Every year, I look forward to the excitement and activities of NAB. All the broadcast industry news, announcements, and new products come together in frenzy that could only have Las Vegas as a backdrop. If you haven't seen the NAB show floor before it opens, you'd be amazed at how fast it comes together. It's like building an entire electronics mega-mall in a single weekend. For a few days, it's a chaotic mix of partially assembled technology, fresh carpet, whirring table saws, and hurried forklift drivers. At a local computer store yesterday I ran into some friends from another company (who shall remain nameless). They we're buying new computers for their booth. I love it.

If you're here at NAB this week, be sure to stop by the Adobe booth to say "hi" and see what's new. We have several exciting announcements that will be detailed on this and other Adobe blogs. If you can't make it to the show, we're going to a special addition this year -- all of the theater presentations are going to be recorded and published on Adobe TV which you can watch in the new Adobe Media Player. The sessions this year include Adobe customers showing how they did some amazing projects with Adobe tools as well as numerous Adobe presentations. Be sure to catch Hart Shafer's sessions for a glimpse into Adobe's future. The videos of the sessions will be on Adobe TV by the middle of next week. In the mean time, grab the Adobe Media Player from the Adobe web site and you can get started watching premium content from CBS, MTV, and others.

If you can't visit with the After Effects team at NAB, maybe there's a chance we can visit you! Head over to our survey site to give us your contact info. The AE team has a continuous schedule of customer visits where we like to learn about your workflow and gather input on future versions. When we're in your city, we'd love to stop in and visit.

That's it for now...Off to the show!

I'm flying home to Seattle tomorrow and now I might rent a show or two from iTunes to pass the time on the plane. I've been wanting to catch up on the new Terminator series. By the way, if you're doing the visual effects for that show, send me a comment!

To get the update, within After Effects, go to the Help menu and choose "Updates".

This update is inclusive of previous updates, so if you're currently using After Effects 8.0, you can go directly to 8.0.2 and skip the 8.0.1 update.

For complete information, read the After Effects 8.0.2 TechNote. We have also posted additional information about how 8.0.2 can help those experiencing certain gamma issues. Lastly, if you use custom interpretation rules, you'll find some important information on our support site.

One of the most exciting changes in the video production world today is the trend toward tapeless workflows. With it's P2 line of cameras, decks and media, Panasonic is certainly a leader in this area. Adobe Premiere Pro is already supporting Panasonic P2 file-based video clips.

Soon you'll be able to import P2 files into Adobe After Effects CS3 as well. No transcoding, no wrapping. No muss, no fuss. Keep an eye out for this addition in an update to After Effects coming in the next few weeks. In the mean time, be sure to head over to DAV's TechTable for a great demonstration of After Effects directly working with P2 MXF files. As a bonus, he's also showing the excellent Dynamic Link between After Effects and Premiere Pro.

As outlined in Adobe FAQ (PDF) on Leopard support, After Effects CS3 is not fully compatible with Leopard. But I'm happy to say that we expect to release a free update in early December that will address key issues with After Effects on Leopard. If you decide to run with Leopard before this release, you may experience problems with various After Effects features such as the File > Import dialog and OpenGL hardware acceleration.

Until then, I'll be creating backgrounds in After Effects to use as backdrops in my iChat sessions....

Thanks to all the people who attended my presentations at Max earlier this week! For those of you who weren't there, the project that I presented demonstrates how to combine After Effects and Flash techniques to create a graphically rich video user experience with a dynamically animating heads up display. The final output is a SWF file suitable for a web site.

One of the unique aspects of this example is that the location of the HUD is being dynamically driven by event cue points in the FLV video. The cue point metadata is generated using the motion tracker in After Effects and embedded into the FLV output via the After Effects render queue.

You can watch a recorded version of the presentation to see how the project is built. It's a very thorough demonstration -- about a 40 minutes -- so grab a cup of coffee, a comfy chair, and enjoy the show. It's almost as good as being at Max, except you don't get to hear any of my corny presenter jokes. :-)

You can also download my source files and step-by-step directions to try it out for yourself. (By the way, these two links introduce some new toys that will require the latest Flash player. I'm sharing the video via the Adobe Acrobat Connect which is a great way to collaborate with others online. I posted the files to a new service offered by Adobe called Share. Share was also announced at Max, and allows you to easily share, publish and organize your documents. This is the first time I used the Share beta and it was a piece of cake and incredibly convenient.)

Enjoy!

Next week is the start of the Adobe Max conferences. This fantastic event brings together many of the best designers and developers involved in creating rich experiences with Adobe products. It's a great opportunity learn a few new tricks, to get inspired, and to meet other members of the Adobe customer community. It's one of my favorite conferences of the year.

There are several educational tracks, but anyone interested in After Effects should check out the Web, Video and Interactive Design track. It's ideal for anyone those of you who are creating rich interactive content, bringing video online, or building content for mobile devices. There are 3 different sessions dedicated to learning After Effects techniques:

• Introduction to Adobe After Effects CS3 Professional
• Hands On: After Effects 101 for Interactive Designers
• Creating Interactive Video with After Effects and Flash Professional  (presented by yours truly)

Meet the After Effects Team at Adobe Max

I'm particularly excited about this year's event because several members of the After Effects development team will also be at Max. We've set aside some time to meet with our customers to talk about how they use After Effects. If you are going to be at Max, we'd love to sit down with you to chat about your projects, the future of our products, and how we can make After Effects better for you! Send me a note at mcoleman at adobe dot com to reserve your time with the After Effects team.

Looking forward to seeing you at Adobe Max!

Please go to the URL below to get started. It will probably take about 15 minutes to complete the survey. It is hosted at Surveymonkey.com:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Z5yi_2fNpZQYa9YvbVuGMSuA_3d_3d

We know you probably have a million things to do, but if you can take some to have a little influence on the After Effects team, we'd certainly appreciate it.

The information we gather is just for Adobe's use and we promise not to do anything annoying with your survey responses. All data will be kept confidential. No information about you will be sold or furnished to any other company whatsoever, nor will you receive unsolicited e-mails because of your participation in this survey.

You may see another survey invitation from me on other forums or e-mail lists. It's the same survey and there's no need to do the survey again.

On behalf of the entire After Effects team, thanks!

I'm very excited to let you know that After Effects CS3 is now shipping!

The new features in include:

• Shape Layers
  
• Puppet tool
  
• Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended integration
  
• Adobe Flash CS3 Professional integration
  
• 3D per-character text animation
  
• Brainstorm
  
• Complete color management workflow
  
• Adobe Clip Notes
  
• Enhanced performance & multi-core support
  
• Video for mobile
• Plus much more!

I could write volumes on the new features, but I invite you to visit the Adobe After Effects web site to explore the product information at your leisure.

After Effects is also a component of Creative Suite 3 Production Premium which is also shipping! Production Premium has everything you need to create rich media for broadcast, film, web, or mobile devices. If you already own one of the components of Production Premium (like After Effects or Photoshop) we have a great upgrade deal for moving to Production Premium.

On behalf of the entire After Effects Team, thank you for all your support and feedback. One of the best parts of our job is seeing all the great creative work done by the After Effects community. We build After Effects for you and we're very excited to release CS3 today. Enjoy!

If you're new to After Effects, check out After Effects Apprentice by Chris and Trish Meyer. This book is an essential primer for anyone looking to get started with After Effects. The authors are collectively half artist, half teacher and make a perfect team to create a book like this. It's exceptionally well illustrated and does a great job of revealing the essential features you need to get your started using After Effects.

Visual effects ace Stu Maschwitz brings us a very cool new book. Stu is co-founder of The Orphanage, the visual effects studio that has brought us amazing effects for films such as Harry Potter, Sin City, and Pirates of the Caribbean. Stu's book, The DV Rebel's Guide: An All Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap, will help you shed the idea that you need big budgets to create killer visual effects. It covers the full workflow of creating a movie, including editing and sound effects. Of course, it's full of techniques for making effects like gunfire, aircraft, and treating your video footage look like film. If you've always wanted to make an action movie, this book is for you.

Those of you who follow the film festival scene might already be familiar with this excellent science fiction short film from Speaking Pictures. Filmmaker Jerome Oliver wrote and directed Missing Pages, the story of a professor who invents a time machine and touches off a war. The 24-minute "amended" version of Missing Pages is now available via Speaking Pictures or iTunes.

What makes this piece particularly unique and visually stunning is that the story is created entirely with 40,000 pictures from a digital camera. The still images were processed and animated using Adobe After Effects and Adobe Photoshop using a technique the director calls "fotomation". To get a glimpse of the creative process behind Missing Pages, check out Toolfarm's interview with Jerome Oliver last year.

Despite being based in still photography, Missing Pages makes you think about about motion and dynamics and it raises questions about the classic persistence of motion film theory. It's definitely somewhere between photography, motion graphics, graphic novel, and filmmaking.

Of course, it helps if your software is optimized for multi-core computers and that's exactly what the After Effects team has been up to for the CS3 release. When you use After Effects CS3 on a multi-processor computer, you now have the option to render multiple frames simultaneously on multiple processors. This applies to RAM previews and Render Queue rendering.

Even though After Effects has a long history of rendering single frames across multiple CPUs, some operations don't lend themselves to being spread out like this. The new option opens the door to new levels of performance, right in time for the great new hardware available today. Anyone that stopped by the Adobe booth at NAB got a chance to take a look at this feature running on the latest iron from Apple and HP.

The folks over at BareFeats.com downloaded the After Effects CS3 public preview and put it through it's paces. This is a great site for you Mac performance junkies out there. They really know there stuff which is why we're honored to have them call After Effects CS3 "an application that, by itself, can justify the purchase of an 8-core Mac". Based on our own internal tests, I can say that their results are consistent with ours.

While I'm at it, I should mention that After Effects CS3 can also take advantage of larger amounts of RAM for additional performance improvements. And for our Mac customers, CS3 is also universal binary, so this is quite a release in the performance department.

We like to live by the notion that every hour we save you is an hour of creativity unleashed on the world. Or an hour of sleep. That's good, too. Enjoy.

The word 'multimedia' should date the conversation like red Reebok pumps and fanny packs. It was 1993 and I was working as a designer in the creative services department at Aldus. Revolutionary publishing wasn't a blog or even a web page. It was a CD-ROM that came in the mail.

I installed the software and played with it all day and nearly all night. When my co-worker returned, I told him I wasn't giving it back. Sorry. It's mine. The software was CoSA After Effects 1.0 and I was hooked.

The next day I found out that Aldus would be aquiring CoSA and soon I became co-workers, friends, and literally neighbors with the team that created this amazing software.

The experience was powerful enough that my career pivoted around these events. I left Adobe (which had aquired Aldus) to take on a career in visual effects & motion graphics. In 1999, I returned to Adobe to be the user interface designer for After Effects and the lead user experience designer for the Adobe Production Studio.

I now find myself lucky enough to be the product manager for After Effects. And you know, I think I might just have the coolest job in the world. I've created this blog to reach out with news, tips, and thoughts on After Effects and related topics. To the community of After Effects users, I hope you'll enjoy what I have to share here. Feel free to drop me a line and contribute your thoughts and suggestions. My name is Michael Coleman and my email address is mcoleman {at} adobe.com.

They say all big things start small. To that I would add: Every movie begins on frame one.

Welcome to Keyframes.