Transcriptize: CS4 transcriptions to Media Composer, Excel, and Final Cut

Assisted Editing has a new product it seems to make Adobe speech transcriptions more useful for users of other software. Transcriptize takes transcriptions from Adobe CS4 Production Premium to Media Composer, Excel and Final Cut Pro.

The Adobe Shortcut App

The Adobe Shortcut App is a new AIR application that's a database of all of the keyboard shortcuts for all of CS4, all in one handy place.

Todd Kopriva reminds some of us that "To see all of the shortcuts, be sure to click All Categories. The default Essentials view just shows a small subset"! Todd thinks that "the information appears to be identical to that in the Keyboard shortcuts section of After Effects Help." For information on editing keyboard shortcuts and scripts (and scriptable AE commands without shortcuts), see the KeyEd Up script by Jeff Almasol.

Koblin & Lima on visualization

CaT: Creativity and Technology conferences are tightly-edited gatherings of creatives and marketeers for discussions of furthering creativity through technology. On Ad Age's Creativity/AdCritic, they've posted several movies from recent presentations, including one by Google Creative Labs' Aaron Koblin on "some of his most stunning projects," and another talk by Processing co-founder Ben Fry and Carlos Ulloa, creator of Papervision3D. (via Datavisualization.ch)

Also fun is the weekly Creativity Top 5 spots.

And while his talk at TEDGlobal 2009 isn't up yet, you can look at an illustrated video interview by Digup.tv of Manuel Lima of Visual Complexity.

Nvidia Quadro CX v. GeForce GTX 260 for CS4

Jan Ozer takes a test drive with the Nvidia Quadro CX and Adobe CS4 at Digital Content Producer. It's the test part of an earlier installment that explained why having a powerful graphics card wasn't that important in previous versions of CS products.

Ozer looks at how Nvidia's Quadro CX (around $2,000) can accelerate performance in Adobe CS 4 (Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere Pro) and notes "that Adobe had certified Nvidia's GeForce GTX 260 for use with After Effects and Photoshop, and that this $300 card costs a fraction of the Quadro CX's retail price tag. So is the Quadro CX worth the significant investment and why?"

Update: High Definition for PC reviews The NVIDIA Quadro CX with Adobe’s CS4 Suite; it seems like a great buy if you're using the Cartoon filter extensively -- but there's more parts of the review coming.

Protect options in Content Aware Scaling

Here's Russell Brown explaining how to protect details with Content-Aware Scale tool options. There's a QT version available too.




In addition to the original presentation of the research on content aware scaling (paper), there's another presentation from SIGGRAPH 2008 that's slanted toward video. Let's hope that some of this will appear in future implementations within After Effects, and maybe even some improved upscaling. Here's Improved Seam Carving for Video Retargeting:

Likes & Dislikes of Premiere CS4

Paul Del Vecchio has some thoughts on Premiere CS4 in 2 videos with another to follow. He welcomes comments...

Additive Graphic Styles in Illustrator CS4

AppClinic podcast #134 shows various aspects of Additive Graphic Styles in Illustrator CS4. AppClinic podcasts can be basic, but that's good if you've ignored some apps for years.

Deke has more on Styles in Illustrator (even before he gets there) in "Using Appearance and Graphic Styles" on AdobeTV (fullscreen):

Another Mocha introduction

Terry White's Adobe Creative Suite Video Podcast hosts Steve Whatley's general explanation of the Mocha tracking plug-in that ships with After Effects CS4.

Several of the possible gotchas using Mocha, and other video tutorials, were discussed in an earlier post, Mocha for After Effects +Corner Pin thread.

Fx Guide previews Adobe .r3d support

Fx Guide podcast red centre #024 talks about RED files in After Effects and Premiere for about 12 minutes starting at 22:30. John Montgomery likes the 1st step implementation and thinks it about comparable to using FCP proxies, and looks forward to improvements coming from Adobe's work with the RED gang and Assimilate.

64 bit computing and Premiere Pro CS4 4.0.1

The Genesis Project notes An article on 64 bit computing and Production Premium by Jan Ozer. In this 1st part of a series on the topic, Ozer says:

"I had two eight-core systems: the Windows workstation, a 2.83GHz HP xw6600 running Windows XP (32-bit version) with 3GB of RAM, and a 3.2GHz Mac running OS X version 10.5.5 with 8GB of RAM. Rendering out to Blu-ray compatible MPEG-2 took 68 minutes on the Windows workstation, 11 minutes on the Mac. ...

Faster performance and responsiveness, with full support for 64-bit computing platforms to accelerate compute-intensive postproduction tasks. Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 version 4.0.1 is architected to take advantage of the additional memory available in 64-bit systems."

Ozer also gives some background and includes a Q&A with Giles Baker, Adobe's Group Product Manager for Editing Workflows.

Part 5: New Features in After Effects CS4

Motionworks' New Features in After Effects CS4 video tour is up to part 5.

And as posted earlier, Dennis Radeke of Adobe broke from his regular beginners format to present movies outlining his Top 10 After Effects features and his Top 10 Premiere features.

AE CS4 Visual Effects and Compositing Studio Techniques

Mark Christiansen says that "soon After Effects CS4 Visual Effects and Compositing Studio Techniques will be on its way from the printer to warehouses and then out to the world." Apparently it's just in time for Christmas pre-orders on Amazon!

New stuff includes guidance from scripting gurus Dan Ebberts and Jeff Almasol (including light wrap and camera mapping), tracking in Mocha AE, and more.

Note: you can get a flavor of camera mapping but no script in a Peachpit excerpt from a previous version of the book.

CS4 Production Premium Road Show & eSeminars

Adobe is taking CS4 Production Premium on the road. The Adobe CS4 Production Premium Road Show & Partner Solutions Pavilion to is hitting 7 US cities in January and February. Register here.

Adobe is also hosting a CS4 eSeminar Series for Video Professionals, December 16, 2008 - February 27, 2009. Topics include: Work more with Production Premium, Make Video Searchable on the Web, Using Adobe OnLocation, Working with Tapeless Formats, Delivering Web-Based DVDs, Shoot & Edit Interviews, and Additional CS4 Topics in design, print, imaging, and the web.

Live online seminars are scheduled web simulcasts via Acrobat Connect Pro. Access details are provided if you register. To view previously recorded sessions, visit the OnDemand site.

After Effects 9.0.1 update

The After Effects 9.0.1 update is available, and Todd Kopriva runs through the most important fixes and tweaks; the rest are in the ReadMe.

REDCODE installer for CS4 available

Studio Daily posted REDCODE Installer for Adobe CS4 finally available from RED.

DAV's TechTable offers extended notes and illustrated help in Native Red Camera Files & CS4! Premiere Pro C4 and After Effects CS4 workflow using the NEW Native RED R3D plug-in, which supercedes his earlier post New Red Camera Adobe Support. Here's a small version of Dave Helmley's supporting video, which can be viewed fullscreen at Adobe TV:



Update: Curiosity seekers can find more details in a RED User thread, and The Edit Blog is already Kicking the tires on R3D editing in Premiere Pro.

Update 2: There's also an Adobe workflow paper available; one version was posted by Dave Helmley. For consistent color appearance of R3D files between After Effects and Premiere Pro, you must assign the HDTV (Rec. 709) color profile when enabling Color Management. The workflow paper tells you how to make the R3D interpretations permanent with a quick revision to AE’s “interpretation rules.txt” file.

ATI emulates Nvidia for CS4 and codecs

Computerworld notes "ATI Stream," which is included in a new driver update for ATI Radeon HD 4000 series-based cards:

'To show its potential, ATI released free Avivo Video Converter software, which takes advantage of the Radeon HD 4000's graphics processors to let users convert video as much as 17 times faster at up to 720p quality, said Dave Nalasco, a technical expert at ATI, during a webcast today. The entire archived webcast is available online by clicking on "On Demand" and then "Live Show Wed Dec 10 2008."

Other software that takes advantage of ATI Stream includes Adobe Systems Inc.'s PhotoShop CS4, After Effects CS4, Flash 10 player and Acrobat Reader and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista, PowerPoint 2007, Expression Encoder and Silverlight player. Video-editing applications from CyberLink and ArcSoft are expected by March.'

It's a bit unclear now just what this means for Adobe apps; Premiere is not mentioned and there's been no chatter on compatibility.

ATI does say that the ATI Video Converter "accepts almost any video file format as a source, and outputs to many different file formats, including MPEG-1, MPEG-4/DivX, WMV and H.264/AVC. MPEG-2 and H.264/AVC benefit from ATI Stream acceleration with ATI Radeon HD 4800 and ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series GPUs."

Some of the strategy for countering nVidia is in the PDF ATI Stream Computing Update. nVidia's recent moves were discussed here earlier in CS4 & the nVidia CX movies.

AE Mac/Windows benchmark smackdown

Kevin Schmitt is back on Creative Mac having re-run benchmarks to see which OS runs AE better with The Great After Effects Mac/Windows Smackdown: CS4 Edition. There's a some twists to running benchmarks and multi-processing in AE that may pop up in coverage of this, but really the problem is that Apple makes insanely great changes to its OS and hardware a bit often. Here's Kevin's conclusions:

"Cripes, the Mac OS X version of After Effects is absolutely smoked again, and the results are slightly worse than last time in places. Either Adobe isn't tuning After Effects on the Mac at all, or tuning the buhjeezus out of the Windows versions. Hell, even single process rendering on Vista generally spanks multiple processes on Leopard, for the love of Pete.

Vista pwnage aside, it's interesting to see how enabling multiprocessing on either platform doesn't necessarily translate to better performance. The time savings bear themselves out on longer renders, but it isn't always a slam dunk to soak up all your system resources by enabling multiprocessing. If your system is beefy enough, it may be a better bet to give AE a single process and then work on something else while the render happens.

In any event, it's clear from these tests that Vista x64 offers significant "pound-for-pound" time savings for your After Effects renders. We're still in disappointing territory for Mac users, to be sure, but I'm actually surprised this time. I figured the situation would be much improved this time around, and, well, not so much. We'll just have to see how the CS5/Snow Leopard/Windows 7 comparison goes."

CS4 & the nVidia CX movies

This is the 1st comment on this $2000 nVidia card that I've seen from someone at Adobe, from DAV's TechTable, CS4 Production Premium & the nVidia CX.

For more on nVidia & Adobe, check out the movies at nVidia's Adobe pages, which previously were only on YouTube.

Update: Nvidia adds marketing ideas with a web page called Adobe Speaks Visual (even though several GeForce cards cause problems with Adobe apps that are using the GPU more and more).

Pre-Pixel Bender Droste effect music video

The video done below could now be done easier with the free Droste Effect Pixel Bender filter that works in AE CS4. The "Droste Effect" features recursive images (like feedback) like the cover art of Ummagumma by Pink Floyd.




Adland has the story behind OneInThree's creation of a "Droste effect" video for the band "Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants" (shown below):

"Mathmap was designed to apply the effect to single images so OneInThree developed a proprietary method to be able to run batches of images through the program, unfortunately the batch limit was 40 frames before the application would crash... After 1080 computer hours, over 400 crashes and 2 terabytes of data, spread across 7 hard drives, the final compositing could be done. The 'Drosted' images were brought into After Effects, re-conformed and animated to zoom in time to the beat. The transitions were then hand animated and the stills added into the mix before OneInThree headed back to The Mill, for a DCP and sound lay."

Also, Frank Beltrán has posted the Making of Droste Videoclip "Clap your brains off," which was also done by hand.

Configurator on Adobe Labs

Previously announced by John Nack, Adobe Labs posted a prerelease of Adobe Configurator, an AIR app which enables Legos-like creation of custom panels for Photoshop CS4. John Nack's got an SD-sized QuickTime movie that's better than this YouTube one (which is missing the last minute):



Update: John Nack has more in Configurator is live!