Adobe Forums facelift

Adobe Forums > Adobe After Effects has had a facelift.

Perhaps it could use a information re-design too -- it's still a bit of a dogpile. John Nack ran down the changes and got some feedback as well. Stephen Muratore has a slightly fuller list of improvements.

Update: Todd Kopriva adds a good deal of advice on using the Adobe Forums, and kindly notes Mylenium posts have more. Still they seem a bit wild West...

Calculated dishonesty and a 'Green Collar' stimulus

A few days ago Bill Moyers interviewed economics professor William K. Black, who says that 'it was more than greed and incompetence that brought down the U.S. financial sector and plunged the economy in recession ... at the very center of mortgage collapse, creating triple-A rated bonds out of "liars' loans" — loans issued without verifying income, assets or employment — was a fraud, and the banks knew it.'

Black says the fraud had 3 stages: "the way that you do it is to make really bad loans, because they pay better. Then you grow extremely rapidly, in other words, you're a Ponzi-like scheme. And the third thing you do is we call it leverage. That just means borrowing a lot of money, and the combination creates a situation where you have guaranteed record profits in the early years. That makes you rich, through the bonuses that modern executive compensation has produced. It also makes it inevitable that there's going to be a disaster down the road."

Black also comments on the foxes guarding the hen house; see this excerpt or the entire QuickTime version at Moyers Journal:



And via Glenn Greenwald in his multisource summary "Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Wall Street's ownership of government," is yet another cautionary view. Offered by Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, is "The Quiet Coup" at The Atlantic monthly:

"The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. ...the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time."

<Update\: Elizabeth Warren's 8-minute video summary of a congressional panel report, via Mike Whitney /update end>

Despite the morass, there are plenty of options -- it's not like the country has been destroyed in a Mongol Invasion like medieval Baghdad. As noted earlier among other good news, SF Bay's Van Jones was appointed Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation by the White House. Jones advocates another type of stimulus -- investments in people and green infrastructure rather than bailouts.

Amazon doesn't let you embed their video, so they won't be able to try to get you to buy the Van Jones book The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems. Here's 2 videos highlighting Jones' ideas:

The Green Collar Economy - Van Jones of the Center for American Progress @ Yahoo!7 Video

Update: Roubini and Taleb discuss the crisis...

AE & Motion apprentice text + 3D spiral text

Chris and Trish Meyer have posted After Effects Apprentice Video Tutorial #4: Animating text in After Effects, which follows on #3 which introduced text in AE. In this video, they "show how to master Text Animators, including Range Selectors, the secret to creating cascading animations, and more."

This follows yesterday's meaty post by Trish Meyer, Animating Text in Apple’s Motion: A primer for After Effects artists.

Also, older but fun is text in a 3D spiral, pictured above, from 3D Type QuickTip by Ko Maruyama, which is reminiscent of a very old tutorial by Brian Maffitt.

Christiansen's 30 April tips starts: BG Renderer

Mark Christiansen is posting 30 tips on PVC in April!

He says, "No matter what is happening in the world around you, that sense of knowing your own value, of what it was important for you to do, helps you to keep doing more of it." That could be, but many people should do something different -- we might need it -- after all this world is no paradise.

Mark's 1st tip is Render Faster & Smarter in After Effects with BG Renderer: This free script will add tons of value to your multiprocessor system.

AE 3D Earths with & without 'Knowing' lava

There are several tutorials to help you start to construct a rotating 3D Earth in After Effects, but do you know which direction to spin things to avoid the Sun rising from the West?

With Knowing Earth, MaxAfter gives you the project and a good start how to make lava cracks and falling particles similar to a shot in the current movie Knowing. (Quick tangent: see The Nicolas Cage Movie Plot Generator.)

If you want your Earth a bit more refined, Creative Cow has a tutorial that you can peruse, Creating a Realistic 3d Earth using only AE. In this video tutorial, Michael Park uses only effects built into After Effects: "Special attention will be given to combining multiple instances of the CC Sphere effect to create unique layers with different specular properties for the land and water masses, as well as creating lights from urban centers on the night side of the earth."

Maltaannon is also in the ring of 3D Earth tutorials with the variously titled Advanced 3D Planets / 3D Solar System. He planned to create a scaled solar system in 3D that you could fly through, so the 3D Earth tutorial might be just a small piece of the bigger project.

Of course there are several more. Jonas Hummelstrand (with map and texture links), The Genesis Project (with help from Aharon Rabinowitz), and Andrew Kramer also have planet Earth tutorials with projects. Kramer's Video Copilot crew has a variety of planet and related tutorials with projects. You may even find out something new in the old Total Training teaser Globe Grid. Earth zooms are also popular, and tutorials are provided by Video Copilot and Digital Arts.

There's also a tutorial for Apple Motion from Timesaver Tutorials for those stuck in a Final Cut Studio world, Rotating Earth. There are many more of these sorts of tutorials, even by NASA (in AE) using their own images, and some for Google Earth Pro.

You can even do 3D earths in Photshop CS4 Extended. Russell Brown CS4 shows how using real 3D objects (download textures here) in a more advanced tutorial he called Advanced 3D Eclipse Animation.

Most of the projects include textures but there are alternatives. Ever-popular Earth textures (various strings attached) can be found at JHT's Planetary Pixel Emporium (with C4D tutorials), Unearthed Outdoors True Marble-free version, and NASA's Blue Marble Next Generation.

Update: VideoCopilot has a tutorial similar to the one by MaxAfter, Dead Planet, as well as a calmer The Blue Planet in 3D.

Update 2: More earthy textures.

MSM calls Hollywood pot black

HDFilmtools and Chris Meyer noted the troubles in the LA in Mainstream Media Calling Hollywood on its Obsolete Business Model and Circling Around the Drain, while AdAge puts it in the larger context of troubles in most all media segments. See Future May Be Brighter, but It's Apocalypse Now, which starts off with a bang:

'Chicken Little, don your hardhat. Nudged by recession, doom has arrived. The toll will be so vast -- and the institutions of media and marketing are so central to our economy, our culture, our democracy and our very selves -- that it's easy to fantasize about some miraculous preserver of "reach" dangling just out of reach. We need "mass," so mass, therefore, must survive. Alas, economies are unsentimental and denial unproductive. The post-advertising age is under way. This isn't about the end of commerce or the end of marketing or news or entertainment. All of the above are finding new expressions online, and in time will flourish thanks to the very digital revolution that is now ravaging them. The future is bright. But the present is apocalyptic. Any hope for a seamless transition -- or any transition at all -- from mass media and marketing to micro media and marketing are absurd. The sky is falling, the frog in the pot has come to a boil and, oh yeah, we are, most of us, exquisitely, irretrievably f*#$ed [bleep].'

Ad Age seems surprised even though the writing on the wall could be seen for quite awhile. The news business has led the way down; see how it's faring at these websites: Mediashift, News Videographer, Andy Dickinson, Advancing the Story, Ricochet by Chrys Wu, Poynter Institute. And Recovering Journalist recommends a recent Clay Shirky essay and articles in Editor & Publisher that write critically about the newspaper industry's titans and the various alternative business models now proposed.

Creative Suite One Laptop Per Child +UltraDuck

from J.C. Burns:

"Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ABDE) today announced the Creative Suite CSOLPC® product family, a breakthrough release of the industry-leading design and development software optimized for the One Laptop Per Child XO machine, running a version of the Linux-based operating system with the distinctive Sugar GUI. The release will, for the first time, enable entire villages of small children to use After Effects and Photoshop on a computer they understand and use everyday—the OLPC XO—to make a creative contribution to the world by taking on the ever-growing number of film and video industry projects that require rotoscoping, motion tracking, color retouching, and wire removal.

... Once entire villages of children have activated the software over the convenient XO wireless mesh network, they will begin to receive 2K and 4K film frames to rotoscope and retouch using the After Effects application, which will break the large frames up into dozens of small tiles optimized for the child’s XO and attention requirements. The finished frame will be then reassembled and sent back to a central server in San Jose, where it will be securely returned to the film or video studio who requested the job. The process is seamless and transparent on both ends."

There's more of this April 1st "press release" at Positively Atlanta.

Update: Be sure to catch the new hotswappable drive technology UltraDuck, just pre-announced. The yellow one is a prototype that may be seen (but not touched) in Las Vegas.