The Genesis Project

I was thinking about a meeting with NBC the other week where we presented Production Premium CS3 to several of the graphics artists, art directors, artists, etc...  After talking about the features and giving an overview of the suite, I started out by firing up Photoshop CS3 Extended.

Now, as you may guess, we are given a bunch of demo assets and you can then pick and choose which features to show off based upon your audience and what their needs are.  Well, with NBC, you can imagine that it would be difficult to find a place to start. However it wasn't a problem.  You see, I start out with the same feature in almost every presentation I do.  It isn't the top 'ooh ahh' feature of Photoshop CS3 Extended.  It's not even the top feature in the standard version of Photoshop CS3. At first glance, it's about the least sexy feature in Photoshop.

Yet, for me (and for people new to Photoshop), it's the best feature we've seen in a long time.  Yup, I started out showing off the quick selection tool.

If you've read this far and you're going, "what is the quick selection tool?", then you need to keep reading.  Here's why: it's my personal belief that one of the foundational things to learn when it comes to Photoshop is knowing how to use the various selection tools. 

Until now, that was somewhat problematic.  You've got your wand tool, the marquee tool, the polygon tool, the lasso tool, etc.  There's been a quiet rumbling, a groundswell of discontent amongst amateurs and pros alike. You were saying, "Give us the uber selection tool, the magic selection tool!"  John Nack and the team heard you and gave us the quick selection tool.

So, if you haven't given the quick selection tool a try yet, then perhaps it's time you did.  If you haven't given Photoshop CS3 a try yet, well...then...what are you waiting for?! ;-)

Posted by Dennis Radeke at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Shape Layers is one of the new features of After Effects CS3 and like most things in After Effects, it can be applied to almost anything.  I wanted to expose you to using Shape Layers on text.  Attached is a tutorial and project file on getting started. The only not included is the audio track.  Sorry, didn't know about the rights.

As always, let me know what you think.

Posted by Dennis Radeke at 7:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm going to be honest here and say that I really want a lot of people to not only sign up but actually show up online at check out the latest eSeminar that I'll be doing.  Why?  Lots of reasons.  Firstly and selfishly, it is like when I was a kid playing shows at bars or recitals: you like playing for a full house (even if it's virtual).  How about that for honesty?  Secondly, I believe in Production Premium CS3 and in my recent travels, I can't tell you how many people are looking for information about what it is, to see it in action and to ask questions (which you can do in this seminar).  Lastly, it uses some great technology from Adobe that is based on Flash called Connect. If you have the Flash player (and you do) then you have all that's needed to use Connect.

So, how 'bout it?  Join in the eSeminar by clicking on the following link:

eSeminar for Video Professionals (that's you!)

Posted by Dennis Radeke at 7:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Dennis Radeke at 10:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's the weekend, and while I wait for the rest of the family to wake up, I took a look at Dean's site and checked out the animations he sent me about a month ago.  These are terrific animations and they're also good for learning how he does. I've found that 'reverse engineering' is a great way for me to learn.  While these looks are sophisticated, you might be surprised how easy the basic concept is.

Dean's animations

In looking at many of them, I'm like "I can do that!" which means you can to...

Posted by Dennis Radeke at 6:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well I gave it a whirl and I have to say, I really like it. More importantly, I can see things that Adobe can or will do with it in the future. What is it? Read on...

Essentially, Resource Central (v1.0 if you will) provides users of Soundbooth a chance to download new Soundbooth scores, sound effects (SFX) or news.

Accessing Resource Central is easy, but it is not opened by default, so you need to reveal it.

Once there you can see scores that are available for preview and purchase with several different categories.

In addition to the music, there is a start on providing sound effects. Audio team take note - I want whooshes!

So, what can Adobe do with it? Lots...and it's all good for our users. An example? Sorry, I can't without getting myself in hot water. You didn't know I was a tease did you?

So, as I have started to experiment and peruse, I am encouraging you to do the same. Tell me what you think about the content and if you'd use it.

Posted by Dennis Radeke at 4:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's not that the movie is awful or horrible per se, but it was the 'cherry on top' for a season of disappointing movies I've been wanting to see. 

Here's the rub: Regardless of how much technology there is today, it's still about the story.  The best movie technologically speaking doesn't mean anything to me if isn't telling the story.

In the case of the Harry Potter movie - the story (aka - the book) it comes from is just fine, but like others I'll mention, it relied on fantastical imagery to carry the film. To be fair, I'll also mention that they tried too hard to keep all the little side stories going instead of having a good movie.  What they ended up with was an okay film from a great book.

Before Harry Potter, an even greater disappointment was Spiderman 3. The franchise that Spiderman has is just about second to none.  The first two films were in my opinion, very close to perfect.  The story was spot on and engaged us right to the end.  Sadly, I think several people involved with the movie must of said something like, 'well, one bad guy per movie made a lot of money, why don't we put three bad guys in there?' It made the story unwieldy and instead of giving another elegant chapter in the Spiderman saga, I was left with a bad taste in my mouth.  Simply put, I could have done with Sandman or the New Goblin, but not both and certainly not Venom.

I could go on and talk about the Fantastic Four (didn't need Dr. Doom at all!!!) but rather let me point you to a company that really focuses on the story - Pixar.  They storyboard and pitch the story and then refine it, massage it, beat it, pitch it again...and repeat as necessary...all the way through the movie.  As a result, I saw a movie about a fish that I thought was going to be boring as all get out.  It wasn't.  That was Finding Nemo in case you didn't figure that out.  I remember walking out of the theater going, "Wow, that was awesome."  I walked in thinking, "How could PIxar think a movie about a fish is going to be entertaining?  Maybe they're losing their touch."

Of course, everyone will admit that The Incredibles is a tour de force of storytelling and all of the animation, effects, sounds, etc are just a bonus.

Another surprise for me was The Presitge.  I caught it on DVD and after watching it the first evening, I preceded to watch it again the next night to get more of the nuances.  It had a good script, good casting, good cinematography, good story!  In fact, the movie was so good, I went out and got the book.  In this case, the movie took the kernal of the book and built a story around it - not quite the same story, but related. My point again, is that regardless of how you get there, getting a good story is a quintessential first step of having a good production.

Bringing it back to us who have budgets, we need to remember that having a good story before we start shooting is the first step to a good project.  Look at your story and figure out how you can make it better - you'll be glad you did...

Posted by Dennis Radeke at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

After Effects New York is all about After Effects and our next meeting is coming up on 7/26 (a Thursday).  If you're in the area, interested in After Effects or just like to hang out with cool people, you'll want to stop on by.  Get all the details at the website.

AENY

Posted by Dennis Radeke at 11:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Digital Media Net has Jeff Schell starting a regular video podcast for Premiere Pro CS3. In this episode, Jeff goes over new features with a mix of powerpoint and Premiere Pro directly.  Take a look - good stuff

DMN podcast with Premiere Pro CS3

Posted by Dennis Radeke at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In my inbox today was some threads and links to problems having to do with Quicktime not playing nice with Rosetta based applications.  To quote a link posted below, "one of the most serious issues ever associated with an incremental QuickTime update"

Ugh...So - stay away from this particular update until it all gets straightened out.  Of course, this is if you own an Intel based Mac.

MacFixIt Article

Update - 8/31/07:  Somehow, during one of the regular Macintosh updates, I somehow didn't deselect the Quicktime 7.2 update and whamo! I was stuck! Looking for an easy way out, I came upon Pacifist, which is a software package that will allow individual installs. It allowed me to install Quicktime 7.1.6 over 7.2 after a fashion and at least for me, it seems to be working reasonably well.

Charlesoft/Pacifist can be had here: Pacifist

It's also worth noting that a LOT of software companies and users have had issues with QuickTime 7.2, so hopefully users are staying away from it until it's all sorted out.

Posted by Dennis Radeke at 6:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Posted by Dennis Radeke at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Technology is AMAZING!  I did an E-Seminar in the morning and now at the end of the day it's available as an on demand seminar.

So, if you'd like to see Premiere Pro, especially on the Mac, then click on the link below and check out the content.  The time to watch this is a little less than an hour and will cover where Premiere has come from, where it is today and give you a good understanding of how it may fit for you.  And it's all done on a mac, but PC users fear not, everything covered here is applicable for you too!

Premiere Pro CS3 for the Mac

Posted by Dennis Radeke at 5:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jayse's growing elements

Ko's 3D Text quick tutorial - very cool

Posted by Dennis Radeke at 11:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now, that vacation is behind me and I've gotten relatively caught up, it's time to get back into the regular schedule of blogging and creating tutorials that are focused on the beginner to intermediate level of creator.  As a reminder, the purpose of this particular blog is to get people equipped and excited about using Adobe programs, to make hard to use programs easy and so on.

One of the most popular tutorials I've posted to date is the one that I called 'Plasma Fire' for lack of a better description.  You can go to the original post HERE.  Anyway, I'm still trying to build on that and hope to show you that I secretly have super powers!

I'm also continuing the tutorial that I called STRANGE PLANET. I'm having a tricky time making the rings of Saturn, but otherwise, I'll give you a quick ride through the solar system.

Both of the above may be considered intermediate, but I hope that won't scare anyone away as they will come with downloadable PDF instructions as well as the project file.

Finally, let me remind you again that we have a bunch of E-Seminars coming up and my next one is for Premiere Pro for the Mac.  You can register for it HERE and I hope I'll see you there.

Posted by Dennis Radeke at 5:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Even from the title, some audio/video people could be going, “Huh?  What in the world is he talking about?”  And no, I’m not talking about surround sound.  My response: Why is this strange?  Everything else is in 3D, why not audio editing?

First a bit about my background that you will hear repeated should you ever attend a seminar or presentation that I am doing.  My background is in audio.  I studied piano for 20 years (thanks, Mom).  I received a college degree in Music.  I studied with a fairly famous composer (though he comes from the atonal/12 tone crowd) and I sold ProTools over 10 years ago, when it played 4 tracks and cost about $10,000.  The first job I had in college and afterwards was working the Pro-Audio department of a NJ based Sam Ash Music.

So the point here is that I have a history in audio and can speak from some position of authority.  Consider then, that if you had asked me a few years ago, could you remove a cough from a live music recording, I would have answered, “no, not really.”  That was the truth based upon my experience.  What about fixing the same on videotape?  Audio programs of the day were displaying 2 pieces of information when you looked at them.  They displayed time on the X-axis and amplitude or volume on the Y-axis.  So if I wanted to remove an anomalous event like the cough, you couldn’t without getting rid of everything that was in that space of time. 

In looking at the picture above, with almost 20 years (maybe more) of editing audio via the computer under our belts, this display is very familiar and because of that, we’ve not known about new ways to edit that have been available for the last several years – namely 3 dimensional editing. 

Well, when I joined Adobe a couple of years ago, Audition 1.5 had been out a while but I hadn’t explored it more than what I normally needed for audio.  However, the guys on my team, knowing I had a bit more audio experience showed me some of the demo files that demonstrated Audition’s frequency space editing.  I typically refer to it as Spectral Editing because it looks at the different spectrums of audio (high to low frequencies).  When I first saw it I immediately grasped what I say to you here: that frequency space editing is the first truly revolutionary thing to happen in audio editing in many years.  Let me be clear as well – revolutionary is quite different than evolutionary.  Revolutionary fundamentally changes the way we approach things and that is what spectral editing does for audio and video professionals.

Take a look at the picture below.  Sure, the view is a little freaky, but as soon as you know what you’re looking at, you’ll look at this as quickly as you do the waveform view.  The X-axis is still time, the Y-axis is now frequency as opposed to amplitude and now amplitude is displayed with color that represents our Z-axis.  Black means no volume, bright yellow means very loud.

The graphic is the same cough file – and you can clearly see the coughs.  Here’s the big sentence, the one you need to remember when using Soundbooth or Audition – If you can see it, you can fix it!  That’s the difference between traditional waveform editing and spectral editing – what you can see and consequently what you can correct.  The way it is done is also cool: we use familiar Photoshop tools to select it.

The thing that prompted me to write this is that despite having this technology out for several years, it still never fails to get an ‘ooh, ahh’ kind of response when we show it.   Once people know about this, it almost inevitably becomes a part of their daily workflow. 

Hopefully, as time permits, I’ll get the chance to do some tutorials on audio. 

In the meantime, take a look at Hart Shafer's blog on audio at Adobe. 

Hart's Audition

I hope this has sparked your interest in the future of audio editing.

Posted by Dennis Radeke at 7:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of the good and bad things of working for Adobe is that you often get access to a ton of materials, training DVDs, etc. etc.  but never have enough time(!) to really go thru them.  I would characterize it as an occupational hazard.

So today, as I was perusing to get the Premiere Pro page link, I saw the Design Center at the bottom of the page. Wow!  These are great nuggets of information that are easily digestible (i.e - they're short) and informative as well.

So, if you have 3-5 minutes, stop on by the Design Center Video section and bookmark it.  It's yet another FREE resource that can help you be productive and creative.

video_workshop

Posted by Dennis Radeke at 1:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Premiere Pro on the Mac - it sounds sweet to the ears.  To some it may sound like an oxymoron, but it is not!  So, if you're a Mac user or perhaps just someone who wants to see Premiere Pro being demonstrated (that means you PC users!), come join me for an E-Seminar next Thursday, July 12th.  Read on to register.

We'll be covering what Premiere Pro is, what it isn't, what's in the box, etc.  It won't be enough to cover in depth, but it will hopefully give you enough of an overview to get you started.  FCP users, jump in too - I think you may find that there is a place for Premiere Pro in your toolkit.  A lot of media outlets like CNN, NBC, etc use some of the features of Premiere Pro to accomplish specific tasks.  It's a 'Swiss Army knife' that performs a function.

Adobe Video E-Seminar Registrations

Premiere Pro main page

Come join me - otherwise, I might end up lonely in an empty e-room... ;-)

Posted by Dennis Radeke at 12:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Also, don't forget that trial versions should be posted soon (if they're not already) and if there is something you really want to try, well, that't what they are there for.  There's a lot to explore and more people than ever to help you learn it, so when you crack open your copy of Production Premium, I want all Premiere Pro users to repeat after me, "I will begin learning After Effects CS3 because it's fun and can help me be more creative."

On a personal note, I'm using this non-travel week to clean up my office which was long overdue.  It's amazing how much junk you can accumulate during a couple years with Adobe.  This is most (not including my personal music gear) of what I pulled out of my office before I vacuumed and the like.  Pretty terrible huh?

Tomorrow (July 4th), I'm off to visit the Apple store to get my Mac laptop fixed (grumble, grumble.)

Cheers, D

Posted by Dennis Radeke at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Of course, only the second part is really exciting. As I and others have canvased the country over the last several months with early versions of the product, I can report that we have had nothing but terrific comments on this particular cycle.  After Effects and Photoshop CS3 Extended are nothing short of tremendous, new applications like Soundbooth and of course our 'Back to the Mac' march that brings Premiere Pro and Encore back to the Mac with new features certainly makes for a terrific 'welcome back from vacation' present.

So, if you have been waiting for the release, your wait is basically over.  Product will be available very soon and pre-orders will ship as soon as we have product. 

Here are a couple of links for you to peruse if this is all news to you:

Adobe Store (US)

Production Premium Page

Posted by Dennis Radeke at 8:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)