OStatic

Blender is not only one of the best graphics programs from the open source world, it's one of the best open source applications of any kind. Widely used in the video and animation communities, it's great for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, and playback. You can also use it on Windows, Mac or Linux systems. Look at the character in progress at left.

In a blog post recently I mentioned SnagItβ€”a great tool for doing screen captures. However, even people who regularly use SnagIt often don't realize that it's great for capturing videos of tasks and applications performed on your computer. For a demonstration of a software application or process, for example, it's more than good enough. SnagIt isn't an open source project, but in the reader comments to my post above, you'll find out how to get a version of it for free.

MetaMorf is a slick little application for morphing effects that you can incorporate with videos and animations. It's also a lot of fun to fool around with, as is Blender.

Prism is a free application that will let you convert video from one format to virtually any other popular format. You can even preview the output to guage whether you have all the encoding right. If you send video of any kind out on a network basis, look into Xvid. This free application compresses video files, which are often huge and unwieldy in size. I've gotten better than 100-to-1 compression ratios with Xvid.

Do you know of any good, free video and animation tools?

• video
• animation