» Posts Tagged ‘cs5’
Element 3D After Effects Plug-In: Free 1.5 Update Released, Plus a Tutorial for Metropolitan Model Pack
If you thought Video Copilot’s Adobe After Effects plug-in Element 3D couldn’t get any better, then check out the new features the free 1.5 update is sporting: support for importing animated 3D sequences, real-time glow, new particle ordering and repeating options, ambient occlusion improvements, layer grid mode, and more. Feast your eyes on Andrew Kramer’s video below for a complete tour of what’s new in Element 3D: More »
Element 3D: 3 New Tutorials and How to Start Making Your Own 3D Content
This past summer I wrote about the release and initial tutorials for Video Copilot’s awesome Adobe After Effects plug-in, Element 3D. Andrew Kramer has been slowly but surely releasing new tutorials for the plug-in that show off more aspects of its functionality and practical applications in After Effects projects. His three latest Element 3D tutorials delve into image based lighting, using video clips as textures to create screen animations, and making a field of random rocks as a part of a set extension. As an extra bonus, I’ve included some tutorials for the free open-source 3D modeling and animation program Blender, to get you started making your own objects for Element 3D. More »
Last month I wrote about the new Adobe After Effects plug-in from Video Copilot: Element 3D. The initial demo videos were pretty amazing, but Andrew Kramer is delving deeper into Element 3D’s functionality in his most recent tutorial videos, covering the creation and manipulation of materials, powerful animation options in the Particle Replicator, environment maps, and 3D Compositing. And if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a tutorial from Serge Mustu on a Cinema 4D to Element 3D workflow and animating titles: More »
Video Copilot Releases Their Stunning New After Effects Plug-in: Element 3D
If you thought the new 3D capabilities in Adobe After Effects CS6 were impressive, you haven’t seen anything yet. Andrew Kramer of Video Copilot just released the Element 3D Plug-in for After Effects CS3 through CS6 on both Windows and OSX. It’s a 3D object based particle array system with a fast Open GL render engine, and a simple yet powerful animation engine. Check out these demo videos to see Element 3D in action: More »
I just took advantage of Adobe’s 20% off upgrade for Creative Suite 5.5, and it’s a good thing, because apparently Adobe is killing upgrade pricing entirely for the Creative Suite — and its individual components — unless you’re running the latest version. This means when CS6 is released next year, if you’re not on CS5.5, you’ll have to pay full price. Here’s what they had to say: More »
When I priced out the components of the new Mac Pro, I realized Apple’s pro line is not a good value proposition. When the same new Mac Pros left off an nVidia graphics card as an option, I took it as a slight to Adobe. When I asked you guys if you’d like me to build a hackintosh in an attempt to have the best of both worlds, you said yes. So I’ve done the research, priced out the components, and drawn my conclusions. Here’s what I think is possible for a video editing-optimized hackintosh: compared to the $2,500 Mac Pro base model that will ship this month, I believe the Hac Pro can have a faster processor, four times as much RAM, a Blu-Ray burner, USB 3.0 connectivity1, more storage space, and an nVidia graphics card that accelerates Adobe CS5. The kicker? This Hac Pro will cost $1,000 less. More »
- Mac OS X does not presently support USB 3.0, but presumably a motherboard with USB 3.0 will be ready once the OS is. [↩]
Mac vs. PC is a never-ending debate, but when it comes to video editing, what we need are hard and fast numbers. It would be impossible to generate a comparison of apples to apples (zing?) by using Final Cut Pro, since that NLE is only available on one platform. Instead, Adobe’s CS5 suite is the ideal candidate — and considering CS5 is 64-bit native on both OSes, it should be a fair fight. The best way to settle this would be to open the exact same CS5 project file on a Mac and a PC, play it back, render it out, and measure it in other ways — on various machines, at different price points — and compare the results. If only someone would create such a benchmarking tool and upload the results to a database… As it turns out, someone has done just this. More »
Apple today announced new Mac Pros, marking the first updates to the fruit company’s pro line since March of 2009. Pricing starts at $2,500 for the base 4-core model, $3,500 for the 8-core model, and a wallet-annihilating $5,000 for the 12-core model. The new machines use the latest Intel Xeon processors, there are new SSD options for storage, and higher-powered ATI graphics cards are now standard. No USB 3.0 or Lightpeak as rumored, and still no Blu-ray option. None of this is particularly surprising, but there’s an interesting angle to this announcement concerning the ongoing feud between Apple and Adobe. More »
I was at a rental house checking out $500k of video equipment (not for my own project — I wish) when Apple announced the iPhone 4 yesterday, so I forgot it was the day I was supposed to figure out whether my next editing machine was going to be a Mac or a Hac. When I got back home, however, I saw 30 billion posts on the internet about the iPhone — a platform for interacting and consuming — and nothing about the Mac — a platform for creating. More »
Adobe After Effects is an incredibly deep compositing program that often flusters first-time users with its myriad panels and switches. It’s not the most intuitive program, and as such I don’t recommend taking the approach I did: banging my head against the wall until it made sense. Instead, why not take advantage of two hours of free training from Video Copilot? This video series came out a while ago (circa CS3), but 99% of it still applies to CS5. More »
Most of us use both Adobe and Apple products — most commonly Adobe Photoshop and Apple Final Cut, I’m guessing. With the ongoing feud between the two companies reaching a joke T-shirt-spawning level, however, it’s nice to know that their respective NLE programs still talk to each other (thanks to standards-based XML files). Since CS4, Premiere Pro has been able to open and export Final Cut XML files (which is handy for getting FCP sequences into After Effects, an action that used to require a $500 plugin). CS5 tutorial after the jump: More »
I don’t work for Adobe or anything, but since CS5 is the NKOTB, this site’s a bit Adobe-heavy these days. Adobe’s Jason Levine is rolling out the free tutorials to promote the suite’s release, so here’s another one on doing keying and time remapping in Premiere Pro CS5: More »
This Wednesday, May 26th from 1-2:30pm (Eastern), Adobe is running a free online workshop on DSLR video and Production Premium CS5
Link: Working with DSLR Video with Adobe CS5 Production Premium
[via Cinema5d]
And the exodus I spoke of begins. In Final Cut there is no (updated: good) way to edit DSLR footage without transcoding. In Premiere Pro CS5, now shipping, there is. I’m also hearing anecdotally that Adobe finally took the “Pro” moniker seriously and the latest version is significantly more stable than previous versions. Here’s Jason Levine with an 8-minute demo of DSLR editing in CS5. More »
This isn’t for anyone who works at a huge corporation or has a lot of money, but for the rest of us, I think the best guerilla solution for filmmaking in 2010 will be a PC. I’ve been a Mac guy for the past four years but I suspect things are about to change; here’s why. More »
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