Our Sessions at Post|Production World 2012

Adobe has announced a new version of their Creative Suite at the last three NAB shows in a row. Unfortunately, they usually don’t announce it until late Sunday night before the show opens, meaning we’ve not been able to reveal in advance what we’ll be talking about at the associated Post|Production World conference (requires separate registration and fee), resorting to generic titles and descriptions instead.

This year, with Adobe tipping their hand several days before the show (here’s our preview of AE CS6), we have a chance to give you a better heads-up about what we’ll be demonstrating, in case you want to take a break from the show floor and sit in a couple of sessions:

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After Effects Apprentice: The Final Project

As we mentioned awhile back, we’ve been busy the past year and a half creating an extensive, multi-course video training series based on our popular beginner’s book After Effects Apprentice. We’re happy to announce that the course based on the Final Project from that book has now been released to subscribers of lynda.com, and is also available for individual purchase from Class On Demand.

Made with After Effects

In what is become an annual tradition, the good folks over at motion.tv run a Made with After Effects competition. We participate in critiquing the entries, including pointing out the strong points as well as sharing our years of experience in suggesting ways to improve the work even further. The resulting discussion - as well as viewing the winners - is something we think is educational for all users looking to raise their game.

Adobe MAX 2011 Technology Sneak Peeks

Adobe’s big annual MAX conference finished a couple of weeks ago, and as part of it they included a series of technology sneak peeks. I’ve gone through the videos posted on AdobeTV and pulled out the ones of most interest to us video folks:

Coke Classic: Final Cut Studio is Back

As has been reported and confirmed by multiple sources, you can once again buy Final Cut Studio. You won’t find it (yet?) in the physical or online Apple stores; you have to call 1-800-MY-APPLE, ask for part number MB642Z/A, and pay $999 ($899 educational).

Great. So?

When FCP-X came out, some tried to placate the naysayers by reminding them that the new version wasn’t compulsory; they could just continue to use the previous version - it’s not like their licenses had been taken away. The reply was yeah, but we’ll eventually need updates and support as hardware and the OS change - why continue to invest effort into a dead product? And unless Apple is about the announce the biggest mea culpa since Avid said they were abandoning the Mac (or Coke quietly took New Coke off the shelves), that part hasn’t changed, regardless of whether you can buy additional copies or not. With Apple’s professional video division focused on the numerous fixes enhancements that have been requested and promised for FCP-X, I just don’t see them launching a parallel development effort to update FCS as well. (Let me know if you’ve seen job postings for Apple that indicates otherwise.)

What this move probably reflects was that some large customers weren’t going to switch to FCP-X just yet, and in the meantime needed additional licensed copies. And more importantly, it shows that Apple listened, and reacted.

And that’s something.

NVIDIA Optix

At this week’s SIGGRAPH convention in Vancouver, Adobe and NVIDIA are giving a technology presentation of ray-traced extruded text and shapes inside a “motion graphics environment” (you can read for yourself what the menu bar says; before getting too excited, note this is a technology prototype and not an announced or released product). Obviously, there are a lot of questions left unanswered at this point in time - but as we’ve seen in the past, a lot of other Adobe technology demos eventually become products; fingers crossed that this is the case here.

After Effects Apprentice: Expressions

As we mentioned earlier, we’re in the process of recording our book After Effects Apprentice as a series of training videos, where you get to look over our shoulders and hear what we’re thinking as we work through each lesson. Our latest installment is on the subject of Expressions: The ability to define how a parameter animates using instructions such as “wiggle” compared to explicitly keyframing every value.

After Effects Apprentice: Parenting

As we mentioned earlier, we’re in the process of recording our book After Effects Apprentice as a series of training videos, where you get to look over our shoulders and hear what we’re thinking as we work through each lesson. Our latest installment is on the subject of Parenting.

Parenting is a way to group multiple layers within the same composition inside After Effects. In this lesson, Chris shows how to set up a parenting chain, discusses what makes a good parent, and demonstrates several techniques using Parenting such as creating a title animation with a minimum number of keyframes, building a geometric construct, and bringing an anthropomorphic robot arm to life. Sidebar topics include avoiding a scaling gotcha with parenting, and creating abstract backgrounds using the Fractal Noise effect.

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