Over the past year I have produced a few videos that needed a voice over track. I tried a few local shops to do the work for me and everything turned out great, but it took a long time to book the talent, book the studio and wait for the track to be edited and sent to me.

It wasn’t until I found Voice123 that recording VO tracks became fun again. Voice123 is a free service for the buyer that connects you with great voice talent. It only takes a few minutes to post a project, set your budget and within 24 hours you should already have a few auditions to review. Make sure to try Voice123 for your next project.

Web link: Voice123

The great folks at Red Giant Software put together a useful resource for motion graphic designers called Red Giant People. Much like the now defunct Trapcode People website, Red Giant People is a place where anyone can submit their own After Effects presets. The library is already off to a good start and is a growing resource of free goodies.

Ever wanted to add some spice to your data being presented in After Effects? Get ready to be blown away by Yanobox‘s new plugin called Nodes for After Effects, Final Cut Pro and Motion. This plugin offers editors and Motion graphics artists a unique tool to combine text and graphics into beautiful 3D animations. Nodes lets you play with a number of different presets, or you can create your own graphic vocabulary by customizing all available parameters.

You can use MPEG Streamclip to: open most movie formats including MPEG files or transport streams; play them at full screen; edit them with Cut, Copy, Paste, and Trim; set In/Out points and convert them into muxed or demuxed files, or export them to QuickTime, AVI, WMV, DV and MPEG-4 files with more than professional quality, so you can easily import them in Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Toast 6, 7, 8, and use them with many other applications or devices.
Supported input formats: MPEG, VOB, PS, M2P, MOD, VRO, DAT, MOV, DV, AVI, MP4, TS, M2T, MMV, REC, VID, AUD, AVR, VDR, PVR, TP0, TOD, M2V, M1V, MPV, AIFF, M1A, MP2, MPA, AC3, …

filmBurn.ffx is an After Effects 7.0 Animation Preset that automatically creates the overexposed “roll-out” effect, where the tail (and the head if you want) of a clip flickers into overexposure. It’s aware of the in- and out-points of your footage layers in the After Effects timeline, so you can experiment with different effects just by trimming your layers differently.

This chart demonstrats the magnitude of standard definition footage to higher resolution footage.