GridIron Flow Ships with Surprise Additions

GridIron Software this morning announced on a conference call that Flow, the one-of-a-kind visual file management, workflow and time tracking tool that has been in development for three years, is now available for purchase or 30 day demo from the GridIron site.

In addition to a demonstration of how the software can be used to recover otherwise lost versions of graphics files, to discover the use of an element – including even a font – in a given file, or to track time spent on a project, Steve Forde, CEO of GridIron, brought on John Nack, Product Manager at Adobe, to show how Flow has been integrated directly into CS4 via Flash Panels.

A Flow icon was shown right in the tool bar of Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign – and reportedly is available for all CS4 apps – that opens a Flash panel showing a miniature version of Flow and allowing capabilities such as coordinating fonts with a file from a different CS4 application that have never been possible.

Steve also announced a new feature added to Flow that did not appear in the public beta: the ability to see the same Flow map regardless of user or system. To support this, GridIron offers a multi-machine license, three systems for $100 more than the single system license.

Tip: Force an After Effects Render to Fail (and Save!) on a Mac

No doubt you already make liberal use of the After Effects Auto-Save feature, which incrementally stores sub-versions of your current saved project in set increments of time. By default, the last 5 20 minute increments are saved, with the oldest replaced by the newest, but you can freely change the interval and number of saves. Still, what happens when your session hangs up and you have valuable unsaved information?

Tip: Force an After Effects Render not to Fail

If you’ve ever tried rendering a composition made up of one or more large images - say, a single huge matte painting or several layers of 4k footage - you have probably encountered the dreaded Out of Memory error causing your render to fail. What to do about this?

Convert RED Camera R3D Footage Losslessly, Painlessly, Confidently

If you’re a regular at this site you may recall 5 Tips to Maintain Sanity in RED Post.. The key point of that article was to assert that since you cannot write an R3D file, you must convert and it is best to do so early in order to save many wasted cycles processing full 4K (when the output is actually HD or less). Today’s tip tells how to convert an R3D losslessly to either 10-bit Cineon or 16-bit TIFF, and it’s backed up by a whitepaper from Autodesk.

NAB 2009 RED Reel Online

The RED reel that showed at NAB 2009 is now viewable online (right click to download it).

There are even a couple of shots on there from a shoot I was on as fx supervisor. It’s a gorgeous, cinematic reel and an entertaining viewing.

Tip: Use More than One Processor with Apple Compressor

Today’s tip is prompted by a tweet that appeared last evening from Jim Geduldick of finalcutuser.com and AENY, the NYC After Effects user group, reminding the owner of a new 8-core Mac that Compressor works best when using fewer than all 8 cores. The thing about that tip is, by default, Compressor only uses a single core to render regardless of how many are on your computer, so first you must understand how to get past that limitation.

Tip: Browse After Effects Scripts as if Looking for Plug-ins

The point of scripts in After Effects is to reduce tedious tasks, although the best of them effectively add functionality because what they allow you to do would never be worth the trouble to do manually. Therefore if you find yourself faced with a tedious task, it’s not a bad idea to try and find a script that will help. Some sites do this better than others, and today I’m highlighting Jeff Almasol’s Redefinery as a site you can go visit right now and find the solution to one or many problems you’ve faced in the past, and are likely to re-encounter.

Tip: Play Anything – YouTube included - in QuickTime Mac with Perian

The QuickTime file format can be the cause of trouble in a production pipeline, with its moving-target gamma and all-or-nothing file integrity (if there’s one corrupted frame in an .mov, forget about opening it and recovering the rest). QuickTime Player Pro, however, has many great features missing from other standalone players (including the fantastic VLC); it just requires that anything it opens be readable as a QuickTime movie. Although it seems at times to support other formats, they will often tend to open blank. Wouldn’t it be great to just be able to double click any moving image file and open it in QuickTime?

Page 1 of 8 pages  1 2 3 >  Last »