Get Fruity with FL Studio via The Anchor
Akai MPC2000XL. E-mu SP-1200. These are the electronic drum machines used to create the majority of classic Hip-Hop records from the late ’80s to mid-’90s, which is considered as the genre’s “golden era.” Many aspiring producers of the new millennium felt pressured to use the same production equipment as the legends that came before them, blindly following tradition instead of advancing with the times. Legends that used the aforementioned drum machines did so out of last resort, as the drum machines were more cost effective than hourly instrument lessons. But in 2009, we’re fortunate enough to have a cheaper alternative with just as much musical potential: FL Studio, formerly known as FruityLoops.
FL Studio 8 Producer is available at an academic discount price of $119.
Link via PC Magazine
Adobe Creative Suite 4 has been out for a while, and it’s been widely praised, not the least by us. It’s a great piece of software—provided you’ve got the hardware to run it. That got me thinking: If money were no object, what would the ultimate CS4 system be? Well, by lucky coincidence, I work in a lab equipped to answer just that type of question. So I set out to build a PC that would wring the maximum benefit out of Adobe’s powerful multimedia suite.
Adobe Creative Suite 4 bundles are available at an academic discount price through Creation Engine.
Creative Suite 4 discount pricing for college students.
Link via Creation Engine
 Ableton Suite is the XL version of Ableton Live. Suite 8 gives you all of the features in Live8 plus SOUND, with a radically new Library packed with beautiful new sounds and a wealth of useful resources. Suite 8 contains 10 Ableton instruments including synths, a sampler, electric and acoustic drums, mallets, numerous sampled instruments and the new, reworked Operator. Two completely new instruments, Collision and Latin Percussion, round off the set. Ableton Suite 8 is a complete package: the tools AND the sounds.
Ableton Live Suite 8 is available at an academic discount price of $499.
Link via Creation Engine
 Ableton Live 8 provides a comprehensive environment for writing, producing and performing music plus a basic sound set.
Ableton Live 8 is available at an academic discount price of $329.
Link via CNET News
 Q: What did you see in Flash that impressed you?
Bowman: You see several things. You see a high-grade product that’s in some form on 99 percent of the browsers. You’ve got something that’s got mass usage. Secondly you see with Adobe a company committed to the customer experience in video with the Flash Player. We see a partner that continues to invest in their product. They have the same desire that we do. They want the Flash Player to be the best thing anybody has ever seen and we want that. When you partner with people like that, it’s not a philosophical discussion. We know where we want to be now how do we get there.
Flash CS4 Professional is available at an academic discount price of $249.
Link via digitalcontentproducer.com
The shot Snyder wanted starts with Kennedy’s motorcade arriving, with the camera dollying around. “It’s a God’s eye view because you actually see Zapruder filming the scene,” Hirota says. “Then you see the impact of the shot, and the camera pans around and you see the limo speed away.” Snyder’s twist on history was to include the superhero character The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) as a player in the scene, embodying the belief of conspiracy buffs that there was another shooter besides assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. “Our camera pans over, and you see The Comedian on the grassy knoll going behind a picket fence,” Hirota says.
CIS Hollywood used a combination of 3D CG elements and 2D matte painting projections to re-create Dealey Plaza. Hirota’s team used Adobe Photoshop for matte painting and Autodesk Maya to build 3D elements and to do the matte painting projections. “We built 3D geometry where necessary and we rendered it in [Pixar] RenderMan,” Hirota says. “Because the camera was moving so much, we’d then take an image and project it back onto the geometry that we’d built and see how it all worked. When we had it in 3-space, sometimes we’d have to clean up the painting projected on the 3D models to make sure that there was no stretching. The moving camera is why we couldn’t just track in a 2D matte painting. The camera is both moving in 3D space and it’s panning around. The camera travels down the road as well, so the environment had to be 3D.”
Photoshop CS4 Extended is available at an academic discount price of $299.
Maya Unlimited 2009 Superpack Mac/Windows (perpetual license) is available at an academic discount price of $395.
Link via washingtonpost.com
 Even in this digital age, black and white photography remains a touchstone of the art. No wonder every imaging program has simple tools to convert color images to grayscale. However, none of those utilities gave us the kind of accessible creative control over quality, grain, tonality, and dynamic range that we used to have in our old film darkrooms… until Nik Software Silver Efex Pro ($200, 15-day free trial) came on the scene.
It has been a long time since we have been as impressed with an imaging program as we are with Silver Efex Pro. It actually aces our old darkroom in fun, creativity and power–without all the chemical fumes.
Nik Silver Efex Pro is available at an academic discount price of $115.
Link via devx.com
 When you are accustomed to writing code with Microsoft Visual Studio and you move to a lesser tool, it can tend to de-motivate you. Despite the fact that I thought Flash had great potential, I walked away. It hurt, too, because I really wanted to do something cool with the timeline. My last thought after closing Flash for the last time was something akin to, “Dude, if Microsoft ever builds a similar tool that works with Visual Studio…look out.”
Well, Microsoft has done just that with their Expression tools. Combined with Visual Studio, you can build rich & interactive applications that rock. And the best part is that the tools rock as well. They are what you would expect from Microsoft… powerful, easy to use, and integrated.
Expression Studio 2 is available at an academic discount price of $108.
Link via wondertouch
particleView (previously called “ShowIEL”) is the library viewer for particleIllusion library files. With it you can load any particleIllusion emitter library and see the particles in an animated OpenGL window. If you’re familiar with particleIllusion, it’s like having only the preview window — fun stuff, and a great way to preview all of the emitters available for particleIllusion before buying.
particleIllusion 3.0 is available at an academic discount price of $185.
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