Adobe Community Leaders Summit

Last week, Adobe invited a variety of well-known people in the industry to come get a closer look at what they’ve been working on, and to provide feedback on their direction. To Adobe’s credit, this was no “preaching to the choir” session; many of those invited were FCP and Avid editors, and several current users gave Adobe personnel an earful both publicly and privately. It was also made clear to us that no specific product versions or release dates were being discussed, and that we couldn’t repeat anything that had not already been mentioned publicly (reminds us of the old Zen Buddhist saying “Those who know don’t say; those who say don’t know”). However, this event gives us an excuse to aggregate into one place a number of emerging technologies Adobe has already murmured about, for those who haven’t had the chance to keep up…

After Effects, ProRes, and Gamma Shifts

Adobe’s yeoman After Effects documentation guru Todd Kopriva maintains a highly useful blog over on Adobe.com.

Today he just posted instructions on how to modify the After Effects CS4 QuickTime gamma rules XML file (did you even know such a thing existed?) to allow proper round-tripping using ProRes4444 without getting those gamma shifts that cause many of us to rip our hair out.

The post also includes links on how to make ProRes 422 roundtrip, and general background information on gamma shifts and After Effects.

Adobe will support RED

Sorry for the short post, but I know this is news many of us have been waiting to hear (and sooner than some of us thought):

“Within a week, RED R3D files will open natively in CS3 Premiere Pro and After Effects.” On both Mac and Windows.

This is not a rumor; this is the real deal.

Here is the thread on Reduser.net.

Compression Artifacts & Pulldown

This started as a quick post about how to gain finer control over the compression settings in the QuickTime dialog. But before we can get there, we first need to talk talk about how 3:2 pulldown works. (Trust me; it all ties together; it was also a good little mystery.)

I recently gave a training session at a local studio, and at the end they were invited to trot out their Barney Stumpers (questions about why something went wrong, how something works, etc.). For one stumper, a user had some footage with 3:2 pulldown, and after pulldown was removed, he noticed that an after-image of the previous frame appeared in the next frame after an edit. Why?

Staggering Mistakes: Reversing Field Order

The two most-watched cable channels in our household are CNN and Speed (guess who watches which). Speed just started a new game show called “Pass Time” where several of the bumpers as well as in-show inserts exhibit the maddening two steps forward/one step back staggered motion of fields that have been reversed (maybe they thought it was a “look”...). CNN isn’t immune to this either; through the years some of their graphics have also exhibited this reversed-field judder.

This prompted us to upload an updated version of a classic column we wrote on interlacing, field rendering, and separating fields; you can find it here. But like any good motion graphics designer who tries to reverse-engineer any graphic they see on television, this has led us to speculate what might have been at the root of this particular problem.

After Effects 8.0.2 and gamma issues

Adobe has released an 8.0.2 update for After Effects CS3. Its headline new features are support for Mac OS 10.5, as well as for P2 media. There are also the expected array of bug fixes. What’s been getting less press than it deserves is a change in the way it handles color management with respect to QuickTime files.

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