So, when you first load up Avidemux you’ll see:

Avidemux

First we load in a video file by going to File > Open (or click the Open button) and selecting the video file from the window that pops up. I’ve selected a MOV file from my digital camera:

My video file loaded in Avidemux, ready to go.

If you have a video that’s in parts, you can add the second part by selecting File > Append and repeating that for each file.

So now we have our video in Avidemux we need to decide what to export it as. Normally I use XVID for the video and MP3 for the audio, this is done by choosing the appropriate compression from the drop down menus below Video and Audio on the left side of Avidemux:

The red arrows indicate the Video and Audio menus.

The next thing I do is some colour correction on the video. This is done by clicking the Filters button which is just above the Audio settings. This displays the Video Filter Manager.

here I've selected Colors (on the left) and MPlayer eq2 (middle)...

Selecting Colors on the left and double clicking on MPlayer eq2 in the middle will display the MPlayer eq2 settings window. If you don’t have MPlayer installed, you may need to select an alternative colour correction filter, I find the MPlayer one good as it’s quite visual.

Here's the source video before changes.

The left half of the image is the source video, the right side is a preview of the video with your changes, I find it better to move the slider (above the sample) to a colourful part of the video then adjust the colours:

I've moved the slider to near the end of the video where there is more colour onscreen.

Quite a difference! Clicking OK accepts the changes, although nothing is actually altered as yet, not until we actually save the final movie. Back in the Video Filter Manager, I then choose Sharpness on the left and asharp in the middle, this lets me visually sharpen the video, usually the default settings for asharp are enough.:

Not much difference in these two halves.

And clicking OK will accept the sharpness settings. With the colour correction and sharpness filters added, click Close to go back to Avidemux. There are a lot of filters to mess around with in Avidemux, it’ll add subtitles, watermarks and so on, so have a play!

The idea of filtering can be done for the audio in your video, but I usually let YouTube replace my (normally empty/boring) audio with a nice piece of classical music.

If you want to see your newly corrected video in action, click the Input menu, beside the Calculator button, and change it to say Output. Drag the slider, or click the Play button (bottom left of the Avidemux window), and you’ll see your new video.

But there’s one last problem. YouTube only allows video files which are ten minutes or less. My video is nearly forty five minutes long! What we need to do is change the frame rate, or frames per second (fps), until we get a video file that is under ten minutes, changing the frame rate will speed up the video significantly, this is what is known as a ‘time-lapse’ video.

To change the fps, click the Video > Frame Rate and in the window, change the frame rate to 100.

My Frame Rate was originally 13, but here I've changed it to 100.

And click OK. How do we know if it’s a good value or not? Have a look at the running time under the clip:

The red line shows the new running time of the video.

In this case it’s now 05mins 17secs long (look back to the image above where I’d just loaded in the video to see the run time difference), this is well within the ten minute limit, so I could probably go back in to the frame rate settings and lower the rate to 60, which would make the video a touch under 9mins long.

Finally, we get to save our video! Click File > Save > Save Video, select where you want to save the file then give it a name. Depending on the speed of your computer it may take seconds or many minutes to convert and save the file, but it will not alter your original video, it’s making a tweaked copy of the original.

Encoding... a screen you might see quite often.

After several minutes, you have a video that’s ready for YouTube!

BEFORE

AFTER

My video uploaded to YouTube and playing.

There are many other things you could do to create smaller file sizes, such as resizing the video, using a different compression codec, removing audio altogether and so on, but it’s best to keep it simple for your first few videos. If you like this tutorial and want to know how to upload your videos to YouTube, how to add annotations, replace your audio for some nice classical music (like I do), add subtitles and so on, leave a comment – otherwise I won’t know if you like this or not.

You can have a look at my YouTube videos here: http://www.youtube.com/user/ronnietucker

Riverside - oil on box canvas - 16" x 12"

When creating the Riverside painting (shown left) I set up a camera, on a tripod, and recorded the entire painting process from start to finish.

Unfortunately, YouTube only allows ten minute videos, so I’ve sped up the video so you can watch the full 70mins in only 7mins.

If you’d like to see how I did a particular section of the painting, drop me an email, and I can put up chunks of the movie, in real time, on YouTube.

Anyway… enjoy the video!

Riverside - oil on box canvas - 16" x 12"

I also recorded the entire painting process which I’ll hopefully be uploading to YouTube shortly, as a ten minute video, although it’s a biiiig file as I’ve kept it at 640 pixels wide rather than the usual teeny tiny 320 pixels wide. I’ll post again when the video is up and running.

CustomWines.co.uk

You can now buy my artwork through Custom Wines!

You can either buy an original or buy a bottle of wine from them and they will send me a percentage of the sale price.

When you go to my page, which is here, you can select one of my pieces of artwork, shown down on the right-hand side, choose to buy the label, which is (obviously!) a print of my work, then a wine of your choice, add some greetings/text and preview the label:

Simple as that! So, in the above case, you’re buying a print of my work which gets me a few pennies and gets you a nice bottle of wine with a custom label with whatever greeting you choose. Nifty!

So spread the word about this pretty unique gift site, and buy some wine!

Finally managed to complete the ink drawing I was working on. It seemed like such a good idea at the time, but when you realise that it takes about three hours to cover about one quarter of the A3 page with a 0.1 pen, the novelty quickly wears off! But I managed it. I reckon that it took me about five or six hours in total to finish it. The dark background was done using a 0.8 pen, so that sped things up a bit and the black trees in the background were done with my brush pen, again saving time. But the 0.1 liner pen is almost worn down to the metal, there’s about 0.5mm left of the nib showing.

I’m glad I did it though, and I’d definitely do more. 

In this tutorial I’m going to show you the easiest way to create a speech balloon, sometimes called a speech bubble, in GIMP.

Left is the panel I’m going to put a bubble/balloon in. In case you’re wondering, the white area is going to be covered by my balloon.

First, we add the text, so click the TEXT button:

and draw a box (top left to bottom right) where you want the text to roughly be. Don’t be too precise about the box as we can move it about later.

Here I am writing my text:

The first thing is that the font isn’t very comic-ish, so (while still editing the text) select a more appropriate font by clicking the font selector button (says Aa on it) and clicking a font:

Voila! And while you’re there, notice below that Aa font button that it says ‘Size:’? Ramp that up a bit to give us a larger font, oh, and you might want to center your text (in it’s box, which is resizeable with the corner boxes) by clicking the Center button:

If you think the spacing between your sentences is too much then you can take the middle number (of the three at the bottom of the screen above) and take it in to minus numbers. The last number, if taken to minus numbers, will bring your letters closer together.

So, here’s what I’ve got so far:

If you want to move your text about, click the MOVE button: and click and drag on your text. If you need to edit the text, click the TEXT button again then click on the text and you’ll get the pop-up with your existing text in it. Simply edit it and click OK.

So, we’ve got the text, now we need the balloon. But first, look at the right side of the screen at your LAYERS, you’ll probably have something like:

The box with the T means it’s a text layer and that it is above the ‘Background’ layer, which is our panel. What you need to do now is to click, to select, the panel (aka: Background, in this case) layer then click the CREATE A NEW LAYER button:

You can name your new layer anything you like, but I’ll call it ‘bubble’ to keep it descriptive. That new layer should appear between the text layer, and the panel layer. This means anything you put on this ‘bubble’ layer will be on TOP of your image, but UNDER your text. Just where we want a speech bubble.

To get a basic bubble shape, we need to have a while ellipse, so select the ellipse select button:  and draw a box from top left to bottom left which will contain the ellipse that will be our bubble:

Now click the fill button:

Click the FOREGROUND colour box (the black box in the shot below):

and in the pop-up window, select a white colour (where my pointer is, below) and click OK.

Now click inside the ellipse we drew out a couple of steps ago:

Now we need to show who’s saying these words. Click the PATHS TOOL icon:

We’re going to make the pointer from the bubble to the speaker, so click once inside the ellipse, click once near the speaker, click once more in the ellipse then press ENTER on your keyboard. You should end up with a selection like this:

And, like we did before, we fill in that triangle. Click on the FILL icon, then inside the triangle:

Now, in the menu, click SELECT > NONE:

OK, so we’ve got our bubble. We can either duplicate the bubble layer and use that as a basis for a drop-shadow effect, but I prefer the good ol’ classic black outline on the bubble. Here’s the easiest way to do it.

With your bubble layer still selected, click the MAGIC WAND button:  and click anywhere on the white of the bubble, this will select only the bubble:

Now, in the menu, click SELECT > BORDER and enter a value of 2 pixels. If it doesn’t look right (too thin, or too thick) click EDIT > UNDO in the menu and try again with maybe 3 or 4 pixels. But you’ll have a border selected around your bubble.

Click the FOREGROUND colour box again, but this time chose black for your colour, click OK, and click the FILL button again. Now click within the border and it’ll give you a black border to your bubble!

OK, so my bubble didn’t cover up all my sins, but I can easily patch that up on the Background layer without disrupting my speech bubble. If you want you can click the MOVE button and click and drag on the bubble to move it.

Repeat all the steps above for each speech bubble you need. Obviously experiment with this and have, for example, giant text (maybe outlined?) and escaping from the bubble for extra impact.

Although I have to admit, I’m dreading that big tree on the left and the dark background. It’s taken about 3hrs of drawing to do what you see above! I love ink sketches like this, but sometimes I just don’t have the patience for it! 

Me.

But now I have two! My first official (non-me) fan was my good friend Erin, but please join my fan page to get all sorts of I-don’t-know-what-yet goodness. Click that RonnieTuckerArt Facebook link on the right-hand side.

This has been an appeal on behalf of a starving artist (who’s about to go and make something to eat), thank you and goodnight.

Keep your eye on my Bonanzle ‘Booth’ (aka: shop) as I’ll be adding more and more items as the day goes on.

Oh, and happy new year!