On December 8 writer, producer and vfx artist Jon Carr presented how his team leveraged the capabilities of Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium to help complete the short film Möbius edited by Vashi Nedomansky and directed by Vincent LaFloret.

Here is a recording of the session.

You can watch Möbius here: http://vimeo.com/31525127

Möbius was shot using a prototype of the new Canon EOS C300 camera and was edited using Adobe Premiere Pro with effects shots produced using Adobe After Effects. Also integral to post production process were Adobe Story, Adobe Photoshop Extended and Adobe Media Encoder.

Here are some highlights from Jon’s presentation:

Adobe Story

> Plays nicely with other popular screenwriting tools such as Final Draft
> The collaboration features of Adobe Story allowed Jon and his co-writer Justin Hamilton to share the script, mark up and make comments and have a dialog about needed changes.
> The outline view lists scenes and uses color-coded dots to identify characters used in each scene. This feature helped Jon’s team save money by identifying a scene requiring a single actor that could be rewritten to instead not use that character.

Adobe Premiere Pro
> Editorial started with 18 hours of source material and a tight schedule so editor Vashi Nedomansky was able to pass Adobe Premiere Pro project files back and forth with other team members to help identify selects and speed the editing process.
> Other NLEs would have required the C300’s Canon XF media to be transcoded before it could be edited, but Adobe Premiere Pro was able to work with the media natively so no transcoding was necessary.

Adobe After Effects
> Shots were sent from Adobe Premiere Pro to After Effects using Dynamic Link
> Warp Stabilizer was used to fix shaky clips
> Some shots required graffiti on rocks to be painted out, and a combination of the motion tracker built into After Effects, mocha for After Effects and CAMERATRACKER plug-in from The Foundry were used.
> Rotobrush was used in cases where the actor needed to be placed back in front of a background that had been cleaned up in Adobe Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop Extended
Jon showed us how he exported a frame from After Effects and used the Clone Stamp Tool to quickly paint out graffiti on the rocks behind the actor. The saved frame was then brought back into After Effects where he used the cleaned up rock to cover over the painted section.

Adobe Media Encoder
When the project was complete, Adobe Media Encoder was used to quickly export the finished sequence to QuickTime.

More details about Möbius can be found on Vincent LaFloret’s blog at http://blog.vincentlaforet.com/