The Microfilmmaker Community

[JeremyHanke]

Hey folks,

Last week, I was privileged to be part of a special Reviewer's Training Workshop that Adobe hosted for 25 media journalists in San Jose. As part of the Workshop, we got to work with the new Creative Suite Production Premium package and get a feel for how they interract. Additionally, we got to ask questions and make suggestions to the actual product managers that oversee all the new products!

There are lots of new features to Production Premium, but some of the really cool features in use were not necessarily the sort of features that might normally stand out in print. It's only by getting your hands on them and using them that you see how useful they are.

These are in no particular order:

*Encore's new Flash Export -- This seems like just another file support feature, but it's absolutely huge for filmmakers! Basically, this will allow you to design an interractive DVD in Encore and then create a full Flash site out of that DVD, without having to know any Flash script at all! This will be especially useful for folks who have short films that they want to display in their entirety, alongside behind-the-scenes footage and cast interviews!

*Vanishing Point for Photoshop CS3 Extended & After Effects CS3 -- The Vanishing Point feature was a pretty cool idea for still photography in Photoshop CS2, but it has been given amazing new abilities in CS3. Basically, Vanishing Point will now allow you to create a skinned 3D model from any isometric photograph of a building or anything with roughly flat sides. Once you've mapped the planes, you can export this into After Effects where you can rotate it and light it with 3D lights. While you can only do two sides of a building per isometric photograph, creative users can get a full 360 degree 3D building with as few as 2-3 carefully planned photos!

*Smart Objects features of Photoshop CS3 Extended - While there are many things that are still to be discovered about this, one of the demos we did at the workshop was to find out how you can combine multiple video layers into a single smart object. We used locked down footage of the Golden Gate bridge to compress 90 video frames into a single Smart Object. From here, you could choose to exclude all the variable parts of the image. In other words, the program would look at all the frames and remove anything that wasn't there at least 50% of the time. This allowed all the cars that constantly swarm across the Golden Gate Bridge to vanish, leaving a clean plate of the Bridge by itself which needed only minimal retouching. I could see how features like this could be an amazing time saver for folks who want to come up with creative Green Screen backgrounds!

*The Puppet feature of After Effects CS3 -- When I heard about this, I kind of dismissed it as being pretty silly. However, when I saw it in action, I really had to take a step back! Basically, the Puppet tool allows you to take an Alpha-channeled still, like a person who's been chromakeyed, and manipulate their body with push pins. With a plethora of custom options, extremely complex animations are possible in a way that's very hard to describe. And, if you use this feature on multiple layers of a simple image, infinitely complex animations can be achieved. (We were shown a test user animation in which the user had created a complex Pixar-quality animation of Mike from Monster's, Inc. using only a single still image of Mike that had been sliced into separate layers! Verbal description can't do it justice.)

*The Brainstorm Feature of After Effects CS3 -- Designed for folks who want to try out multiple variations of filters, Brainstorm allows you to randomize certain attributes of your filters and settings. Once you've chosen what features to randomize, Brainstorm will show you 9 different versions of your creation. You choose the two that are closest to what you're looking for and it comes up with nine more options that are based on the two you like. This really ended up being something that we were all extremely excited about once we got a chance to use it! To see all the variations that people would have in a single room was truly astounding! (I quickly joked that it was sort of like an interactive psych profile!)

* Live Color in Illustrator CS3 -- This is kind of strange to describe, but it's incredibly clever and something I hope they add to all of Adobe's products. Basically, Live Color is a color harmony program in Illustrator CS3. What this means in a nutshell, is that you can choose any color you want, and Illustrator will give you a list of different color schemes that would either complement this color or contrast this color well. Basically, for all of us who may be able to come up with good designs, but can't seem to figure out what colors would really look good together, this takes all the guess work out of it. This description doesn't really do a good job of describing how much of an advantage this can give you, but this can factor into color design for everything from a website to the actual set and costume design of a feature film! This probably got the second-greatest applause of any of the new features found in Production Suite!

*Premiere Pro's new Time Remapping and Pixel Motion -- While Premiere Pro didn't get a huge number of improvements in this version, one of the big ones is the ability to do After Effects-style Time Remapping and PixelMotion (which were unveilled in AE 7) directly in Premiere Pro, with After Effects quality rendering. This is especially helpful for folks shooting in 30P who want to have slow mo's that look like they were shot at 60P, as the Pixel Motion engine extrapolates the location of different pixels in different frames and creates new 'Tween-frames that look much less like they were slowed down in post and much more like they were originated at 60P.

*Flash's new Photoshop and Illustrator-- Flash will now import Photoshop Layers and Illustrator vector art directly. While folks have always gotten content into Flash from these sources, this represents a massive time savings. Now you can import them with the appropriate layers converted to Flash, so you don't have to import nearly as many things and you don't have the nightmare of having to rename all the things you import!

You'll get more info and pix in next month's issue!

-Jeremy
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Jeremy Hanke
Editor
Microfilmmaker Magazine
"Improving no-budget filmmaking through technique and critique."
http://www.microfilmmaker.com
jhanke@microfilmmaker.com