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..?
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.
DSLRs were never designed for film work, but there's no doubt they've completely changed the game in the world of independant filmmaking. And while they're capable of producing some astouding imagery, they need a lot of work to make them useable in the real world.
One of the most important refinements to come along in the past two years has been the advent of engineered Picture Styles. I've written a bit in the past about the granddaddy of them all - Technicolor's CineStyle. Since it's release it's the style I've used almost exclusively in order to achieve the most latitude when grading my footage. But the more I used the Technicolor style the more I started to have a big gripe with one aspect of it...
Over the weekend I had a chance to shoot a short film for New City Church's official launch. I really believe in the people behind this, and I can't wait to see how this church impacts Shawnee Mission.
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..?
Over the past month or so my friends Rob Webster, Kathleen Sylvestri and I have been working hard on a new promo short about love, sex and marriage. What's made it great has been finally having an excuse to make a short film entirely within the world of Legos. (you can check it out after the jump)
One of my responsibilities on the project was color grading the final results. This presented a unique challenge as there wasn't anywhere stylistically to take it. For the sake of the story and the the tone of the composition those yellow Lego faces needed to stay in their correct color space. This wasn't a project to go all 'hipster' on.
What this piece needed a good Technical Correction grade without adding any Style Grading. If that last sentence seems at all confusing then this is the tutorial for you...
This week I finally had the chance to do something I'd always wanted to try. Ever since the original "Believe" spot from the Halo 3 campaign I wanted take a shot at creating a narrative short film using only highly-detailed models. So when this opportunity came up it seemed like the perfect chance to give it a go.
Read on to see the film and find out about the techniques use to create it...
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)
You wanna know why no one's really that excited about Avid's new Media Composer 6? Adobe's gonna show you why with this kick-tail video demo of their new dialog-syncing technology called "Rubbadub". (see it for yourself after the jump)
For those of you not familiar with the dialog-syncing, one of the most common problems with shooting dramatic material is that, no matter how hard you try, the audio you record as you're filming is often not great quality. In Hollywood they solve this problem by re-recording the dialog in-studio using a process called Additional Dialog Recording (or ADR). Then you get the best of both worlds.
The problem is that this process is HARD. Getting the actor to deliver their lines again with perfect timing and inflection is very difficult. Once you have the new dialog recordings syncing them up is a by-hand, pain-staking, syllable-by-syllable process. The whole thing is so incredibly difficult and time-intensive.
