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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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 »

I just had an article published in Creative Cow Magazine, entitled Managing Broadcast Assets with Adobe Bridge. I wrote the article, in part, because there are many Creative Suite users who aren’t aware of Bridge, and in part because it will give existing Adobe Creative Suite users an insight into how they can manage thousands of files (whether they are broadcast assets or not) in a relatively painless way. Read more »

For those of you about to jump, I salute you. Here’s a very good link to Adobe TV that will give you a fast start:

http://tv.adobe.com/show/switching-to-adobe-premiere-pro-cs5

And here’s a link to the Adobe shortcut set to make Premiere work with FCP shortcuts:

http://blogs.adobe.com/premiereprotraining/2011/06/final-cut-pro-7-keyboard…

About five days ago, I had only heard of WordPress – I didn’t own it, I hadn’t installed it, but I had heard it was very cool if you wanted to set up a website which was a hybrid blog/CMS (content management system – read…web page). I’m still hacking away at this, but it’s very user friendly, and you don’t have to spend a lot of time in the PHP side of things, which looks a lot like HTML.

I still have a ton of work to do here, but the WordPress Control Panel, not to mention the one which comes with the template, is very easy to figure out. Granted, I’m an advanced user on the graphic design side, and know my way around a lot of complex software, but software isn’t programming websites. I’m pleased with the way its’ going, and look forward to discussions to come on Graphic Design, DSLRs, and the changing face of the delivery model for media production.

Joe Bourke