I'm a big fan of open source projects because they allow for community development and composability...the ability to take code from one project and integrate it with another. There are many incredible open source tools that are useful for us recons, for instance: CloudCompare, Blender, MeshLab, VLC, and FFmpeg. The latter being the engine under the hood of iNPUT-ACE (Axon) and Amped FIVE.

Free video tool I'm continuing to explore

I was introduced to another open source video tool, driven by FFmpeg's codecs, by an attendee in a recent Northwestern course: Kinovea. It got my attention when he said Kinovea sometimes opens videos VLC can't. It's a great piece of software capable of some tricky stuff like distortion removal, object tracking, and de-interlacing. It can also do some simple, but super useful, things like partial frame zooming, annotating, setting playback units to frames instead of minutes/seconds, and "read[ing] almost any video format you will throw at it." I highly recommend giving it a go.

Thanks for reading along, have a great weekend!

Lou Peck
​Lightpoint | Axiom