Video

ObscuraCam is an Android application that allows you to obscure faces or objects in photos or videos to keep certain information private. It allows you to black out or pixelate certain areas of an image. You can also reverse pixelate, so that only the person is visible and the background becomes blurred. The application also allows you to remove telltale metadata such as GPS location, phone make and model, and author information.

Bambuser is a live video service that allows you to capture, upload and store video from a mobile phone or webcam. You can set up broadcasts, like channels, and share them publicly using social media, or share privately with just certain users. You can also view videos on your phone, and chat in real time. Geo-tagging is possible. With certain platforms, you can also save a recording and upload it at a later time.

Skype is the most popular service around for voice calls over the internet. You can also use live text chat and send files. Many international organisations rely on Skype to reduce their costs, using it instead of the telephone. It makes online collaboration between global grassroots communities easier, as it is both cheap and universal, supporting calls to landlines and mobile phones.

Screencasting software lets you record what is happening on the screen of your computer as a video file. This can be used together with audio narration to create useful help videos. Windows has at least two good open source options: Cam Studio and Webinaria. These both allow you to record audio from your microphone or choose another sound source. You can select the whole screen for recording, or just part of it.

Because of some of the challenges of editing video on the desktop, it may be a good idea to try an online video editor. Two options are YouTube and Video Toolbox. YouTube Video Editor allows you to take videos that you have uploaded, as well as other videos and audio that have been uploaded under an open licence, and edit them in a simple editor in your internet browser.

Most video editors are similar in design. Once you have learned the basics in one application it is often easy to apply these skills to another program. This is fortunate as there are no free cross-platform video editors available. Here are some comparisons of different tools:

Windows Movie Maker and iMovie come free with Windows and Mac OSX respectively. Recent versions have made them much more than the basic editors they used to be; they now support images from modern hard drive cameras, and video from mobile phones.

HandBrake was created to convert DVD discs into smaller video files suitable for viewing and sharing on the Internet. This is called 'DVD ripping'. HandBrake is popular, and is available for many different operating systems. There are now more features including transcoding, which means changing one type for video file into another. This is very useful for video makers wanting to make their projects small enough to fit on a CD, or to share online or on a mobile device.

DVDStyler is a cross-platform, free DVD authoring application. It creates DVDs that can be played on almost any standalone DVD player. You can design interactive DVD menus and the interface is simple and intuitive to use. If you do run into problems with image quality or opening different video formats, then try using a different application (like Avidemux) to transcode your video into DVD-ready MPEG-2 files, and then import them to DVDStyler.