With CS5, we’ve updated the feature so that you do not have to dig into the directories in order to trash your preferences.  When launching Premiere Pro from either Mac or PC you can hold down a couple of keys while launching to automatically throw away your preferences.

For the Mac it is Shift+option (or shift+alt).

For the PC it is Shift+alt

You will know it works when the Premiere Pro splash screen doesn’t have projects listed.

Of course, the old way outlined in my previous post will still do the trick.  You’re just looking for a ’5.0′ folder instead of ’4.0′.

One other tip that I find very useful, is periodically cleaning up your cache file in Premiere Pro.  This folder holds all of your peak audio files among others and while individual files may be small, over time they build up. In fact, I looked at my laptop folder as I was typing this and my folder was 1.5GB!  While not all of this is Premiere Pro (most Adobe video apps have a cache folder and the ability to clean it), it did remind me that this is a great little thing to do once in a while.

In Premiere Pro preferences, you will see something like this:

As I mentioned, it’s a good thing to do for all of your apps and after going through all of the main video applications that I use (Premiere Pro, After Effects, Encore, Adobe Media Encoder, Audition and Soundbooth, I recovered nearly all of that 1.53GB.  That’s a good thing!

So, remember once in a while to do your Adobe maintenance even as you periodically do your PC/Mac maintenance… You do that right?

In addition to showing how Premiere Pro and other Adobe applications, my goal is to bring some of the accessories that go with DSLR cameras.  I’ll be bringing some rigs for mounting the cameras and talking about what I’ve used and liked.

Register for the event here

I look forward to seeing you there!

If you’re one of those people who have been curious about what all the ‘hub-bub’ is about from a FCP perspective, then these webinars are for you!  Read on for the details and line up from industry experts!

You’ll learn the real story on Adobe Premiere Pro’s Mercury Playback Engine, what it means to edit DSLR footage natively, and how you can remove bottlenecks in your pipeline when working with Adobe After Effects and Photoshop. We’ll follow up the series with a Q&A session to get your questions answered.

November 15, 2010, 12-1 PM PST
Leveraging Advanced Features and the Mercury Playback Engine in Adobe Premiere Pro with Chris Fenwick
Join Chris Fenwick as he explains his personal frustrations with Final Cut and why he decided to make the switch to Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. Chris will showcase Adobe Premiere Pro’s more advanced features and how the 64-bit, GPU accelerated Adobe Mercury Playback Engine speeds his entire editing workflow while solving a variety editing challenges. Register on Facebook: http://on.fb.me/PPro_1

November 16, 2010, 12-1 PM PST
HDSLR editing in Adobe Premiere Pro with Richard Harrington
Join Richard Harrington, author of From Still to Motion, as he shows you why he uses Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 for editing HDSLR footage. Rich will share his post-production techniques and editing strategies in Adobe Premiere Pro for HDSLR color correction, audio syncing, and camera calibration. You’ll discover how to harness the professional-quality tools in CS5 Production Premium to natively edit, color correct, mix audio, and publish to the web and Blu-ray Disc. Register on Facebook: http://on.fb.me/PPro_2

November 17, 2010, 12-1 PM PST
Tight Integration and Multi-Format Timelines in Adobe Premiere Pro with Colin Smith
Join Colin Smith, from PhotoshopCAFE.com, as he shows you why he uses Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 to create training DVDs. Because of Adobe Premiere Pro’s tight integration with Adobe Photoshop and After Effects as well as its ability to edit multi-format assets on the same timeline without converting to Pro-Res, Colin uses the suite of tools in Adobe CS5 Production Premium to speed his entire production workflow. Register on Facebook: http://on.fb.me/PPro_3

November 18, 2010, 12-1 PM PST
Making the Switch Q&A with Industry Experts Karl Soule & Kevin Monahan
Think of making the switch to Adobe Premiere Pro? Join Karl Soule, Adobe Premiere Pro expert, and Kevin Monahan, former Final Cut Pro editor, and get your questions answered. Learn how you can take advantage of Adobe Premiere Pro’s breakthrough performance and true native editing of DSLR formats. Have a hardware question? No problem, we have the answers you need to help you make the switch. Register on Facebook: http://on.fb.me/PPro_4

This episode is about animating a still, a classic, timeless look. With CS5, we have some new tools that make this work much easier than in times past. To that end, I developed a tutorial in two parts to cover it.

In this part, we dive into the Photoshop aspect to create our separate and distinct layers for animating in After Effects. As always, rate the video via Adobe TV and feel free to make lengthy (or pithy!) comments at the blog here.

However, there is one thing that I like to mention as a general kind of ‘catch all’.  It’s surprising at how often it can cure a user’s mysterious problems.

We call it ‘trashing the prefs’ and here’s how you do it.

On PC go to

UserFolder>Documents>Adobe>AdobeProductName (like Premiere Pro)  Inside of this, there is a folder with a number (usually 4.0 for CS4).  Take that to the trash and restart your application.

On the Mac its basically the same.

UserFolder>Documents>Adobe>AdobeProductName

Hope this helps you if you’re experiencing something less than a great experience.

troubleshooting,preferences,trash,Adobe prefs

I have to say that I am really bummed that my screen recording did such a horrible job of capturing the actual playing of the QuickTime file.  However, I put it up on YouTube and hopefully you get a sense of what we’re trying to do.  Let me know what you think as always.

I’ve been blessed to hear that a lot of big companies have said that they’ve watched the videos and it’s always gratifying to learn that your work is being consumed and appreciated.  No, this isn’t a call for compliments – rather a chance for me to say thank you for watching.

After Effects,CS4,Adobe,Adobe Beginner Classes,Adobe TV,Photoshop

Below are both the link to download the project and all associated files (it’s about 12MB total – mostly the big PSD for the fog) and the link to episode #27.  Be sure to check out the other Adobe TV episodes related to this project starting with episode #24.

The Bigger Project After Effects Project download

I’ve always been fond of saying that After Effects can – "take anything in, do anything to it and output anything."  Or another catchphrase you might hear from me is, "If you can think, you can do it in After Effects." 

A lot of this power comes from the scripting abilities in After Effects. Scripting offers users the ability to automate a bunch of things and in some cases extend the functionality of After Effects today.

Now before you jump from this blog entry, read this – there is a suggested donation amount for any of the scripts, but Lloyd and the rest of the folks there make all of the scripts available for free.  You can add anything to the cart and then change the price to $0.00 if you so choose.  My thoughts would be that if you try it and use it a lot, then you should throw them a few bucks. Help support them so that they keep doing it!!!

Lloyd Alvarez is one of the primary contributors, but there are a number of things there that are worth getting.  Below are a few of the ones I really like. 

BG Renderer – allows you to have background rendering in After Effects.  Perhaps not as full featured as Nucleo Pro, but it works with CS4 today and it’s free!

Throttle 1.2 – Allows you to have access to many of the most important preferences inside of After Effects.  Great little utility for regular AE users.

Mocha Import – If you’re using Mocha AE (a part of AE CS4) for tracking, this could be a very powerful little script for you to utilize.  I’ve been meaning to work on a tracking/stabilize project for my Adobe TV show, so I may incorporate this into the upcoming episode.  Watch the video as well – explains what this script does.

Create3DShapes – I was one of the guys that was bummed when we stopped licensing 3D cubic lite from Digital Anarchy  This product has since moved over to Red Giant but now there is a great way to create some basic 3D shapes inside of After Effects without going crazy.

One thing you’ll want to know is that many of these scripts can be a dockable element inside of AE CS3 or later.  There is a video tutorial on how to do this.  I highly recommend it. 

It’s probably been done a million times, but hey(!) I focus on the basics so everything is fair game! In all seriousness, if you’re relatively new to Photoshop and are a video person, this tutorials is instructive simply for using a couple of the more powerful selection tools.  As I mention in the tutorial itself, knowing the selection tools in Photoshop is the key to being a good Photoshop user.

As always, I would love to get some feedback on the episodes.  Rate it in Adobe TV for sure, but if you have a thought or comment, please come back here and drop me a line.

Maximum PC: Make your PC faster

Go there now – Layers Magazine 100 Wicked Tips!

PS – you’ll find the AE and PR tips towards the bottom of this article.

I’ve got another part of this extravaganza coming up on Adobe TV and I’ll post about it when it goes live.  Today, I was giving a new plugin a try when I thought about something with 3D text: what if I applied a Puppet Tool to the basic text layer?

The result is below for you to view.  I didn’t polish it up or even finish the thought – it’s just an experiment to see how it would look.  If you want to grab this simple project to dissect, here it is

3D Text with Puppet Tool

In closing, let me say that acknowledging that you have a problem is the first step to curing it.  Repeat after me, "Hi, my name is Dennis and I’m a 3D addict."

"Hi Dennis."

The Adobe forums have gotten a refresh and there’s some new information that you can check out.  The basic link is here: Adobe Forums

Some of the ones that video people might find interesting are below

Premiere Pro

After Effects

Encore

Soundbooth

and of course… Photoshop

They’re nothing special, but as elements in a greater design, they do offer some wonderful random things that can be a part of a larger design.  I particularly like my "vegas lights" strobe at the end.  It does a passable job of creating flickering lights.

In a nutshell, take this project and hit the "UU" key on layers to explore where the Wiggle expression has been used.  If you’re new to the "UU" key, it’s hitting the "U" key twice quickly. This will reveal any parameter that has been modified AND any keyframes on the given layer.

Enjoy.

Download Wiggling AE Project File

As an update, I received an email from Todd Kopriva who handles a lot of the technical writing for Adobe products (and a great resource as well) and he offered me a few links that you might find interesting

About Expressions

Expression Reference

Wiggle with start/stop

Also, Todd pointed out that instead of "UU" we can also do "EE" which just reveals all properties modified and NOT any with keframes. There is why I like After Effects, no matter how much you know, there’s ALWAYS something else you can learn about it.

Cameras still get me a little queasy figuratively speaking and 3D is deep.  Expressions by comparison are a walk in the park.  The point is though that none of these are necessarily hard and in developing this tutorial, I think each of these three things are handled in a simple manner – which is the whole point for me.

In the ‘giving credit where credit is due’ department, VideoCopilot.net is responsible for most of this tutorial and/or it’s genesis.  The VideoCopilot site is a perfect example of where you should go after playing around with my stuff.  In other words, you should quickly graduate from my beginner stuff to more intricate and better tutorials from many artists that do AE tutorials.  In watching a particular tutorial, I thought that there were a lot of easy elements that Andrew (Mr. CoPilot) didn’t really cover and so thought they were worth a beginner style tutorial with a little extra thrown in.

Back to the tutorial – The 3D camera has no keyframes (nice!), the 3D is even easier and more faked than normal (double nice!) and the expression is so easy even a caveman can do it (sorry Geico…).

One note, you’ll need to do a font substitution or head over to DaFont.com to get "28 Days Later" font.  Be warned though, the site does put on some mild spying cookies on if you’re on the PC, so be warned about running AdAware, Spybot or some other software afterwards.  Both of the aforementioned softwares are what I use in conjunction with Grisoft’s free Anti-Virus.

So, download the the project file and enjoy.

Download Camera Shake Project

I really enjoyed doing this one and couldn’t leave well enough alone.  That being said, this is nothing new to an experience AE designer.  This has been done and taught by many great people.  In fact, I must give do credit to Danny Princz in NYC as well as FXPHD.com because it’s from them that I originally learned this technique.

And while I don’t use this technique, I should also mention Maltaannon’s great plug-in that uses After Effect’s Shape Layers feature.  It’s free, so have at it.  You can get it here.

Once the video is live on AdobeTV, I will post an embedded version in this blog entry.

Download 3D Text Project File

2-28-09 Update: The episode in question is below and you can get it via Adobe TV or through the Adobe Media Player. As an aside, it was four years ago today that I officially joined Adobe!

Well, of course there some little bug fixes that you probably have never encountered. Or if you are encountering them, then hopefully this addresses them! But more importantly it give you some wonderful new functionality!

Here’s what’s new about this version
OMF Export – for those people doing some serious audio work or need to interface with ProTools, here’s the ticket. This has been a long time coming and I’m glad to say we’re finally there.

AAF Import/Export – This is for people who want to interact with Avid systems. It can’t get any better than this can it?

Final Cut Pro Import – Oh snap…it can… This is not, I repeat NOT an EDL. It’s much better. Cuts, PIPs, transitions, keyframes of basic transforms like scale and position all come across. If you’re a FCP editor whose wanted to have some of the integration of Production Premium, well now you can. Edit in FCP, export to XML, import into Premiere Pro and finish with whatever other Adobe applications you need to use.

Other things: Surcode support, edit in Audition (Windows only), and some things that will allow our third parties to access some necessary funtionality for their hardware.

So, in one fell swoop, we’ve opened up interoperability between the major audio system of the world and the two major competitors in the NLE world. We want to play nice with everyone!

By the way, you may have seen some chatter about the RED plugin. It’s coming but we’ve held off a little bit longer because we’re getting some great feedback from users about whats needed. This will be an evolving process, but it will be worth the wait.

Get the software below…

Here’s the link for Mac: Premiere Pro 4.0.1 Mac

And here’s the link for PC: Premiere Pro 4.0.1 PC

I learned this somewhat by accident as I did an eseminar and another Adobe coworker happened to mention it.  I tried it and sure enough, it works just fine. It opens up some interesting possibilities on reusing content, but also as another tool to create motion graphics for Premiere Pro.  This morning, I reviewed a document that mentioned every new feature of Premiere Pro and I didn’t see it there.

What’s good for all of us Premiere Pro users is that our flexibility and options continue to grow.  Good news for everyone…

So, take a look and let me know what you think. Enjoy…