You spend a lot of money creating an image for your business. You spend a lot of time making sure that image stays consistent. You’d never consider purposefully cheapening that image by taking shortcuts just to save money, but it’s tempting; especially when you’re confronted with the potentially high cost of having custom art created. Clipart, stock photography, stock video and music, even complete templates for websites, commercials, animated graphics, and other media, have opened up a new world of creativity in which the marketing department can often times become the creative department. Think of the savings! Read more »

I’ve been writing, producing, and creating informational video productions for many years. In almost every production I’ve done, music has been one of my first considerations, and it has almost never been brought up by the client until I have mentioned it.

Music, in most cases, is essential to establishing the pace of the edit, creating a mood, smoothing out transitions, and adding to the impact of the overall presentation. It tells the viewer how to feel. It is not something which should just be slapped on after the editing is done; it should be a carefully considered part of any video production.
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So the battle continues to rage – and it may indeed prove to be a tempest in a teapot – only time will tell. There are voices of reason on both sides of the argument, which, in case you haven’t been watching, is whether the Adobe Creative Cloud is a step forward in software licensing, or whether it’s another example of corporate greed running rampant through the software industry.
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In my last post, which barely covered what’s new in After Effects, I promised to continue with the Creative Suite, so here we are at Premiere Pro. Most of you know at least a little bit about Premiere Pro, and if you frequent the Creative Cow forums, you’ve probably read about the industry controversy surrounding Final Cut Pro X, or FCPX. In a nutshell, Apple turned what was an industry standard tool in the medium- to high-end post-production world into what many users considered a joke. Many believe that it was an attempt on Apple’s part to innovate – many believe it was an attempt to dumb it down and broaden their apps market. Read more »

I’m as guilty as anyone else when it comes to using new features – my day-to-day work gets in the way of jumping on what’s new, then using it for projects. That said, I thought I’d go over a few of the bells, whistles, and fixes which have been added to CS6 (I own the Master Collection, but mostly use the applications you’d see in Production Premium).

Let’s start with my main tool, After Effects. The really big one is something you’ll never see, but you will notice. Full 64-bit performance, with a Global Performance Cache which will make you wonder how you ever worked without it! It involves several features, and you can get the best explanation straight from Adobe. In essence, you get faster performance while you’re working, a RAM cache that “knows” what you’re working on, and saves pieces you haven’t changed, so the old days of edit, re-render, edit, re-render, are much improved. There’s also what Adobe calls a “persistent disk cache”, which saves what you’ve rendered to RAM, then has it ready to go when you re-open the file. That’s the stuff you don’t see. Read more »

So…I made the jump to the CS6 Master Collection, and the discs have been sitting on my desk for the past couple of weeks. I didn’t have the courage to install it all, then see how poor the performance might be on my aging quad-core with only 8GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 that fell just short of the Adobe list, even though it had the 896MB of video RAM required to run the minimum spec for the Mercury Engine. So I started reading, and ended up at Studio 1 Productions. These guys have done an exhaustive test program, and come up with a way to make many of the off-list Nvidia cards work. Read more »

I’ve been working on some new/old technologies lately, and if you take a look at this video, you’ll see a magician from the 1930’s who has something to say. The beauty of this technology, once you see what it does, is that what’s going on under the hood is simple to do. I’ve taken a still image (an historical poster which is in the public domain), done a bit of Photoshop work with it, and then simply supplied a voice track (in this case, a Velveeta radio ad from the 1940’s), and technology does the rest. Read more »

In the realm of “It’s a New World”, who would have thought the day would come when you could subscribe to Adobe software? Sure, it’s always been kind of that case with software that has a licensing dongle, such as in the CAD and 3D worlds, and my license of 3D Studio Max 2011 does offer a subscription that adds some very useful bells and whistles, albeit at a price too steep for my wallet. Read more »

There’s more to Motion Graphics Design than putting pretty pictures on a page and moving them around. It takes planning, a content expert on the client side, who can tell me whether or not my designs are accurate and the message is on target, and that the visual content matches what’s being said in the voice over. Read more »

It may sound a bit repetitive, but the sea change in multimedia has more to do with the delivery of media than anything else. True multimedia has been a promise for many years – now it’s a reality! It shouldn’t be frightening – it should be exciting. Any time you can get more bang for your buck, it’s a good thing! Read more »