A free tool for grabbing screen action and a website (YouTube like) for publishing vids. http://wegame.com/ - can store to hard drive for making machinima or upload directly. Great for quick screen grabs but uncertain at present about making machinima.
The Straad Players use Second Life to produce Machinima but there are other engines with different pros and cons. There are some purpose built engines for Machinima and these can be found in the tool category. (click read more)
As yet untested by the Straads but it is a free download and looks really promising. Check it out here
Here's what they say:
Celtx is the world's first fully integrated solution for media pre-production and collaboration. It replaces old fashioned 'paper, pen & binder' media creation with a digital approach to writing and organizing that's more complete, simpler to work with, and easier to share.
Based on YouTube all time views AND that display a unique machinima skill, aesthetic interest or have educational value...
These videos are not
· Brands showing off individual events or builds *
· Second Life tutorial videos· Short sexual or 'gag' videos about SL
· Music performance (just avatar band on stage miming) **
· Not RL reportage about SL (eg: these include significant inworld footage)
* apart from 21 as it shows exceptional machinima skill and 8 as it is generic
** Apart from no.1 as it is the number one viewed SL video on YouTube
Gimpshop is an open source image editor free to download here [available for all platforms] Gimpshop is a version of the equally free GIMP which has been edited to more closely Adobe Photoshop Photoshop has become pretty much the industry standard in image editing but it is not free. Photoshop Elements is a cheaper cut down version and comes with some cameras or computers. Elements does everything you need but there is a general consensus of opinion that after version 2, subsequent versions got more clumsy and less useable.