We talked about some pretty cool features in Adobe’s latest Production Premium yesterday. Today we will finish off with a look at After Effects, Sound Booth and a few links.
Adobe Soundbooth
The Adobe equivalent to Soundtrack Pro. One cool feature was Volume Correction which allows you to adjust the volume on one clip and it will match the levels on the other clips. It does not adjust them all the same amount, instead it knows that certain clips will need to be adjusted less than others and will apply the effect accordingly.
The ability to zoom into the waveform and edit individual frequencies of sound. In the demo the guy took out a cell phone ring without messing up the sound around it. Very easy and very useful for the non-sound-editor video guy. You can make all of these adjustments on the fly and Soundbooth automatically “heals” the audio around the adjustments so you get minimal distortion.
It also includes a bunch of keyframeable royalty-free sound fx and scores.
Adobe After Effects
My personal favorite Adobe product for any motion graphics or visual effect work. You can now search the timeline just like you are able to search the effects palette. This will save a ton of time in projects with a lot of layers.
It also has advanced 3D support to match the upgraded 3D engine in Photoshop. You can now tweak your model in Photoshop, import it into After Effects and get some pretty sophisticated animation going on.
There is a new “Cartoon” effect that gives you the Scanner Darkly/Charles Schwab commercial effect. It was actually well executed and you can keyframe the values to get a more natural looking effect. Check out this video:
Within the keyframing in the After Effects timeline you can now change the values for an individual axis. For example you can have separate keyframes for the X and Y axis allowing for smoother animation.
Lastly Imagineer Systems’ Mocha has developed a plugin for After Effects that is included in Production Premium. It allows you to do more sophisticated corner pin tracking easier than within AE. You can then edit the resulting keyframes from within After Effects. Check the video:
Useful Links
These were some links that they gave us at the show for more info.
- http://www.gigapxl.org/ - Really cool project for giant images. Check out the gallery
- http://tv.adobe.com - Training Videos
- http://labs.adobe.com - Download free Google 3D Models
- http://blogs.adobe.com - Blogs by people who work for Adobe
- http://motiongraphicslab.com - Tutorials, etc.
- http://motionism.com - Encore templates
Conclusion
Nicely done Adobe. Everything looks well thought out and there are some very interesting new features. I would need to get into an actual project to really see what it has to offer and how well it works in practice. But for me, After Effects and Photoshop and the very least are on my software wishlist.
If you have had any experience with the new Production Premium CS4, let us know in the comments.
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