'ZbornToy' for AE 3D Caustics, and Refractions, and Re-lighting

restyling Frischluft (Lenscare, etc) to Taronites, ZbornToy seems to go beyond abilities of obscure nodes in Motion Plug-in Conduit...

from Jonas Hummelstrand's General Specialist...

"Here's a fresh new way to composite externally rendered 3D images in After Effects. The plug-in ZbornToy takes grayscale depth maps and magically let's you continue tweaking and change many parameters from within AE.

In some ways, the technique is similar to Walker Effects' Channel Lighting, but with ZbornToy, not only can you change the lighting afterwards, you can also render with background refractions, cast caustic reflections onto other layers, and much more."

ProLost TV

Stu says ProLost has a video Podcast.*

* So far it's just graphics with music but you get good projects and presets.

Adobe back to Mac with Soundbooth

Adobe released a public beta of a new cross-platform audio application today called Soundbooth. Soundbooth "provides the tools video editors, designers, and others who do not specialize in audio need to accomplish their everyday work." Soundbooth is not an Elements product but will replace Audition in future releases of Production Studio. At first glimpse, I'd rather have Audition, but we'll see:

Audition: for audio professionals and experts
Soundbooth: for video professionals and Flash designers who need an easy but powerful audio tool for things like cue integration with Flash, Actionscript, and FLV

Audition: complete audio toolset with editing, mixing, CD burning, etc.
Soundbooth: Single file editor (ala Cool Edit 2000)

Audition: existing code base, Win only
Soundbooth: new code base, Win/MacTel

Audition: DAW-like multi-track features let you package your music as a Soundbooth Score (also available is separate SDK and packaging tool)
Soundbooth: Soundbooth Scores, similar in ways to SonicFire Pro, provide music bed and but things like ambient sound effects tracks.

There's more at Create Digital Music, the Creative COW preview, and product manager Hart Shafer's blog.

Details on saving FLVs and converting them

Here's a detailed tutorial for different browsers and OSes:
How to Copy Files Off YouTube and Convert them for your Video iPod, which mentions MoviePod (Mac/Win), another app that converts movies, with a single Drag & Drop.

And via DVGuru, a quite comprehensive Amazing YouTube Tools Collection from Quick Online Tips.

Update 10-26-06:
There's even a YouTube movie that explains how to get things off YouTube.
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Windows Vista shell:revealed

With the avalanche of Adobe updates coming next year it'll be tough keeping track of both OSX and Windows, and who knows if Apple's emulation of Windows will improve, but Microsoft actually has an appealing subsite on Windows Vista (sorta) called shell:revealed, plus the start of a team blog and tips & tricks.

Hidden Illustrator<->Photoshop integration

John Nack explains the trick to get PSD files into Illustrator pretty much intact.

Light graffiti in AE

I first saw "light graffiti" posted by PIPS:lab as a Shockwave site. After graf experiments flowered further Wired did an article, and now Apple has a cool iPod commercial.

Andrew Kramer shows you a similar technique in AE with Trapcode Particular at Creative Cow.

Update: newer posts on these topics can be found under the tags graffiti, and light.