Then there are places where you can preview and download music for a fixed fee per piece (Shockwave Sound and Q Music being my preferred ones), and then there is our dear Kevin MacLeod. He offers his collection of music free, as long as he gets credit in the film. If, for some reason, you cannot or do not want to credit him, you can pay a little fee (30 USD).

And now music artist Moby has made his own mini-website where he published over 60 tracks that can be used free of charge for non-commercial productions (commercial productions have to pay a standard fee, the full amount of which will be donated to a good cause). Here’s the incredibly blurry announcement:

As usual in my improve series, I’m not going to talk about the content, but the technical side.

The goods

They used a tripod, they used proper white balance.

Nice to have some opening graphics, it gives the whole piece more weight. Though for my feeling, the title should have the same graphic feel and sound as the opening graphic.

Camera

There is way too much headspace. Tilt down a bit. Or even better: use 16:9 widescreen format, which works much better for 2 persons.

Change perspective. Flat on is usually boring. In an interview situation, I would move the camera so we see more of the interviewee’s face, while getting the interviewer more in profile.

Get closer. When you see that a person is talking for a longer time, zoom in. Preferably, have one camera locked on a two shot, and then have a second operated camera, that zooms in — and follows — the interviewee. Thus you can cut between those two, hiding those ugly zooms. If need be, then close-ups of the interviewer can be shot right after the interview.

Watch your background. White background is about the worst for a camera, it draws attention. Jeremy’s head gets almost lost in the background.

Sound

This is the weirdest miking I have seen in a while One huge attention-drawing microphone on the interviewer, and one tiny lavaliere mike on Matt, where no effort was made to hide the cable.

Interviewer and interviewee really should have the same type of microphone, otherwise it just looks ridiculous. Preferably a lavaliere — this would also help the informal atmosphere. And a lavaliere that is hidden under the sweater. If you don’t have time for that, put the wire behind the back of the interviewee.

If you have to use two totally different mikes, do us the favor and use 10 seconds to even those microphone levels in-camera. As it is now, Jeremy is way louder than Matt. If anything, the interviewee should be loudest.

Flash files (from good to awesomely mindblowing)

Flash Den is a relatively new site, offering mainly Flash files. They have all from small pre-loaders to full webpages. And most of them of an exceptional quality.

In addition they also have royalty free music loops, some video files and graphics on offer. Plus a few fonts. But their main business is Flash.

Stock Photos (affordable)

iStockPhotos offers royalty free photographs for all kinds of usages. You can chose the size of the picture you buy, and a photo can cost just above $1. They have gained both size and quality, but unfortunately have increased the prices, while lowering the pay-out for the original photographers.

Still, you can easily browse for hours in their exhaustive library, searching for subjects, themes, emotions, colors, even whitespaces. Additionally, iStockPhoto also offers graphics, good vectors, cheap videos and lower quality flash files. One nice feature is that you can save interesting photos in your own lightboxes, leaving them for purchase at a later point. Or you can share your lightbox with a client.

If you have some good photos rotating away on your harddisk, you can start selling those pictures at iStockPhoto. Hey, you even can get some of my photos there.

Ajaxising (without knowing Ajax)

For the portfolio section of our new webpage I used a donation-ware component by Kevin Miller, called LightWindow. Besides adding that Ajax feel to your website (opening links without having to re-load), it also enables you to play back pretty much any media format around. Lots of options.

And if you use it, send some PayPal love to Kevin, so that he can get his well deserved Power Book Pro.

Shopping Cart (open source)

If you need a cart system for your website and you want to avoid having to pay hundreds of dollars in royalty payments (and probably some monthly fees), Zen Cart is definitely worth a look. Though it has a somewhat messy admin interface, it leaves you space for many tweakings. There are numerous extensions available, such as plug-ins, language packs, buttons and a couple of free templates.

See it live on our company’s brand new (and Norwegian language) shopping site.

Content management (minus the pain)

Now 1 1/2 years old, this blog has always run on WordPress. Though I’ve had some Windows like experiences, by and large I am impressed by this powerfool — and free — tool. So impressed, that I have used it as the CMS for our new webpage.

With the new version of WordPress, I can even be lax with using links. A page that is really located at, say, www.abitofmagic.no/english/services/eng-crew can also be reached by www.abitofmagic.no/eng. The magic happens without me having to do anything.

Of the many good plug-ins around, the one I want to mention today is WordPress automated plug-in, which takes the pain out of upgrading your blog. Which is especially nice when the frequency of those updates increases, and exponentially higher when you have more than one copy of WP running. I’ve used it on most of the 5+ WordPress sites that I maintain, without a single glitch.

Graphic Freebies (quality, not quantity)

One of my favourite blogs on graphic design, BitBox, regularly offers high quality freebies, be it web 2.0 buttons, high res photoshop brushes or vector graphics.

Photoblogging (free)

Pixelpost is to photos what wordpress is to writing. One great software to easily, yet beautifully, churn your digital photos into an on-going on-line publication. Lots of followers, translating to many exciting add-ons. Recently they also took the important step of easing the process of upgrading to new versions.

For fun, I am occasionally posting pictures on my pblog over at visualnary.com

Wishes

What I would love are the following future features:

• De-interlacing
• Automatic naming and numbering of exported frames.
• Option to export in native QT size (with option of having 16:9). Option of having 25%, 50%, 200%, 400% sizes. Throw in some advanced resizing calculations, and this could become a powerful tool that people would spend money on. This reviewer included.
• Display of current window size.
• A Text saying “Drop QT file here” instead of the blue screen — this threw me off at first; blue screen to me suggested that I would have to plug in a DV source.
• Support for keyboard control. Space = start/stop. Arrow left/right = one frame advance/back.

That said, great little – and free – program.(Review at Macupdate.)