Multimedia Live

This distro provides all useful features of professional software for designers and the best part is they can work on files from anywhere in the world!

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

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Let's assume you're a designer (working on 3D or 2D tools) or a sound artist, and on a vacation you suddenly get a call from your boss asking you to immediately work on some file and send it back to him. And you don't have a laptop with you. In such a scenario if you have the PCQLinux 2009 DVD or the PCQLinux 2009 Multimedia Live USB, you can wriggle your way out. All you have to do is go to a cybercafé or to any shared computer, boot the machine with the DVD or the USB and you will get instant access to the tools such as Scribus (layout software equivalent of Quark), Gimp (Graphic manipulation software equivalent to Photoshop), Blender (3D modelling software) and Audacity (Sound mixing and re-mixing software). And you can start working on them immediately. Once you are done with, you can either save the created files to a USB or mail them directly by using the Firefox browser. And once you
reboot with the DVD/USB, the machine will be back without even a single trace of your IP and creativity. This particular distro is also useful for those enterprises who want to give Open Source DTP and modelling software a try but don't want to shift to Linux. Once they have fully tested its utility, they may install it later on to a machine's hard disk. Let's see its various tools.

Scribus
Scribus is a DTP and Layout software which can be used for creating layouts of newspapers, magazines, CD Jackets, books, etc. The software has all necessary features such as layers, PDF export, output collection, pagination, bleeding, etc. I showed this Live distro to a designer who has been working with Quark for the last 10 years and his view is that this software is equally useful as Quark and has some added features as well.

You can run Scribus from Start  Graphics  Scribus

Blender
Want to do 3D modeling on your PC but are hesitant because of the price and size of the software? Then try Blender 3D. It is a free and Open Source software and comes pre-packaged with PCQLinux 2009 Multimedia Live distro. But, being free doesn't mean that it compromises on features. The Blender foundation, formed in 2002, released Blender as an Open Source product. And, it is now available for Linux, Windows (all versions), Mac OS X, FreeBSD 4.2, Irix 6.5 and Solaris 6.8 platforms under the GPL license, and is one of the most renowned 3D modeling application available today.

A standard two column newsletter designed in Scribus.

Blender's interface is quite radical, to say the least. Though you can customize the interface, by default it is divided into three parts: 3D Viewport, the Buttons palette and the User Preferences menu. Viewports are large squares that the interface is divided into. They show different views (top, front, side, camera, etc ) of an object. The Buttons palette is the area beneath Viewports. You can control most operations from here.

The Audacity audio editor provides a slew of features for amateurs and pros alike. An intuitive GUI eases the process of editing audio files.

Described above is the default interface. Depending on the work that you choose to do (modelling, animation, sequence editing), you get a corresponding screen in place of the default interface. The modeling screen is the default screen.

Starting Belnder is very simple, all you have to do is go to start  Graphics  Blender.

GIMP
I am sure most of us know about GIMP. This software is available for all OSes including Windows, Linux, MAC and is pretty renowned. We have added the latest version of GIMP in our Multimedia Live distro. You can run it from start --> Graphics  --->GIMP.

Why pay over the roof for Adobe PhotoShop when the same functionality can be had with this nifty image editing software?

For those who don't know, GIMP is a graphic manipulation software and is the Open Source equivalent to Photoshop. Additionally, now GIMP also supports certain level of animation as well. This is a very useful tool and most of the icons and images in PCQLinux, since the days of PCQLinux 8.0, are created using this software.

Audacity
Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor that can be used by amateurs and professionals alike. This tool is beneficial for basic editing of sound loops, editing voice over for multimedia presentations and adding some basic effects to sound. You can run Audacity from Start  Sound and Video  Audacity. It sports a simple and easy-to-use GUI, which consists of the menu bar, the main timeline, tools, player and volume controls.

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