Show Notes: Episode 167

  • Final Cut Studio 2 vs. Adobe Production Premium CS3
    Tavis Dunn
    Art Director, Greedy Productions Ltd.

    What is Final Cut Studio and Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium and who is it geared towards?
    Both products are an excellent value for small companies or 1 man band operations.
    They both cover a lot of the same area. Both have video editors, motion design programs, sound editing, dvd creation and video compression elements. Adobe throws in an image editor (photoshop), a vector editor (illustrator) and a flash editor. So for some it may be worth the extra $400.
    Final Cut Studio is primarly aimed at video editors who want to do a little bit more with their videos.
    Adobe CS3 Productions Premium is aimed at graphic designers who want to do a little bit of everything
    (including flash and illustrator creation) but with a focus on video as well. Final Cut workflow is a little more seamless from program to program, but performance suffers especially in the FCP to Motion workflow.
    Adobe’s dynamic link is a little more cumbersome, but there is a minimal performance hit. Adobe premiere
    Is very buggy on the Mac, with several known issues. It is however a version 1 product on the Mac and you
    should be aware of that if you want to use for mission critical projects. Final Cut Pro is by far a more robust editor and becoming an industry standard. So if you are interested in getting one of these bundles as a stepping stone into the industry, then FCP is a better solution.

    PRODUCTS SHOWN
    Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium ($1699)
    Apple Final Cut Studio 2 ($1299)

  • Stop motion animation in the digital age, Old Art with New Tools…

    • brief description of stop motion animation to frame the interview (with video)
    • Describe our digital image capture pipeline ie shooting on Canon 5Ds, shooting with Mac Pros on Fibre Channel, software overview, doing the lab work in house (RAW to TIFF pipeline), running on Mac platform. Demo Iridas software’s Framecycler
    • Describe the two different motion control rigs used on the show (stills and video)
    • time permitting, a brief overview of what we’re going to do in VFX – we’ve just started the post process and don’t have much to show at this point in time

    http://www.framethief.com/ - Framethief Stop Motion animation software
    http://www.framecycler.com/pro/ - IRIDAS Framecycler Pro – High quality frame sequence playback
    http://cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/ - DCRAW photo conversion software
    http://www.apple.com/shake/ - Shake 2D Compositing software
    http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/ - Adobe Photoshop
    http://www.apple.com/xserve/ - Apple Xserve
    http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/ - Apple Xserve RAID
    http://www.general-lift.com/ - General Lift Motion Control Systems
    http://www.technicolor.com/Cultures/En-Us/Home - Technicolor
    http://www.atmosphere-vfx.com/ - Atmosphere Visual Effects
    http://www.spinpro.com/ - SPIN West VFX

    Stop Motion Websites / resources
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_motion
    http://www.stopmotionworks.com
    http://www.stopmotionanimation.com/

    Motion Control Suppliers
    http://www.bwc.com/ - Bishop Wisecarver
    http://www.geckodrive.com/ - Gecko Drivers
    http://www.ni.com/labview/ - National Instruments Labview

  • Firefox 3: From a Sprint to a Marathon
    Zak Greant
    Associate, Foo Associates

    http://getfirefox.com (Official Firefox download site)
    http://mozilla.com (The Mozilla Corporation website)
    http://mozilla.com/projects (A list of other cool Mozilla community projects)
    http://mozillafoundation.org (The Mozilla Foundation website)