Most of the time when making a movie, people worry about creating a soundtrack that matches well with the film. Sometimes though, when doing a video montage or making a music video, you’ll need to do the reverse and match video to audio.

This is easier than it sounds - and if you’re a user of Sony Vegas it’s even easier (Vegas started its life as an audio editor, and has always had a fantastic set of audio features). Sony has posted a tutorial that is directed at Vegas users, however it’s chock full of knowledge that can be used by anyone who needs to match video to audio.

Interested in a sample (and a shameless plug, hehe)? Check out this project I did several years ago. Like Russell at DV Guru mentions, the impact is much more dramatic when you have the video and the music working together as they do.

Via DV Guru

MasterNewMedia.org has an article talking about ownership of media in the age of the participatory culture.

This is a fantastic area of debate, and one that has become more and more confusing to follow as the participatory culture, where “You” Make Media, has been embraced. The article cites parts of licenses in sites such as YouTube.com where they reference their ability to use your work all over.

For me, this isn’t the interesting side of the debate. I think we’re going to see some interesting legal battles in the future, surrounding around who is the actual owner of a work if many people contribute to it. One would at first thing this is a concern that Open Source software would have figured out, but they aren’t commercialized so it’s not an area they need to worry about too much (when it comes around to splitting up the payments).

Video podcasts such as Ze Frank’s theshow are based heavily on user-created content (for example the recent mashups of the “Ray” song - Ze fans know what I mean). Ze makes money from ads in theshow. Put two and two together - there may come a time where disgruntled fans ask for something in return.

I can’t see this happening in the immediate future but I have no doubt that time will come unless groundrules are laid out now, establishing who owns what. Is it the creator (almost always yes if it’s commercial, but not always if the entity is community-driven)? Is it the most active fan?

Who knows?

Not me. Not quite yet anyway.

The Celtx team has released version 0.9.8 of the fantastic Celtx pre-production program which I reviewed roughly a week ago.

The team lists all sorts of improvements at the official forum topic, most of which I went into detail over.

Read the press release

Editor’s Note (again): I’ve been pretty sick the past few days, hence the slow posting. I am still working on my Edit For Free article though and am about half done. I sincerely apologize for the delay and hopefully things will be picking up relatively soon.

StashSpace is a new video editing website.

StashSpace, which is the latest entry in a long line of similar websites (however this one apparently is quite old - at least the software is), allows users to upload, edit, and then export to various formats (including DVD - big plus here!).

The token system that the site uses is very interesting. You pay for your storage in tokens. You can get tokens for doing good stuff on the site (sharing video for example) and I’m assuming they start you off with tokens as well. If you run out of space, you can buy more, although TechCrunch (linked below) notes that prices vary between “25 and 40 cents per 5 minutes”.

Via TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: I’m still working on my Edit For Free article… don’t worry!

“DVD Jon”, the hacker behind the hacking of CSS (content scrambling system) has reverse engineered Apple’s FairPlay DRM (the stuff used in iTunes) and is now going commercial. Johansen has plans to sell the technology (presumedly through his company, Doubletwist Ventures) to companies interested in DRMing their media but not interested in going through Apple to do it.

My first thought on this was the same as Peter’s at GizBuzz - how will he get through this legally?! As I think about it more, I can’t honestly think they went into this without knowing there would be a court battle. I’m sure they have an argument at hand.

Read more at GizBuzz

Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Magnolia Pictures, and HDNet recently said that only a “moron” would buy YouTube.

I was going to write a lengthy post on this topic.

I kinda did, but I re-read it and realized it was terrible.

Expect my thoughts on this tommorow or Tuesday.