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I'm not affiliated with any of the companies mentioned here; I'm simply a (reasonably) satisfied customer.
I try to make sure these links are all current, but if you find that any are broken, please let me know. Thanks!


Cubase integrates MIDI and digital audio, with stacks of real-time effects and EQ. There are also a great many plug-ins, with prices ranging from free to more than Cubase itself. Several RealAudio examples of what I've done with it (recording, editing, effects, EQ, mixing) are here.

This is one of those products which you either love or hate. Many people on the Cubase mailing list complain loudly and frequently about numerous bugs and instabilities. Many others say it works fine. I'm one of the latter (otherwise I wouldn't have a link to their site), but I will say it took a lot of effort and swearing to get to this state. Steinberg say Cubase works with a wide range of hardware, but (like many software vendors) they seem to have a definition of "work" which is rather more generous than that of the average computer user.

The bottom line for me is that Cubase gives much higher sound quality and offers many more creative possibilities than what I was using before (a 4-track portastudio), and there's no way I'd go back now.


I've got the Lite version of Cool Edit. (There's also a pro version, which does multitrack and costs about 10 times as much.) Very good for doing basic editing and weird effects, but the time-stretch and pitch-shift are slow and of poor quality.

The "crunching" sound at the start of Ambiguity is a bunch of keys, slowed to about 1/7 normal speed in Cool Edit and put through its ring modulator, and then through a delay in Cubase.

Its noise reduction features are nothing short of amazing - highlight part of the recording that's just noise, and tell the program to remove everything that sounds like that. I used this to get rid of some rather obnoxious mains hum in my film From the Earth to the Moon and Back Again. If you listen carefully, you can hear a slight phasing, but this is nowhere near as objectionable as the original hum. It has its limits, though - I was stupid enough to record some dialogue with the computer and a noisy fan running in the same room. The noise was a mere 11dB below the voice, and cleaning this up was beyond even Cool Edit. Needless to say, I had to re-record it.


Thumbs Plus creates a database which contains little preview files of all your images. When you're looking for an image, this makes it very quick and easy to find the one you want. It also does file format conversion, and can create thumbnail sheets for web pages. Most of the images on this site have been through this program at least once. My only criticism? It knows nothing about alpha channels, and it drops them from TGAs, TIFFs and PNGs when it saves files in these formats - without telling you that it's doing it. The help file does have a note about this "misfeature," but you have to look quite carefully to find it.

Poser does the hard work of modelling the people and defining how they move for you. Just add your props and decide what movements you want your actors to make.

The downside is that the people have a very distinctive look - once you've seen one image with Poser-generated people in it, it's quite easy to spot all the others. You can change the way they look, either by replacing a body part with another object, or by adjusting the polygons in another 3D package, but - to judge from all the talk about that on the Poser mailing list - it's not a task for the faint-hearted.

Version 3, the latest version of Poser, is a big advance over version 2 (which was already pretty good). For example, you now have control over facial expression, and individual fingers and toes. You can import an audio file to do lipsync, and the common phonemes are defined as preset expressions, so you can apply them at the right places in the timeline and get a good first approximation very quickly.

Sadly, the program's marred by some nasty bugs. Mainly, these are to do with importing objects from other 3D programs (Poser has no real modelling facilities, so you usually have to import objects sooner or later). The scene usually looks fine in preview, but Poser will sometimes refuse to render it. A patch, which was due in September 1998, will supposedly fix these bugs. We'll see...

Update 20 January 1999: The patch was finally released last week. I haven't installed it yet - I'm letting other, less patient, people make the mistakes and scream about it. The word on the Poser mailing list seems to be that it fixes the bugs which were causing hair loss among users. It's fiddly to install, though. MC's recommendation is to apply it to a clean install of Poser - which means reinstalling Poser 3 before installing the patch. If you're thinking of buying Poser, my advice is to wait until the CD distribution includes the patch, so you don't have to install it yourself.


You don't get anything for nothing. The catch with POV-Ray is that you have to describe the scene you want rendered in a text file which contains instructions like sphere { <1, 2, 3>, 0.5 }. To do animation, you define an object's position, rotation and so on as functions of the current time... Fortunately, there are various programs which will let you model your scene graphically and then generate this text file for you. Moray (link below the POV-Ray link) is one of them.
The advantages of having the scene described in a text file are:
  1. By not having to provide a graphical interface for modelling, the developers can make the program easier to port to many computing platforms. It currently runs on MS-DOS, Windows, MacOS, the Amiga, Linux, SunOS (Solaris) and various other flavours of UNIX. (The source code is available if you want to compile it for another platform.)
  2. The developers can also spend the time and effort that they would have spent on the modelling part of the program on improving the quality of the rendered images instead.
  3. You can choose the modeller you like best. Many all-in-one packages produce wonderful images but have poor modelling facilities - or vice versa - forcing you to choose one or the other. With POV-Ray, you can have both. (That's the theory, anyway - to me, a lot of POV-Ray images look very geometrical and over-precise. This may be because most of POV-Ray's primitive objects are fairly low-level - spheres, cylinders, and so on - and it can be tedious to create natural-looking objects out of them. It's not an inherent limit of the raytracer.)
  4. The scene file can be processed by other programs which process text files. Say you have a lot of objects, all with the same texture, and you want them to use another texture instead. This is just a matter of a search and replace in a text editor.
The main disadvantage of putting the scene in a text file is that it's a very non-intuitive way of modelling, and it's very hard to visualise what your scene will look like before you render it. POV-Ray images that were made without a modeller tend to be abstracts, with relatively few objects, which rely on complex textures, reflections and refractions to make them interesting to look at. (POV-Ray diehards recommend planning a complex scene on graph paper before you start modelling it...)

Moray knows (almost) everything there is to know about modelling a scene for POV-Ray to render. It doesn't do animation, though - you'll need a separate program for that, or you can do it by editing the file that it creates for you. It's very well-integrated with POV-Ray - you hardly notice the rendering is being done by another program. That said, you get used to being able to carry on modelling in Moray while POV-Ray is rendering. This is something that most all-in-one packages can't do - at least, not for the sort of money I'm prepared to spend ;-) The shareware version of Moray also nags a lot after a while. I've found that this is usually a symptom of low-quality software, a paranoid supplier, or both, but Moray is definitely an exception.

Fast Movie Processor handles AVI, FLI, and FLC (not MOV, though), and sequences of still images (one frame per file). It reads animated GIFs, but doesn't write them. (This is apparently a licencing issue.) I used it a lot in creating the computer graphics for my video Ambiguity. It's free for educational or non-commercial use. Commercial users need to register.

If you'd like a link on my site, send me an e-mail and (if I like your site ;-) it shall be done.
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Last update: 25/7/2020 17:09