Alejandro R. Mosteo

Scribus is the last piece I needed to completely ditch proprietary software in my paper writing process. It allows reliable conversion from EPS to SVG. With this and Inkscape I need no more Illustrator in order to retouch figures.

Kdenlive is another beauty from the KDE suite. A video editor in the mood of Adobe Premiere. Albeit much simpler, it provides just what an aficionado needs and is really easy to learn and use. It imports all ffmpeg supported formats, renders the final video pretty quickly in a variety of formats... It has a practical text frame creator for title frames and some interesting transitions and effects... A great discovery!

 

Ever been asked to submit a video in some particular format and under some too limited size? And you only have a strange source format or still snapshots? And you have tried the hell that is getting mencoder options right? And when you think you have it, it does not play in windows? Sounds familiar?
 
ffmpeg is bliss. Just use:
 
ffmpeg [source options] -i <source> [target options] target.fmt
 
and it will do everything quickly. Now, things get interesting because you can specify

• numbered snapshots as source with "prefix-%03d.png" (for a series of prefix-000.png, prefix-001.png, etc).
• a frame rate with -r
• a bit rate with -b
• resizing with -s <width>x<height>
• two pass encoding to fine tune bit allocation with -pass [1|2]
• the final format you like simply by using the right target extension (.fmt above), be it .avi, .mp4, whatever.
  

Vector drawing program. Useful for SVG/EPS/PDF conversions. Also has a very good bitmap to vector converter, very handy to vectorize experiment snapshots for inclusion in articles.

http://www.inkscape.org/