It was some time ago I wrote the original tutorial on how to make Age of Empires 3 work with a freeware Virtual Private Networking (VPN) program called Hamachi. There have been many questions about where to find the AOE3VPN.exe patch referenced in the tutorial, with some readers were to find it from the supplied Google search bar.

The good news is that a much-improved patch is available from Crea-Doo Continue »

Note: This tutorial may seem simplistic to some but I’ve been answering these questions for several years and still wince while watching casual PC users take nearly half a minute to find Windows Explorer in the start menu. Some “advanced” users fare little better, so please be patient.

What is Windows Explorer?

Windows Explorer is a file management system for the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems. The most common uses of Windows Explorer include:

• Copying, moving and deleting files between directories
• Accessing information on USB keys, CD-ROM’s and DVD-ROMs
• Changing file attributes (eg setting files to read-only)
• Performing context-sensitive operations on files (e.g. file compression, opening media files with Windows Media Player)

What is the Difference Between Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer?

Internet Explorer is a web browser and allows users to surf the World Wide Web (or locally-stored web pages). Windows Explorer is a file management system that allows users to “surf” their hard drives, optical media drives and network drives. Continue »

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The Challenge

You’ve completed your latest movie masterpiece and now it’s time to put on the finishing touches. One problem – your Non-Linear Editor (NLE) cannot do exactly what you need. Perhaps you would like to render the final project using a proprietary codec unavailable in your NLE of choice. Perhaps you would like to render an MPEG-2 file using CinemaCraft Encoder or other software that produces better output than your NLE’s internal algorithm. Maybe you are not done applying filters to the final video, but those last few filters reside in a different software package.

In the past, the primary solution was to render the project to an intermediate file and then load that file into other software packages for post-processing. While this approach may be adequate for smaller projects, several problems arise when working with longer video segments or with High Definition content:

1. Quality Loss. Rendering a project to a lossy intermediate format (e.g. DivX, Neo HD) results in loss of visual quality. Further processing and rendering causes more quality loss, which may result in unusable video output
2. Disk Space. The problem of quality loss can be avoided by rending the project to a lossless intermediate format (e.g. Lagarith, Huffy). However, the resulting file size may be prohibitively large due to the much lower compression ratios of lossless formats.
3. Time. Rendering any intermediate format takes time and then more time must be spent re-rendering the file after further processing.

The Solution: Frame-Serving
Continue »