Is your titling with Sony Vegas a bit blasé these days? Here’s a technique that can bring some pizzazz to otherwise bland white letters on a background. Consider adding motion that appears inside the letters and compositing that over another video. That’s a powerful look that every Sony Vegas user should know how to do.
Digital Producer Magazine tutorial: Placing Video Inside a Title with Sony Vegas
What’s new in Rhino 4.0 videos on iTunes
McNeel Miami publishes free monthly video tutorials demonstrating how to get the most from Rhino. The tutorials are aimed at all levels of expertise. there is something new for everyone each month to download. Rhino videos, tutorials, tips, interviews now playing on an iPod near you.
Free Lightroom presets for download
onOne product manager Mike Wong has some good news to share: the company has teamed up with author Jack Davis to offer a set of 85 develop presets for Lightroom, and these are now available as a free download. (The installer copies the files to the correct location.) onOne offers info on how to use the presets, though I’m having fun here just messing around with the black & white settings. Thanks to Jack, Mike, & co. for making these available to the community.
Best-selling XTensions modules, including XPert FindChange, XPert ItemStyles, and XPert Pilot, to be available the week of April 2
DENVER – 03-13-2007 Quark Inc. announced today that Quark XPert Tools Pro for QuarkXPress® 7 will be posted on the Quark Web site the week of April 2 as a free download for all QuarkXPress 7 users.
“This suite of tools directly answers customers’ needs and enables simply better design,” said Terry Welty, Quark senior vice president of Corporate Marketing. “There’s tremendous value in these XTensions, especially when they’re combined with the powerful features in QuarkXPress 7. Making them available at no charge is our way of saying thanks to QuarkXPress 7 customers.”
Many designers rely on these powerful XTensions modules (formerly known as Quark ALAP XPert Tools Pro) in their workflows. Making them compatible with QuarkXPress 7 greatly expands the possibilities of what designers can do. Specifically, designers will be able to achieve their visions with greater consistency through better scaling, improved guides, and powerful text-linking.
Quark XPert Tools Pro will help designers excel through the use of features such as XPert FindChange that allows them to transform not just text but entire documents in seconds. XPert ItemStyles will enable them to quickly create attractive pages while keeping design consistent, and the XPert Pilot feature will let them go beyond tiny thumbnails to see large, graphically rich overviews of their projects.
Other popular XTensions in Quark XPert Tools Pro designers will look forward to include: • XPert Guides: Create and edit on-screen guides with precise control • XPert Scale: Scale multiple objects and their contents in a layout quickly and easily • XPert BoxTools: Ease the process of adjusting the size and placement of items, text, and graphics • XPert ImageInfo: Access information about pictures and the capabilities for modifying pictures placed in layouts • XPert PageSets: Save frequently used settings in the New Project dialog box as a style • XPert Toolbars: Create custom palettes for quick access to any QuarkXPress function • XPert TextLink: Provides an intuitive palette for linking and unlinking text boxes and text paths • XPert Print: Print or export pages or spreads as EPS files • XPert Type: Access and apply common text-formatting options quickly and easily
By David Basulto
Found at Digital Producer Magazine
I was so happy to take the day off from editing my film and delve into Wondertouch particleIllusion 3! To say I felt like a kid in a candy store is an understatement. This is absolutely one of the coolest, creative and exiting programs I have had the pleasure of reviewing! Oh and did I say powerful? Talk about a program with endless customization possibilities! Endless! All you do is add imagination!
Read more: Turning Text into Smoke with Wondertouch’s ParticleIllusion
From Computer Arts
Prepare for a bombshell. Most of the characters you’ll encounter on the TV or cinema screen are not refined, covered in fur and rendered by a single person during their coffee break (although while the final scene is rendering, you’ll probably have enough time for a good cup of java). Having given you that advice, please disregard it – because we’re going to try to do so anyway.
Since the design of cartoon animals is generally quite clean and unfussy, time spent on adding details such as wrinkles and creases can usually be kept to a minimum. However, as you chuck out these elements, you stand a risk of ending up with a rather uninteresting character: precisely the opposite of what we have planned.
When you design the character, it’s essential that the audience should be able to distinguish the beast’s species without having get out their Big Book of Comedy Creatures (Furred Edition). However, this does not mean you should stay true to your animal’s anatomy. On the contrary, a great way to start is by exaggerating one or two main characteristics, and then doing something unexpected with the rest of the body. While you’ll hopefully end up with a unique design, gathering references before you start is still a vital part of the process: not only to make sure that you create a recognisable caricature, but perhaps more importantly, to serve as inspiration.
Once you’ve finished the model, the creature can enter your virtual hair salon to be furred, groomed and dyed. In the walkthrough that follows, we’ll be running through the process step by step, controlling which polygons hair should be grown from, adjusting strand length, then delving into the parameters that control density and styling. You can use your own model if you prefer, but if you want to dive right in, we’ve provided one of our own.
It’s estimated that planet Earth is home to between 10 and 14 million different species, so there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to find a couple of interesting animals. But seeing as reading this will have already taken up half your coffee break, we went ahead and researched the perfect furry, comedy animal – the anteater!
Click here to download the support files Click here to download the tutorial for free
Adobe CSS Advisor
To keep track of all the different browser compatibility issues and the solutions to fix them, Adobe has created the CSS Advisor website. There, you can find solutions to CSS and browser compatibility issues, contribute your own CSS issues, share fixes with the community, and comment on and improve existing solutions.
Photoshop Insider: Lightroom: The Word On The Street
Here are some comments, quotes, postings, and blog entries I’ve picked up in the last few weeks regarding different photographer’s reactions to Adobe Lightroom. Although there were lots of great comments, when I ran across any “not so great” comments, I included them too. An interesting read for sure.
If you’re creating video for the Internet, mobile devices, CD-ROM, or DVD, you know that the fun of editing stops when it comes time to compress your work. It’s one of those things you hate to do because you usually need to make your file size as small as possible, which inevitably forces you to compromise video and sound quality. That’s why it helps to have an application like Sorenson Squeeze, which specializes in compressing video. Version 4.5 of the Squeeze Compression Suite doesn’t add any major new features to the last version we reviewed (3 out of 5 stars, May/06, p50), but it sports a few nips, tucks, and bug fixes, in addition to Universal binary support.
Sorenson Squeeze 4.5 Compression Suite review from MacLife
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