FXPHD’s Compositor’s Guide to Nuke

For those chomping at the bit in After Effects, Nuke is enticing. Final Cut User posted a note that FXPHD’s Compositor’s Guide to Nuke is Now Online, and the 1st movie makes the free 8-part 4-hour orientation download worth grabbing fast.

Adobe Advanced Technology: more than limited color picker

There's a new version of Adobe Kuler out now with promises that SwitchBoard, a Flex library which lets Adobe AIR desktop apps communicate with Creative Suite applications, will help with Adobe's lackluster development of the color picker and swatch palettes (I could swear that a Kuler swatch 'Export to Folder' wasn't there at first, although 'CS3 icons' can't be seen). Hopefully future developments will be better.

A trio of recent posts (tagged image science) by the informative John Nack talk of complex video enhancements and other tech ventures like Adobe's relationship Hany Farid, who is a "digital detective inventing new ways to tell if photos have been faked" according to a nice little video by NOVA scienceNOW.

There's more insight into future development to be had by glancing at the projects of Adobe’s Advanced Technology Labs and its people, which is more focused on research than software tools like at Adobe Labs. Something of the work of Advanced Technology Labs overlaps with University of Washington research, as does some projects of Microsoft Live Labs and perhaps Microsoft Research.

Interest in graphics research can spike after SIGGRAPH; postings on this blog, like the list 2007 image processing projects are tagged graphics.

50 Cool Things You Can Do with Google Charts API

Via andydickinson.net is 50 Cool Things You Can Do with Google Charts API by Jessica Merritt:

"Chartophiles, have you heard that Google has made it incredibly easy to generate your own slick-looking charts? It’s true, and all it takes to make one is the ability to read and edit a URL. This has made it possible for lots of people to get creative with charts. Read on to see what’s been done, and how you can do it yourself."

Plus, here's some nice advice on chart resources from Jorge Camoes:

"No book had more influence in the way we think about information visualization than Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Tufte’s books are a pleasure for the eyes so you can leave them in the living room…). Tufte combines a minimalistic approach with easily digestible concepts (like chartjunk, data-ink ratio, data density) to create a strong framework. Use that framework to validate your design. Discover other authors like Stephen Few, Jacques Bertin, William Cleveland, John Tukey, Stephen Kosslyn or Colin Ware.

Edward Tufte maintains a discussion forum. In Stephen Few’s site you’ll also find a discussion forum and some before/after examples of chart design. It is difficult to find great examples of information visualization in the media, but the NYT is a good reference. A list of online resources can be found here."

Audio transcription in CS4 today [+ Youtube]

The Soundbooth CS4 beta in Adobe Labs has a great audio transcription feature to be integrated into CS4 apps, which was discussed here previously. I got very good results transcribing a lecture and podcast (a good recording in American English with clear diction, and no speakers talking over each other). Here's one way to do this, from posts by Scott Carver:

1. Expose the Metadata panel (Window->Metadata)
2. In the Metadata Panel, find the section called Speech Transcript (after the File and Clip sections). From here, you can transcribe, make corrections to your transcription, play back individual words, etc. In addition, the search box at the top of the metadata panel will search for words in the transcript as well as text in the metadata of the file.

Update: Beet.TV reports that Youtube is doing transcription now too, along with Blinkx and others, so be careful because video search is getting a whole lot easier:

'The search box is found on YouTube You Choose page. (It's on the lower left area of the page.) Visitors can enter words such as "Iraq, "Global Warming," and "Free Trade." Also, putting your cursor over the timeline, you can see the transcription.'

Update 2: In an August '08 EventDV article, Jan Ozer muses that this will be a big feature. Others seem to concur -- in an NAB tidbit, Beet.TV and an Adobe rep talked about how Video metadata is key to web future. And as noted in NAB 2008 on Adobe TV, Hart Schafer did a demo of Production Premium CS4 showing off this feature (better viewed at Adobe), which works a bit differently than Avid ScriptSync (see the Avid overviews).

State of Design 2008 Recap

In State of Design Recap, Motionographer collected some favorites that were recently presented at Promax|BDA; you get video, credits, and original postings for more background.

Also, Trapcode gallery has some nice stuff, some of which appears on Motiongrapher, like the recent Barbecue for Lexus Hybrid Drive.

Adobe Community Help

Adobe Community Help is a new Adobe "online service for instruction, inspiration, and support that enables you to find the best answers for your Adobe product questions, no matter where they may be found. Search for help, support, and inspiration across Adobe.com and the best sites on the web"

Adobe Community Help is in public beta; it "relies on a new approach to search called Custom Search, an enterprise tool from Google that enables us to selectively index only the most high quality sites and resources."

Viral videos: not just by amateurs

In 'Who is "Fred"? the LA Times found out' WatchingTV Online notes that at least some YouTube viral videos by "Fred" are not just the project of some little George Lucas in his parent's garage. Fred, getting 5 million views on some videos, is an amateur supported by an L.A.-based ad firm.

But to answer NewTeeVee's original question in "Who the Frack is “Fred?” ("watch his latest video and please explain what, exactly, is going on?"):

Millions of grade school kids have different sensibilities than older people. Just ask one and they'll show you many similar videos.