Joining Forces with Cinema Grade

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Some time has passed since I told you that I’m back in the game. And in the meantime this happened: Cinema Grade for Windows. As you can see, I am again directly involved in reducing your pains in using color grading tools during editing. Take a look at that Kickstarter page and then come back, I’ll tell you a story of how it came to pass.

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Another Course of Adobe Plugin Development

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I’ve grown quiet over past several months, when I decided to more actively embrace my development career in a field that is not related to film and video. However, despite quite an overwhelming day job, I managed to recently wrap up the second instalment of a course for After Effects plugin development, again hosted by my favourite vfx training site – fxphd.com.

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Creating Thumbnails Has Never Been Easier

One of the byproducts of my work on THAT Studio Panel extension for Premiere Pro and After Effects has been an After Effects script that would generate a massive amount of thumbnails for video files. The initial idea to use it to prepare Panel assets did get scrubbed along the way, and we never got to using it in our automated workflow, but I believe it was too valuable to go to waste. Therefore here it is – name any way that you want to generate frames from your After Effects compositions or video files, and Master Thumbnailer will do that for you.

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Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects Plug-in Development Course on fxphd.com

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I’m happy to announce, that this term I’m teaching plug-in development for Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects on fxphd. I’ll be covering the basics of C/C++ and Adobe After Effects SDK in a bit more detail, as well as GPU acceleration for Premiere. All these will be illustrated with a simple vignette effect that we are going to create during the course with the students. Believe it or not, any similarities to the very first effect that I wrote are coincidental. see more

The Bane of UI Minimalism

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I am appalled at some trends in the User Interface design these days. Touch screen devices became an entrenched market a couple years ago, and suddenly everyone and their mother decided to optimise the User Experience (UX) to take into account this new animal. Nothing bad about the general idea, but unfortunately in some cases the results seem to have been the apparent devolution of the UI design.

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Layer Stripper – It’s Not What You Think It Is

CI Layer Stripper

As I’m getting ready for this year’s NAB, I think it’s great time to release a new nifty tool for After Effects – CI Layer Stripper. This script deftly removes all unused layers from your project – the ones that are not visible, and not referenced by other layers as parents, track mattes, or even simple expressions. This will allow you to trim and collect these items in your project which are actually being used.

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Finally a Viable After Effects Archive Solution

Trim N Collect

While developing Conform Studio I stumbled upon an application of the CS Extract script which I considered interesting, but did not have enough time to code and test properly. It was only a matter of time when other people attempted to use the Studio in this manner, therefore I even included a note in the manual about it. see more

Nuke Studio For After Effects

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When I first saw the demonstration of Nuke Studio shown on NAB, with each new feature I was thinking: yes, this is exactly as it should be done. This is precisely how Dynamic Link should work from the get go in Adobe applications. Congratulations to The Foundry for making it happen. I wish I could afford your tool :) see more

The Inevitable Convergence – Episode II

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In the aftermath of IBC 2013 I wrote about the inevitable convergence of various software packages. It was easy to see how various vendors began expanding their packages into areas beyond the primary intended roles. NAB 2014 confirms this ongoing trend, and breeds more and more interesting solutions at various price ranges.

Let’s quickly sum it up: BlackMagic Design gave Resolve a serious boost in the editing realm and collaboration, The Foundry announced Nuke Studio, bringing Hiero timeline into Nuke – or another way around, if you prefer – upping the VFX management expectations for everyone and aiming towards the on-line market. Autodesk enhanced real-time timeline capabilities in both Flame and Smoke, while Adobe is constantly tightening the interaction between its various applications to make them work seamlessly as one. The case can be made that Avid is also attempting to do precisely that, gathering all its offerings in Avid Everywhere platform mirroring Adobe Anywhere though with proxy workflow instead of real-time server rendering.

All in all, this expansion outside the primary areas suggests that the applications are mostly mature, the toolset required to fulfil the primary functions is pretty much there, and the software companies are aggressively attempting to widen the user base. This is the case especially with grading packages, where the competition is relatively intense, and the high-end segment stops being perceived as the only viable support. Witness Digital Vision licensing its precision control surface to SGO Mistika, and going software-only route with its Nucoda, dropping its price in a clear attempt to widen its reach.

Which breeds the question – is specialized software doomed to fail in the long run? Will the likes of Baselight eventually run off of the resources to sustain themselves? Certainly, there are some comfortable niches where individual applications do and will exist – Mocha for planar tracking and Silhouette for rotoscoping seem to be pretty good examples. But they thrive in the space where they have no competition, protected by patents or relative obscurity. It’s a very cozy place to be in, but there are not many like these. How will Nuke fare against Mamba FX, now that it has Mac version? How will Premiere, Avid and FCPX survive the BlackMagic incursion?

Today for pure editing still nothing beats dedicated NLEs. I bet it might be a year or two before somebody attempts to do a larger editing project in Nuke Studio or Resolve. But I can easily see how shorter forms might resort to these tools, especially to Resolve for its unbeatable price point and relative ease of use, and Nuke Studio will comfortably find its place in the VFX editorial and possibly finishing.

Lastly, there is the problem of feature bloat and discoverability. When software starts to expand into areas not envisioned from the moment of its conception, the risk of hitting a development wall is pretty huge, since the base code and the user interface was not optimized for these additional tasks, and the forays will most likely appear clumsy to the eyes of the users of specialized packages. Nuke will never be as good roto software as is Silhouette, and I highly doubt it will outclass After Effects in motion graphics.

Will the convergence happen though? Will there be enough overlap between Adobe Creative Cloud, Nuke Studio, Autodesk Flame, and daVinci Resolve that the choice will come down to user preference and – gosh – pricing? Not unless BlackMagic partners with SGO, Eyeon or takes over Toxik from Autodesk. If that happens, all bets are off.

As for now, we can happily choose any tool we deem appropriate for the job and out budgets.