Yay!

Yay!

On Friday I was given a G4 cube! It's _SO_ cute!





I'm going to hug it and squeeeze it and name it George! No wait! Cube-Bert! Hmm... No... Geepers. What am I going to call it? Hmm... Well... To make a long story short, he ended up being named 'Geepers'. :) On Saturday I went out and bought him an additional 512M of RAM so now he's got 640M of RAM. Though older and slower than my PC, it does a better job with video stuff and since Adobe gave me copies of After Effects and Premiere for Mac when I upgraded my PC version, I have tools to play with on it. Although Premiere does not support direct DV capture in classic mode for OSX, but I can capture with iMovie so it's still really neat! I can also now do DV stuff on two different computers concurrently! Yay!!! :)

-Sammi

After Effects 5

Wow!

After some discussion in my animation class on Monday about bluescreening techniques, I decided it was time to sit down and try to learn After Effects. About a year and a half ago I bought the Adobe, 'Dynamic Media Collection' which came with Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, and Illustrator. I had bought it because I wanted Photoshop and Premiere and it was cheaper than buying those two seperately. Great sales plan on Adobe's part! After having Illustrator for a while and using it for nothing more than fiddling with PDF files, I started working with it more and discovered that it really does a LOT of neat stuff that I had wanted in Photoshop but not been able to get.

The same seems to be true for After Effects. Every feature I felt was lacking in Premiere was in After Effects. Better bluescreening, MUCH MUCH MUCH better traveling matte control, 3-d rotations of images, crossfading titles, and a bunch of other cool stuff. I also found out there are a bunch of additional things in After Effects that I never even knew I wanted! Forcing faked 3d lighting into 2d images, all kinds of REALLY neat filters and manipulations, render-queue/render farm capabilities, onionskinned Vector-drawing. Forcing 2-d stuff to vectorize and output as Flash, and tons of other really cool things!
I have a HUGE amount to learn, but after 3 hours last night, I am already overwhelmed by all the possibilities it has opened up and all the problems it solves! Definetely a really really cool program if you do video stuff! I'll have to post some results soon! :)

-Sammi