.
My prediction was "probably late June or sometime in July". The 29th qualifies as "sometime in July", but that was hardly a direct hit on the date.
The free upgrade doesn't apply to the Enterprise version of Windows 7 or 8 and that's what's on the desktop system. So it appears that I'll be one of the lucky folks who will need to download Windows 10, format the hard drive, and perform a clean install.
After you apply online, Microsoft will send an e-mail explaining what will happen next.
Microsoft is trying to build excitement about the new Windows version and what I've seen from the Technical Preview suggests that most of the company's claims are based on fact. Windows 10 starts and shuts down faster than previous versions of Windows. It's still not as fast as Linux in that regard, but performance has improved. The new browser (Edge) is a big improvement over Internet Explorer, but I'll probably continue to use Firefox and Chrome most of the time.
The digital assistant, Cortana, is an interesting addition, particularly for those who have more than one Windows device, and even more so for those 6 people in the world who have Windows phones.
The next step will be Office 2016, which eliminates some of Office 2013's rough edges. The Office suite applications will all be Universal Windows applications, meaning that they will understand the capabilities of whatever device they're running on and will adapt themselves accordingly.
If you purchase a Windows 8.1 device between now and the end of July, Microsoft says you'll be able to upgrade to Windows 10 easily and that many retail stores will help upgrade new devices.
I needed something from Amazon this week. It was a low-cost item in the $5 range. Usually items such as this either aren't available for 2-day Amazon Prime shipping or they're marked with an "add-on" icon, meaning that 2-day free shipping would be available only if the item is part of a larger order.
My sub-$5 order was eligible for free 2-day shipping and there was no add-on icon. What's going on here?
It seems that Amazon has made thousands of low-cost items eligible for a new program and with no conditions. How much profit can you make on an item that sells for $5 when you have to buy the item, stock it, have someone pick it and prepare it for shipping, and then pay the post office or a shipping company (or both) to deliver it? Obviously, not much, but Amazon seems to think the cost of the program is worth the good will it will earn Amazon.
And there's more. Free shipping applies to everyone, not just Amazon Prime customers. If you're not a Prime member, you won't get it in 2 days, but you also won't pay for shipping.
This can't make EBay happy because EBay tells its merchants how important free shipping is.
Some customers will soon be able to get same-day free shipping as part of Amazon Prime. That will apply only to customers who live in large cities that have a nearby Amazon warehouse.
So maybe if the company simply doesn't lose any money on the transaction, or doesn't lose much, it's still worthwhile. After all, how many times have you considered buying something online only to find that "handling and delivery" will cost twice as much as what you want to buy?
The new program is primarily for light-weight items (up to 8 ounces or so) and shipments will come from a warehouse in Florence, Kentucky.
I wasn't the first person to encounter the new program. Amazon rolled it out on a test basis about 3 months ago.
