About ACRO| FAQs, Tips, Tricks, and Terms

What's it for? ACRO was built to understand the changing global media environment. By building this site and making available to the world, we have built a research facility, a digital repository, a source of creative materials, and a place for you to display your new works. 

What's it do? ACRO allows you to search or browse a large database of digital media content so that you can re-edit it and use it in your own presentations, projects, or just for fun. It holds short video clips, photographs, digitally drawn images, and all sorts of audio. All of ACRO's media files are in editable formats that are  designed to be "bits" of something else that you and others make.     

Who pays for it? ACRO is funded by a number of Federal, State, and Industry bodies that are listed here. As a not-for-profit research centre, ACRO is always interested to discuss funding and research opportunities. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have a research problem you think we can help with, or even if you just believe in supporting open participation in global culture. 

How much does it cost?: For us it costs plenty. For you, it costs nothing: zip; nada, zilch: ACRO is entirely free ... just as long as you use the materials according to the terms of use. By downloading materials from ACRO you agree to abide by these terms. 

Isn't it illegal to download media files from the internet? Not always. The material in ACRO is either in the public domain or cleared by the copyright owners for your use under Creative Commons and AEshareNet Free for Education licenses. Before using any content from ACRO, please read about our default licensing agreement and our terms of use. If you are a copyright owner and think your copyright has been breached, let us know immediately and we will remove it. 

Technical notes: This section will grow. At the moment we can tell you a few useful things. First of all, our formats are editable and the codecs we use are chosen for the widest compatability across different software packages and operating systems. Our codecs may or may not be compatible with your editing system, and we know we can't keep everyone happy. If there is some footage you would especially like in a particular codec other than those available on the website, please email us. We also keep professional, uncompressed copies of all our collections and can sometimes provide these for commercial use for a fee.  

Video is available online in either DV or avi formats. We have done our best to cater for people who can't afford expensive editing equipment, and try to make sure that you can use the movie editors that come packaged with most PCs, such as Windows Moviemaker (®©™ etc) and Apple's iMovie (®©™ etc). If you would like to try some different tools for free or fairly inexpensively, look here.

Still images are all in .png format which, unlike almost anything else, seems to work on just about everything. There are some good image editors here.  

Audio is available online in .wav and .mp3 files. Again, this has to do with a combination of common usage, editability, and quality. We have provided you with access to some useful audio editing tools, although we do not offer any guarantee or technical support for these either.    

What does ACRO offer technical support for then? Unfortunately, not much. We would like to, but funding and staff levels do not permit it at this point.      

Can I donate to ACRO? Yes  -- You can donate just about any kind of media content: photographs, home videos, songs, sounds: almost anything in the way of old playback machines. We also take cash, cheques, philanthropic funding, and have proven more than willing to enter into complicated research collaborations that will attract funding to advance our knowledge of new media. 

More as news breaks ...