OT: Adobe CS5 Countdown to April 12th Launch!

[cs5launch.adobe.com]

I can't talk about anything...but I can say there are some prominent plug-in developers working on CS5 Plug-ins that are Snow Leopard 64-bit ready!! Gotta get it for your Final Cut Pro Toolbox!!

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Let me just add - Content-Aware fill. Freaking amazing. This will save some of us SO much time. [blogs.adobe.com]

I never got the time saving thing. I always thought for billable hours labor-intensive(or labour-intensive, how do they write it in Oz?) was good. Like rendering. Slower the computer the better.

All the best,

Tom

Depends whose pocket it comes out of, I spose. Also, there's stuff that just plain hurts to have to do. Not having to do it is a great relief. Like capturing 25 hours of race footage while making notes for example. Never never fun. If there was a button to do that, I would happily press it and give up the 25 hours pay.

Yes, I am a very poor capitalist.

I will gladly give back every dollar I've ever earned doing roto if it means I never have to do roto ever again.

(Disclaimer: I will not actually give back those dollars. They're long gone.)

But the new fill is super cool, though the way it can complete redo reality rubs my upbringing the wrong way.

All the best,

Tom

Don't be too proud of this technological terror Adobe's constructed. The ability to give a cool-looking low-resolution Flash video demo is insignificant next to the power to ship a product that fixes more bugs than it introduces.

The Content-Aware-Fill is the best upgrade ever. Been using Photoshop since version "1".

Thank you Adobe.

Russ Andris

It's pretty cool, but better than layers and transparency?

All the best,

Tom

LAYERS ARE FOR LOSERS. CHANNEL OPERATIONS FOR LIFE.

STOP SHOUTING.

Channel ops need channel layers.

All the best,

Tom

OH! I'm shocked and appalled that you would denigrate the good name of layers in a professional forum.
Layers are for life. Not just for Xmas.

Tom,

Saving time for us Artists by shortening processes doesn't mean we tell the client that we can work faster. It just means we don't have to do as many workarounds

BTW...I hate to be the Harbinger of Doom...and I don't know if it is true or not...but I have been told by 2 VERY prominent / well respected Adobe Product Teaching gurus in our community that the "Content-Aware Fill" posts everywhere...are FAKE. If you think about it, Adobe NEVER releases any info about a product before the product is announced. It's taboo at Adobe.

I hope the folks that told me this are wrong because I would get a TON of use out of this.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

See personally, I tell my clients if it doesn't take so long. I'm funny like that.

It's been announced, release at NAB. Demos being done by the Adobe product team. It's for real, using the word loosely. It's another Adobe magic tool. When it works it's mind-blowing.

All the best,

Tom

SuperMeet has Adobe on stage too but not sure what exactly they will be showing. Yet.

Michael Horton
-------------------

I hope you are right Tom because it would be spectacular. I was told not to take it seriously as the Product Team has a grand sense of humor

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Content-Aware-Fill...that is freaking AMAZING.

Wait til you see the other features of CS5!



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Yeah you can't go past the 'step back in time' feature where it ACTUALLY TRANSPORTS YOU BACKWARDS IN TIME!

Ok, that was bullshit. But it would be cool. Feature request?

How about a feature called "REPLACE SIGNIFICANT OTHER"?

This feature works on pictures of couples who split up. Simply select the significant other that strayed and hit "Resolve" and it replaces that person with your favorite movie star / sex symbol (there would be a downloadable library of "Replacement Significant Others" on the Adobe site).

Better than tearing photos in half!!

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Why is it that every development in electronic editing since Editec has been billed as saving time, but 30 years on I am still working 15 hour days? Edit sessions NEVER get shorter. The product gets better, the look more refined, the process more involved, but the hours are always the same.

-V

>The product gets better, the look more refined, the process more involved, but the hours are
>always the same.

Well, it depends. In some places, the product doesn't get better, the look doesn't become more refined, nor do the hours become shorter, but the volume of work more than doubles. I'd trade this for getting a better product anyday.



www.strypesinpost.com

Quote

Edit sessions NEVER get shorter.

That's not universally true. It's possible today to do in an hour what took a day ten years ago. So some edit sessions are much, much shorter. Just two days ago I sat in on a twenty-minute session that would've taken all day (much of it spent rendering) just five-ish years back.

But on the other side of the coin, in a lot of environments the sessions aren't any shorter because the price of a session has remained the same, or even dropped. The agencies continue to buy a day of supervised editorial, and use the time they've paid for. The fact that they're getting a lot more for their money now is just bonus.

Yet another aspect is the fact that you can now do the same job in the same time as five or ten years ago, but for what, a tenth of the investment in equipment and software? You can build a really good offline edit suite for $20,000 today, give or take a few bucks, and for say $75,000, you can build a fine online suite. Not counting the posh couches and the latte budget, obviously. Or for well under $10,000, including software, you can have a complete offline suite that can fit in a carry-on case. It's really kind of remarkable, if you think about it.

OK Strypes, you caught me out. It's first thing in the morning here and I was trying to put a positive spin on the day. If I were in my more cynical mode I might have said, "But we just keep throwing more crap up on the screen."

What's the old joke? TVs are so sophisticated today. They're digital, they're high-definition, they've got computers in them, there are a thousand individual little controls that nobody ever uses. But the shows on them have gotten dumber and dumber. I wish there were a control on the television to turn up the intelligence. I tried the one marked "brightness" but it didn't help.

First apologies to Joey for hijacking this thread about a major upgrade.

Jeff I would like to define a term for this discussion. A "bang" is a bit of visual wow that we all put on the screen. As in "bang for your buck" A cool effect, a great color look, and interesting sound design. All are one or more bangs.

So our industry has constantly ramped up the bangs. Like you point out, it is MUCH less expensive to make bangs every year. And to the original point of this thread, the folks who make the tools are constantly givings us things to ramp up the bangs.

Clients really love bangs. They want as many bangs as they can get. So at the end of the (long) day my work now has a lot more bangs that it did in 1980. What's more after inflation adjustment those bangs are a good value (remember on-line rooms at $600/HR plus additions for extra gear).

Still I remain unafraid that new technology is somehow going to cut the number of hours we spend collectively lighting up television and movie screens. Any single "thing" may be quicker but it seems there are so many more things to do to get all those bangs.

-V

Weird double post. What I get for jumping back and forth during short renders I guess.

==> I tried the one marked "brightness" but it didn't help.

What is the old quote? "Television is a medium because it is rarely well done."

That's the problem. Too many "bangs" flatten everything out. Sensory overload, lack of contrast, lack of depth and development, lack of nuance and subtlety, and so on, and so on. Imagine if every scene in The Godfather were as explosive as the Sonny Corleone assassination or the killing of Virgil Sollozzo. Clients often don't have the filmic awareness to realize that you need scenes like the garden conversation between the Godfather and Michael, or the discussion of retaliation in the study, in order for the peaks to stand out. Clients, given their way, will often try to fill every second with "bangs", and that's when you get Domino or the Transformers movies.


www.derekmok.com

I like it. Bang density per unit time. Makes sense.

Thing is, though, a bang won't necessarily be noticeable. In fact, often the goal of a particular visual effects shot is not to be noticed, or at the very least not to be conspicuous. Just last night I was helping Strypes pull a key on some very poorly shot footage. I worked my butt off in Nuke to make that procedural matte as good as it could possibly be, not so people would look at it and go "wow, what an awesome matte!" but simply to avoid people going "wow, that matte looks like butt."

A friend of mine is working this weekend on a television commercial for, if I remember correctly, Firestone. It was shot during the winter, but it's going to air in the early summer. So he's having to go in and replace the grass in front of a house with entirely computer-generated 3D grass. Why? Because simply color-correcting the grass didn't work ? it was all patchy, and very difficult to convincingly color-correct ? and because he can. The client wants the shot, which is only about 32 frames long, to convincingly pass for a warm season, and it's easier and cheaper for my friend to do a 3D camera track, render out procedurally modeled grass and composite the new element on top of the shot than it is for the client to do a reshoot once the weather turns.

Not every bang has to be a bang, I guess is what I'm saying.