Look cool without breaking the bank

Look cool without breaking the bank with "The Plabt Abides" t-shirt designed by Stu Maschwitz. "Plabt" was an e-mail typo (b is next to n) that became a term of affection. It's not as quite fun as the snow cap with the AE electric tower though. Chris Meyer has a bit more.

Layoffs at Adobe

Adobe is trimming it's staff 10% or so. The earnings didn't seem too bad; the stock price rose on the news. There's a press release and initial reports at TUAW , j/d's twitter list, and Techmeme. "Yikes" was a comment that resonated here, even if favored teams are not effected.

Update: Mike Seymour at Fxguide does a quick survey of the landscape in melt down.

Free fire project for After Effects

Video CoPilot has a free fire project (CS3+) for download:

"Here is a little test I made using CC Particle World and some vector blur to make Fire. It’s not perfect but an interesting study. One of the key things I did was used a wiggle expression on the particle birthrate to give a variable emission pattern like something was burning inconsistently. It’s a little slow to render but it is very high resolution."

Update: Mathew Kelly shows you how to build your own with built-in filters:

After effects fire tutorial from Mathew Kelly on Vimeo.

The making of 'Fuel'

MacVideo.TV posted a video of the presentation from IBC 2008 on the making of Fuel. Darius Fisher, co-Producer of Fuel and Sundance Winner 2008 (and also worked on The Aviator), spoke about what tools and so forth went into making this feature-length documentary which challenges aspects of our oil-based economy and the cost this dependence has brought about. Here's the trailer for Fuel:

Sony CineAlta event @ Apple

The Digital Cinema Society Northern California Chapter will partner with MacFilmmakers to present a joint meeting covering the Sony CineAlta Camera Line, 6.30 pm - 9.30 pm on Wednesday December 17th, 2008.

The meeting will be held at Apple, on the main campus on Infinite Loop. Register here.

Presenters include Adam Wilt and Art Adams, who with the help of Leigh Blicher from San Francisco rental house VideoFax, will show off the new F35 CineAlta and cover such subjects as Sony S-Log and Hypergammas. They will also present footage, including a spec spot they recently shot with VideoFax's F35.

Representatives from Sony including Shahpour Nosrati-Fard will also give a presentation on the EX3 CineAlta and Bob Lofland will demo Sony Display products including the BVM L230 LCD HD Master Series Monitor which will be used to show off the F35 imagery. Representatives from VMI will also be present to answer questions. And of course there's a raffle.

Ease and Wizz CS4, AE palette for new easing types

Ian Haigh announced CS4 compatibility for Ease and Wizz, a script palette for After Effects that gives you more ways to interpolate between values (mentioned earlier).

Be sure to check out Alan Shisko's March post Easier Easing for gotchas and Ian Haigh's comments.

Update: Chris Meyer added other details in his PVC post, including a series of Graph Editor charts that show curves for some of the fun interpolations, like one for Bounce below.

Brightness Issues with H.264 QuickTime

Chris and Trish Meyer have a good post on the gamma problem:

Brightness Issues with H.264 QuickTime Movies: Solutions - good and bad - to a long-standing problem.

They nicely summarize actual solutions, including use of a gamma stripper app from FuelFX mentioned earlier and using the x264 codec.

Update: Chris added a few details to follow up on a thread on the AE-List (Search "h.264 compression"),

The workaround Alan and Jarle mentioned works - on Windows. Which is why it didn't work for me. The procedure is slightly different inside QT on the Mac. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for playback in all apps, and has other feature and performance hits that are unpleasant (for example, it supposedly kills Fast Load).

Brian: Having a custom color profile indeed greatly aggravated the issue. Although I did still see a slight problem even with the default Cinema color profile. What is interesting is that when I switch to my custom profile (which is darker than the default Cinema profile), the untagged movies get darker as well, whereas the Apple gamma tagged movies change very little. This points further to some correction Apple is doing under the hood - which, however well intended, is going awry in many real-world situations.

Thanks again to everyone for their suggestions. The x264 codec ended up being the way to go.