Bob Donlon’s Web TV Blog

Adobe TV is On The Air

Well, I've been quiet for so long because I couldn't tell you what I was working on. Today I can.

The project that I founded and run @ Adobe launched tonight at 9pm Pacific. Adobe TV

Just go there. tv.adobe.com

You'll understand it - I don't need to explain.

More soon about how we put it all together

Posted by bdonlon at 10:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Why I Do What I Do (Pt. 1)

OK, I'll admit the following may seem a bit self-indulgent, but taking a cue from one of the big-shots here at Adobe who recently began a large team meeting by giving us a presentation on his personal history (and how it relates to why he’s chosen his particular career), I thought I’d pause for a minute and consider the same thing myself. How did I get into this field anyway? Why do I do what I do? It’s a good thing for everyone to stop and take stock of these things now and then, and I think it’s a good lead-in to explaining to you why I have the passion for the work I do today.

So if you’re looking for the “tutorial of the day” you should probably skip this post, otherwise, please do read on.

My fascination with television began when I was 7 years old. My father had decided to become a serial Game Show contestant (and by that I don’t mean he was a contestant on a “Serial Game Show”, but that he was a contestant on a few different game shows) –anyhow-- on Lincoln’s Birthday in 1974 I got to attend a live taping at ABC's studio on West 54th Street in Manhattan, to watch my dad compete on the then-popular program The Big Showdown.

Having already spent the lion’s share of my first 7 years front of the TV set, it was a huge thrill to spend an afternoon in an actual TV studio. I got such a huge charge out of the whole experience that I decided right then and there that I would work in the television business when I grew up. The fact that my dad won $7,000 that day probably didn’t hurt either.

My repeated pleas to mom about turning our living room into a game show set didn’t pan out so well.

Fast forward to 1984 and high-school-age Bob was watching cable TV at a friend’s house in Manhattan (we didn’t have it in the Bronx yet). He put on a show on channel “D” . . . well, you could hardly call it a “show” as it consisted of 2 knuckleheads around the same age as us horsing around in a TV studio. My friend though it was hilarious, and I thought it to be the stupidest thing I’d ever seen on a television screen -- but I was able to see past the crappiness of this particular show and realize that one could rent such a studio and put on a show and actually have an audience.

I had read about Public Access before but had never actually seen it. With a phone call to Manhattan Cable’s Public Access coordinator, and a fake Manhattan address in hand, I secured a half-hour slot on Thursdays at 5:30pm on Channel “C”, and found the cheapest studio deal in town at a place called Metro Access -- a fully equipped Black & White TV Studio, with a live feed into the Manhattan Cable master control, for 30 bucks an hour (incidentally, this was the same studio that the infamous Robin Byrd Show originated from).

I wasn’t aiming to just spend the weekly half-hour just horsing around as that seemed pretty lame. I wanted to “Produce” something – get talented people involved and make a real program. Since I was then a student at the famous School of Performing Arts (the school that the movie & TV series “Fame” were based on) I had loads of friends who could help me create something really entertaining. And so the “Darren Behr Show” was born. I don’t want to get in to who Darren Behr is, or why the show was named after him since he was never actually on it, but we did some pretty interesting stuff in our weekly half-hour, “cablecast” live on Channel C. I produced and directed the show (and funded it with the proceeds from my after-school messenger job) with several of my talented classmates working as the cast & crew (including Chastity Bono, daughter of Sonny & Cher).

What made the whole experience so amazing in was that there was this platform (Public Access) which in a place as large as Manhattan pretty much guaranteed you an audience. Remember, there still weren’t that many channels to choose from back in 1984.

Along came the time to start thinking about college, and my first thought was to study TV Production. But I was a Music major at Performing Arts (I’m a bass player), and was also thinking about that as a course of study. The decision was actually made for me when I discovered that you needed excellent grades to get into the really good TV Production programs. So off to Music Conservatory I went.

I didn’t really do anything at all with TV or video for awhile, as the short supply of bass players kept me pretty busy for the next 13 years (I had a pretty successful career as a professional musician). But in 1996 I decided to leave the music business behind (for reasons I don’t want to get into right now) and had to figure out what to do next.

I did have to make a living, and I did have some graphic design chops from my days of laying-out my college newspaper on the then state-of-the-art Macintosh Plus with it’s whopping 1 Megabyte of RAM and 20 Megabyte external hard-drive the size of a shoebox. And so I was able to B.S. my way into a temp job designing Power Point slides at the big Wall Street firm Smith Barney. Not a “career move”, for sure, but a relatively painless way to pay the bills.

I’d been there a few months when one day the head of the video department walked in and asked if anyone knew a program called After Effects as he needed to have some animations created for a video he was producing. As was my habit in those days, I said “yes” right away (despite not having a shred of an idea what After Effects was, nor any experience in animation) and immediately hi-tailed it to a large Manhattan bookstore to buy a copy of After Effects Classroom In A Book for AE 3.0.

Being a musician and having an astute sense of pacing, tempo, and time, I picked up the concepts of motion graphics and animation pretty quickly (I would learn later on that this is a common thread with many AE wizards). Being already adept at Photoshop made the interface and concepts in AE pretty familiar (as my friend Dean Velez likes to say “if you’re a Photoshop user you already know 50% of After Effects). I also understood video workflow from my days of producing a live TV show every week back in high school. It seemed that I’d hit on something that could be an actual career for me.

Soon after that, I landed a full-time job in Smith Barney’s in-house video department. I taught myself how to edit video using the (then rare and expensive) Avid systems, and helped launch the company’s in-house TV network “NextGen TV”, which was the first of its kind on Wall Street.

But creating corporate videos for a Wall Street firm can be . . . well . . . kinda dry, so I started branching out.

Tomorrow . . . on to making some “legit” TV and globetrotting in in hi-tech startup land.

Posted by bdonlon at 03:36 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Bo(o)b Tube

If you've read my blog in the past (and by past I mean WAY in the past, since this is my first posting since July) you'll notice that it has a new name. Well, I've taken on a new role at Adobe and it's still to early to talk about what it is (hi-tech is such fun that way). The name of the blog might tip you off to what general area I'm working in, but for now I'm keeping my mouth shut.

The combination of my new gig, which has me working out of an office 5 days a week for the first time in YEARS, and this little project pictured below, has kept me far, far away from the blogosphere. I'm really happy to be back.

That's my son Theo, who's the biggest joy of my life, ever, and also the source of some of those lines on my face. The sleep deprivation is kind of like being jet-lagged all the time (which I'm pretty used to anyway).

So it's a "Web TV" blog now, eh? Well, my philosophy is that production methods should be the same whether you're going the traditional route of video distribution or you're planning to chuck something up on YouTube. Because something is "for the web" doesn't mean you should cut corners on production values. In fact, the way you rise above the fray is to have better looking content than everyone else. So as far as production techniques go I'm still going to be focusing on that alot.

The encoding, distribution, and playback pieces of the web TV puzzle can be confounding to those of you that come from a traditional video background, so I'm going to be focusing on that as well. These areas of technology are still in a great deal of flux -- the fact that the 4 major TV networks in the USA have completely contradictory strategies for their online video presence is a good testament to this. This article from Forbes.com features interviews with the heads of the online divisions of ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX so you can read it all for yourself. There's still a long way to go..

But I'm a true believer of being in the right place at the right time, and the fact that Adobe is the only company with a complete capture-to-consumption workflow for web video puts me (and you) in a pretty good place to do some amazing things with this technology. We just announced a long-term strategic partnership with the BBC which will now be using Flash Video as it's online distribution format, as well as Premiere Pro and CS3 Production Premium as their main post-production toolset (which they've been using since earlier this year). The Adobe Media Player went into public beta earlier this month (click the link and download it from Adobe Labs today!). And there are so many things coming down the pike that I'm finding the "perfect storm" is swelling on a daily basis right here in my own backyard at 601 Townsend Street. Stay tuned and enjoy the ride.

Posted by bdonlon at 01:37 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

This Ship Has Sailed

And what a beautiful ship it is . . .

After many long months of work by our incredibly talented and dedicated engineering teams CS3 Production Premium is now shipping!

To celebrate, let’s make some fireworks. It’s almost July 4 anyhow.

Start off by creating a new composition in After Effects, in whatever resolution you wish to work in (File > New Composition). In the Composition Settings dialog, set the Duration to 4 seconds (0;00;04;00).

Create a new solid layer in your Comp by selecting Layer > New > Solid. In the Solid Settings dialog, click Make Comp Size and then click OK.

Go to the Effects menu and select Simulation > CC Particle Systems II. RAM Preview and you’ll see some sparks.

We’re actually not gonna have to do all that much to make this look real pretty. What we’ve got now is a constant stream of sparks. Let’s set some keyframes for the Birth Rate of these particles to give us a single “pop”. Drag the Current Time Indicator (CTI) in your timeline the beginning of the comp and then set an initial keyframe for Birth Rate by clicking on the stopwatch to the left of its name in the Effect Controls Panel.

Set the Birth Rate to 40, then move the CTI ahead 5 frames and set the Birth Rate to 0. RAM Preview again and you’ll now see that “pop” but we still have some work to do in order to make this more convincing.

Twirl open the controls for Physics and set Gravity to 0.2 (which will keep the particles from falling away so quickly) and set Resistance to 10 (which will keep them from traveling too far away from their point of origination, also known as the Producer).

Then twirl open the controls for Particle and set Max Opacity to 50%

Now let’s duplicate what we’ve done a few times to create a short sequence. First, trim back the tail end of the Solid layer to make it 2 seconds long by clicking and dragging the right-hand edge of the clip to the left until it lines up with the 2 second mark on the timeline.

Duplicate the layer by selecting Edit > Duplicate, and then change the position of the Producer by first selecting the CC Particle Systems II effect in the Effect Controls Panel, and then clicking-and-dragging the Producer in the Composition Viewer to a new location.

The Producer is a small circle with a cross inside it.

Repeat the above step 3 more times until you have 5 copies of the layer, each with its Producer in a different location.

Now to have these fire off in a sequence, select all 5 of the layers then go to the Animation menu and select Keyframe Assistant > Sequence Layers.

In the Sequence Layers dialog, make sure Overlap is checked. When one layer fires, we want the next one to fire 10 frames later, so this is basically a math problem which depends on your frame rate:

If you’re working in 30fps enter a duration of 1:20 (0;00;01;20)
If you’re working in 25fps enter a duration of 1:15 (0;00;01;15)
If you’re working in 24fps enter a duration of 1:14 (0;00;01;14)

Click OK, RAM Preview, and then sit back and watch the show.

To customize further, try changing the colors of the particles as well as playing with the different Physics parameters. Happy 4th of July everyone, and here’s to the most exciting release of video tools in Adobe’s history!

Posted by bdonlon at 06:35 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Photo 2 Life

The Puppet Tool, which is one of my favorite new features in After Effects CS3, is bound to bring out the Frankenstein (or at least Frankenberry) in most people. It’s the easiest way to create animated characters from still images, and I’m going to be showing you how it works using a production still from our “Aquo” shoot up in Whistler, BC.

These little birds were just about everywhere, and I thought it would be funny to have this one peck the heck out of that bike tire. The first step here is to separate the “character” (in this case the bird) from the background using Photoshop. I used the Quick Selection tool to select the bird (you can see the selection in the image above), removed it from the background, and then used the Clone Tool to clean up the background plate (Photoshop 101 stuff.)

The bird, the background, and the cleaned-up plate.

Next, import the Photoshop file into After Effects, making sure to select “Import As Composition” in the import dialog. Once it’s imported, double-click it to load it up, then select the Puppet Pin Tool, which is that new push-pin looking thing on the right side of the After Effects toolbar.

The next step is to place pins on the character based on how you want it to move -- the fewer pins you use the better the results are likely to be. First select the layer in your timeline, then select the Puppet Pin Tool, and click on the image to place the pins. For my bird, I put one on his head, foot, tail, and back.

To animate the pins, you can twirl down the controls for the Puppet Tool in your timeline and set keyframes, but the easier way is to motion sketch. Just hold down the Cmd (Mac) or Ctrl (Win) key and when you place your curser over a pin it turns into a stopwatch.

Clicking and dragging records your mouse movements in realtime, and you see an outline of your character as you draw. It’s really easy to record an animation this way. You can do multiple passes, to animate as many pins as you want, and you see the ones you’ve recorded play back as you record new ones so you can easily synchronize motion.

I started out by doing a pass just wiggling the tail, and then I did a pass of his head pecking away at the tire. I then animated the scale of the scene to zoom in over time. Here’s what I got:

Now this is a really simple example, you can go in much deeper with this tool. Holding down the Puppet Pin Tool in the toolbar reveals the Puppet Overlap Tool and the Puppet Starch Tool.

The Overlap Tool controls which parts of the character cross in front of or behind of the others, and the Starch Tool pretty much does what it says it does – it keeps unwanted warping from occurring. You click on the character to apply either of these tools.

Just a reminder for those of you that haven’t downloaded it yet, After Effects CS3 is in Public Beta over at Adobe Labs, so you can start using it right now until we ship it in a few weeks.

Posted by bdonlon at 12:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)