« June 2009 | Main | August 2009 »
over at VideoCopilot.net
Really interesting and of course, using things that I would never think of - which is a great way to learn new things in AE! Andrew used a couple of fairly mundane plugins to make a pretty plausible energy ball. Go take a look at the link above.
...or at least it looks sophisticated to me!
This project is going to be Adobe Beginner Classes #21, so in advance of learning all of the steps, here's the project so you can break it down.
As a bit of background on this, I got the inspiration for this while touring the USS Intrepid. There was an info wall and it had something similar that I thought was worth going through. I hope you enjoy the project and tutorial.
You can download the project file Download Project File
Anyway, below is Episode #20 and I've got a couple more getting ready to get uploaded so stay tuned over the next month and we'll have some more content for you.
The Adobe Media Player was initially designed to be a content aggregator, but turns out that's not what the media companies really wanted. However, during development, we came out with Adobe TV. Now before you go clicking the link, I'm here to tell you there is a better way - the essence of my post. The Adobe Media Player is an AIR application that installs as an application on either your Mac or PC. What we've done with the player is to make it a great resource for downloading and consuming FREE tutorials done by Adobe employees and trusted partners. There are well over 1000 tutorials available now with more coming every week.
Sooooo.... if you haven't downloaded and installed it yet, take the time to do so and get ready for a whole new experience with video tutorials. While you're there, make sure you tag mine as a favorite!
With your's truly. I'll cover some tapeless workflow items, dip into OnLocation, metadata and speech-to-text and of course a little AE and FCP goodness for good measure.
It's late at night, the kiddies and wife are in bed and I'm at my laptop for no good reason other than when something creative does grab me (it's rare!), it's hard for me to not want to capture it fresh.
I'm working on something that is really simple in After Effects that I saw on a Cub Scout trip with my son. Super quick, super easy, I took the idea and expanded upon it. As stated here previously, I'm all about easy so that people can learn from it or just take it to use.
Anyway... here's a simple still graphic. I'll explain more about it when I post the project.
To say that he's talented is an understatement. To say that he does wonderful tutorials is equally inadequate. PLUS, he's got that awesome Australian accent - how can you not dig that? Anyway, check out John's comprehensive tutorial on building his boxing promo - it's definitely a good watch.
The title says it all in accordance with the idea of 'tweets' being short and sweet. That being said, I'll comment that I'm far to old to be doing all of this social networking stuff! I'm not sure exactly how I'll be using Twitter and how I may (or may not) connect it to the blog here. Most likely, I'll be pinging my friend and fellow Adobe blogger John Nack for such advice. You'll see that he's got some tweets going back to his blog.
Back to not being sure about what to do - I always welcome some input from others on what you'd like to see from me. Until then, check out what I've twittered thus far and tell me what you think.
Cheers, Dennis
I've finished up two relatively dry but informative episodes and the first one is posted now. In this one, I'm showing the rudimentary workings of cloning. Have you ever wanted to have a conversation with yourself on video? Did you wonder how the movies are able to have the same actor on screen twice? Look no further than cloning as the answer.
As an aside, I'm hunting for some new topics on Adobe Beginner Classes episodes, so if you've got a good idea, be sure to post a comment here and I'll take it up for consideration.
People wanted to talk about which NLE to use, how they use Photoshop (one lady did a joke on the bride's father by adding 50 lbs!) which platform (Mac or PC) and of course, which camera(s) to get.
In conversing through the evening, one of the anecdotal bits I walked away was this: More people have Vista 64 than I originally thought. When we shipped CS4 in October 2008, within a month or so, many of the Adobe folks had started moving over to Vista 64 so we could take advantage of greater memory, but most of the customers we would talk to hadn't done so. Whether it was the bad press on Vista or inertia, most didn't think about 64-bit computing or the benefits.
Now, that seems to have changed. A number of people I spoke to that were on the PC platform were all using Vista 64 and had anywhere from 6-12GB of memory. This is good news. Adobe loves to talk about how we integrate Premiere with After Effects with Photoshop with Encore, etc...BUT users have to remember it doesn't just happen on a 2GB RAM equipped system. We've got the special sauce, but you've got to provide the saucepan! ;-)
Digging a bit further, I turned up this old link, but it seems to speak to what's happening these days. Microsoft is saying that their Vista 64 adoption rate has tripled. That's saying something for 64-bit being mainstream and for the next stage of content creation standards.
Switching gears a bit, I just want to offer my thanks to all of the attendees and organizers - lots of good conversation and information. Good stuff.
There are two upcoming CS4 Timesavers seminars that I will be participating in. If you'd like to join me, I would be honored to have you.
We'll be covering some of the measurable benefits of using CS4 in a video production workflow. It will be a tag team effort with Pfeiffer consulting who did the study. It will be something new and it should be informative.
To learn more and to sign up - click here
On my last post, I outlined some of the PC and Mac places I like as well as all things After Effects. This week, I'll take on Photoshop with my confession on Illustrator as an extra.
NAPP - The National Association of Photoshop Professionals. Wow, what a mouthful, but also what a great organization dedicated to all things Photoshop. When I joined Adobe, I called to get the Photoshop User magazine and initially read it cover to cover. In a large way, NAPP is who taught me Photoshop. If you're curious about Photoshop, or use it in a utilitarian fashion and want to get deeper, then there is no other resource I can recommend more highly. While I'm at it, one of the contributors to the mag is none other than Adobe's Terry White.
There are a tremendous number of resources that are available for Photoshop and they're nearly all free. NAPP has a bunch of podcasts and TV bits and there's a lot of tutorials available on Adobe TV as well. A couple of not so obvious recommendations follow:
Abduzeedo - Abducted by Design - He has some great Photoshop chops and an eye for cool design. What's nice is that he puts out a number of tutorials that are inspiring. Definitely worth bookmarking in my opinion.
The catch all site? Good-Tutorials.com brags that it contains tens of thousands of Photoshop tutorials. Frankly, I don't have enough time to call them on that, but it does seem as if they have a LOT of tuts for you to peruse. ;-)
If you're into Photoshop brushes, textures and the like, there are a lot of resources for you to check out. Typically, you can just google "Photoshop brushes" and turn up a number of entries. One I've used in the past is Photoshopbrushes.com
On the subject of Illustrator I confess my relative ignorance of this fantastic product. People think that Adobe people automatically know all of our products - that's not true. By the way, have you ever heard of LiveCycle? Thought so. Anyway, on the subject of learning Illustrator, I've got some of the basics, but my goal is to get much further along and so in addition to tackling Classroom in a book, I'm going to spend some time with quality books and vids by Mordy Golding. Mordy is a former product manager for the product and knows Illustrator like Russell Brown knows Photoshop
Is there a lot more? For sure. Honestly, there is so much out there that no one can really catalog it all. These are just a couple of the things that I've stumbled on over the years that have helped me or simply inspire me.
This is kind of old news, but I thought it worth scribbling a quick line on it. The Adobe Media Player has stopped being a content aggregator and focusing on being a single point source on Adobe TV content. While I liked Adobe TV for watching and collecting media, I'm equally excited that the creative community have a tool that can be a terrific source for viewing, storing and retrieving tutorials for Adobe products.
The Adobe Media Player page has been updated to reflect this change. If you've never heard of Adobe TV, then get the Adobe Media Player by clicking the above link and choosing 'launch now'
I'm working on some new episodes now and hope to have them up in the next month. If you want to watch what I've got up there already, you can get them via the Adobe Media Player, or check them out online here
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I like to read Maximum PC magazine for tips on keeping my PC's in top condition, plus they bring just enough attitude to keep it fresh and fun. One of their articles recently talked about 21 things you could do for free to help speed up your system. Now, I wouldn't recommend all of them for the novice (or even the expert) but this is definitely worth a careful read and apply several of these things to your rig(s).
Adobe Systems is not only promoting some savings, but also highlighting how CS4 provides some real world time savings. There are a number of resources to view or download, so when you have some time, give it a look.