Free Multimedia Softwares for Professional Multimedia Creation

Blender 3D graphics application

Blender is a powerful 3D application that can be used for any 3D graphics creations including modeling, texturing, UV unwrapping, skinning, rigging, animating, rendering, simulations, non-linear editing, and compositing. It also features advanced simulation tools such as realistic body, rigid, fluid, cloth and softbody dynamics, modifier-based modeling tools, character animation tools, a node-based material and compositing system, and Python for embedded scripting.

Blender has been used for creating interactive 3D applications, including visual effects, video games, television commercials, and animated film. One of professional projects that used Blender was Spider-Man 2. In Spider-Man 2, Blender was primarily used to create animatics and pre-visualizations for the storyboard department.

Blender was primarily authored by Ton Roosendaal as an in-house application by the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo and Not a Number Technologies (NaN). The software then released as free software under the GNU General Public License.

Unlike most other 3D applications, Blender has a relatively small installation size (installer of Blender version 2.49 for Windows 32 bits is only 10.5 MB small and requiring only 36 MB disk space after installation) and runs on several platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD.

CinePaint raster graphic editor

One of the most successful open source applications in feature motion picture work, CinePaint (former name Film GIMP) is painting and retouching bitmap frames of films software used in many large professional projects such as The Last Samurai, Stuart Little, Scooby-Doo, the Harry Potter series, 2 Fast 2 Furious, The Grinch, Planet of the Apes, and many more.

CinePaint features ability to work with 16-bit and floating point pixels for high dynamic range imaging (HDR), onion skinning, frame manager, and supports a 16-bit color managed workflow including CIE*Lab and CMYK editing for photographers and printers. CinePaint supports image formats including BMP, CIN, DPX, EXR, GIF, JPEG, OpenEXR, PNG, TIFF, and XCF.

CinePaint is free software under the GNU General Public License.

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program)

GIMP is a free raster graphics editor software primarily employed as an image retouching and editing tool. GIMP is often cited as a replacement for Adobe Photoshop, provides Photoshop-like capabilities. The vision for GIMP is to become a high-end graphics application for graphical elements of web pages, icons, editing and creation of original images, and art for user interface elements.

GIMP can accomplish image work-flow tasks such as editing, resizing, cropping photos, combining multiple images, image formats converting and free-form drawing. It can also be used to create animated GIF.

GIMP is released under the GNU General Public License as free software, and works with numerous platforms including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Inkscape vector graphics editor

Inkscape is a cross platforms vector graphics tool for common vector object creation (including paths, rectangle, ellipses, stars/ploygons, etc), specialized objects (spirals, 3D boxes), XML tree editor for direct manipulation of SVG document structure, and supports text editing for both regular multi-line text (SVG's <text> element) and flowed text (the non-standard <flowRoot> element, and mathematical diagramming with various uses of LaTeX. Inkscape also supports the export of bitmap images (PNG, JPEG, BMP) as well the import it by File>Import or by pasting.

Inkscape runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X (typically under X11), and Unix-like operating systems. It also has multi-lingual support for complex scripts, a feature currently lacking in most commercial (proprietary) vector graphics applications.

Inkscape is released under the GNU General Public License as free software.

Ardour hard disk recorder and digital audio workstation

Ardour primary author is Paul Davis, who is also responsible for the JACK Audio Connection Kit. The software was built to provide digital audio workstation software suitable for professional use.

Ardour has limitless recording capabilities - it limited only by the hardware it is run on. The software can do latency compensation, positioning the recorded material where it was intended to be when recording it. New versions also support transporting audio over a generic IP network. This capability let users run Ardour on separate hardware from the hardware that actually contains the audio interface.

Ardour's integration with JACK makes it possible to use mastering tools such as JAMin to process the audio data. Ardour can also export TOC and CUE files, which allows for the creation of audio CDs.

For audio mixing, Ardour supports an arbitrary number of tracks and busses, as well flexible routing system. All sample data is mixed and maintained internally in 32-bit floating point format for maximum headroom and fidelity.

Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (version two or any later version), Ardour is free software. Unfortunately, currently no Windows version for this cool software openly available. There is a Windows version, but the author refuses to release it.

Avidemux

Avidemux is a platform independent, multi-purpose video editing and processing program. The software features WYSIWYG cutting, appending, filters and re-encoding into various formats, project system which can save all options, configurations, selections, and preferences into a project file, and built-in subtitle processing.

Avidemux supports OGM, MP4 and Matroska files natively, direct read input for various types of MPEG files, and many other video formats and containers. It offers MPEG editing and requantization.

Avidemux is available for Microsoft Windows (32 bit), Mac OS X, and almost all distributions of Linux that are capable of compiling C/C++, GTK+ and the SpiderMonkey ECMAScript scripting engine.

VirtualDub video capture/processing application

VirtualDub is not comparable to Adobe Premiere, however, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. VirtualDub can be extended with third-party video filters and has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files. The software can read (not write) MPEG-1, but mainly intended toward processing AVI files.

VirtualDub available under 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows platforms (98/ME/NT4/2000/XP/Vista/7), and licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) as free software.