Yesterday Adobe announced the forthcoming Production Premium CS6, which will include new versions of Premiere, After Effects, Audition, Encore and Photoshop. Versions 5 and 5.5 both represented major milestones in terms of features, performance and stability. In fact, the increased stability of CS5.5 was a big part of why I finally decided to make the jump to a total Adobe workflow.
So do the new features of Production Premium CS6 represent the same leap forward in visual storytelling..?
Last month I had the chance to create a new short film for the RezDowntown campus. (you can check it out after the break) The community recently moved into a new venue, formerly the Crosstown Station, which provided some wonderful visual opportunities. I especially loved the different kinds of available light found there.
One of my favorite things about this project was that it gave me the opportunity to experiment with a number of different post-production techniques I'd never attempted. As a result, this might well be the first project I've ever created that I'd be really happy to see on a 40-foot screen. A big part of that had to do with some major software finessing of the footage in post...
Yesterday Red Giant released Magic Bullet Denoiser II, which was enough for me to drop whatever plans I had for the evening. Over the past few months I've been wrestling with the amount of noise I'm getting out of the H264 compression inherent in DSLR footage, and I was already shopping around for different solutions to the problem.
I'd tried out the original Magic Buller Denoiser, but it just wasn't stable enough within Premiere and After Effects. Turns out that the software code didn't entirely belong to Red Giant, which meant they weren't able to fix the problem themselves. Their solution was to build a new completely new denoising program from the ground up.
At this year's Sundance Film Festival Adobe hosted a panel about technology and storytelling that's really worth giving a listen to. (check it out after the break) The group includes some of the filmmakers and producers behind "Avatar", "Hugo", "District 9", and the upcoming "Act of Valor", and it's amazing just to hear about them using widely available technology like the Canon 7D and After Effects. I just found this to be really inspirational - hopefully you will as well.
Porn addtiction is one of the most pervasive problems we face in our society, yet it's something no one really wants to talk about. It takes a lot of courage to be willing to stand up and share your story about your battles with pornography. And while Tom Ryan's story is more dramatic than most, it's far from being a unique problem.
Someone turned me on to this amazing short film earlier today, and I knew a lot of you would definitely be able to appreciate what the filmmaker's up to with this piece. It's a incredible marriage of time lapse footage, motion graphics, visual effects, color grading and killer title work. The integration with the soundtrack is top-notch as well.
Douglas Koke is the visual artist, and you gotta respect the way he was able to find a compelling subject and then add several layers of awesome. Even better, the footage itself was shot with a sub-$1,000 Canon T3i.
Those of you who are regular reader of this blog will know that while I started out on Sony's Vegas, I really became a filmmaker using Apple's Final Cut Pro suite. Sure, by 2009 it was starting to get a little long in the tooth, but that was ok because what it lacked in horsepower it made up in stability and usability.
Even better, FCP was THE industry standard. Its enormous market share meant that third-part hardware and software makers could invest huge amounts of time an effort into FCP-compatable add-ons, knowing that if they created something good and useful a sizable market would be open to it. There was a lot of security there for aspiring filmmakers.
Then Apple had to go and laid the epic goose egg that was FCP X...
A few months ago Adobe announced that they would be aquiring Iridas' SpeedGrade color grading suite. While the details are still sketchy as to how exactly it would be incorporated in the Adobe software family, they seem to be indicating that it will probably be bundled into the forthcoming Production Premium CS6 suite.
As you can see from the video below (after the jump), this is a killer move for Adobe. One glaring piece of functionality that's been missing from the Adobe vidoe workflow is a professional color correction suite. But is Speedgrade as it exists today really the right step into the future..?
As a recent convert to Adobe Premiere CS5.5 one of my favorite discoveries is the Rate Stretch tool. It allows you to visually pull the length of a clip to fill how ever much time you need, then immediately preview the results. As someone who uses a lot of b-roll and slow motion in his filmmaking this tool is a serious time-saver. (check out the video after the jump)
The only problem with the Rate Stretch tool is the quality of the motion quality. In order for Premiere to slow the clip down it has to create new frames, and the more you slow it down the more frames Premiere has to create out of thin air. Premiere does a decent job of this, but most of the times I need a lot better than "decent" - I need "amazing".
In order to get great results you need something like Pixel Motion (within After Effects) to really get top-quality slow motion. In the past that meant slowing the clips down in Final Cut, exporting them into AE, applying the effect, exporting them back into FCP and hoping I guessed right on the slow down rate. (if not, I get to repeat the whole process again)
Sometimes if you work your tail off, create something great, then put it out there, good things really can happen. Just ask James Curran. Last month Curran posted an unoffical opening title sequence for Steven Spielberg's Tintin movie, an effort so well-realized that it currently has over 600,000 views on Vimeo.
Turns out one of those viewers was Spielberg himself. Now Slashfilm is reporting that Curran has been invited to the world premiere of Tintin in London by the man himself. Even better, according to the co-writer of Tintin Spielberg has offered Curran a job! Talk about a dream coming true.
Check out the animation that launched it all after the jump...
