Link via csmonitor.com
Filmmaker James Cameron (“Titanic”) has dubbed the new technology “the Holy Grail of advertising.” Eric Miller, a digital artist and the director of online training for the Gnomon School of Visual Effects notes, “A new medium for artists to explore doesn’t come along very often, and this is one that really needs to be seen.”
Perhaps the most telling response comes from within the ranks of the Hollywood technorati. “It’s a glimpse of the future,” says Josh Greer, president and cofounder of RealD, one of the industry’s leading providers of 3-D technology. “Everyone in this town is interested in 3-D and this,” he says, shows “what the next stage will look like.”
RabbitHoles offers startling realism, but only for 10 to 12 seconds of motion. That’s not enough for a normal 30-second advertisement, but the moving holograms have already produced a handful of movie-theater ads, special effects in theme park rides, and a sprinkling of holographic art pieces.
Thanks to several years of research and development by laser technicians and optical engineers in Canada, crisp-moving 3-D images once seen only on a computer, or with special glasses in movie theaters, have finally been realized – and in an easily portable format.
Rabbitholes Media Website
3-D images can be created by Autodesk, Hash, Maxon, Newtek, Strata and other 3-D software available from Creation Engine.
Link via Business Tech – CNET News
On one side of the battle lines is the original Web page description technology called HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language. Over the years, its abilities were augmented first with JavaScript, a basic programming language, and later a JavaScript-on-steroids technology called Ajax.
On the other side is Adobe Systems’ Flash, which got its start as a method for graphic animations. It’s grown into a much more powerful programming foundation over the years and has been joined more recently by a competitor: Microsoft’s Silverlight.
All these technologies are advancing rapidly as Internet start-ups and giants such as Google race to transform personal computer software into services available on the Internet. These so-called rich Internet applications rarely match the performance and features of PC-based applications, at least today, but online applications can benefit from sharing, reliability, and access from multiple devices.
Flash CS3 Professional is available at an academic discount price of $245.
 With Photoshop Lightroom 2.0, Adobe has smartly upgraded an already-strong product. For many photographers, the new Adjustment Brush and the advanced filtering capabilities will reduce the need to use external programs like Photoshop and Adobe Bridge, and are well worth the $99 upgrade price.
But what’s most impressive about the update is how smoothly it works with you to organize and edit your photos; by focusing on improving the little things, Adobe has made an already good program even more usable. It’s not perfect—it’s rare that a version 2.0 of any product would be—but Lightroom is well on its way.
Photoshop Lightroom 2 is available at an academic discount price of $98.
Link via Adobe Edge
 If you’ve heard about Adobe AIR but haven’t taken it for a test drive yet, there are many reasons to check it out — especially if you have a background in Flash development.
The Adobe AIR runtime enables you to use your existing web development skills and tools to build desktop applications that run on Mac OS X and Windows (and soon also on Linux). AIR applications have all the necessary functionality of standard desktop applications — including access to local files, drag-and-drop support, and more — while also providing the benefit of online and offline connectivity.
In addition, installing AIR apps is safe and transparent to end users thanks to support of digital signatures and the seamless badge install. (You can read Deploying Adobe AIR applications seamlessly with badge install by David Tucker in the AIR Developer Center for more information about that.)
Flash CS3 Professional is available at an academic discount price of $245.
Link via Broadcasting & Cable
 NBC will have more than 100 Sony cameras in Beijing, but the lion’s share of coverage will come from BOB, which is using some 60 mobile units and a mix of HD cameras, including Thomson LDK hard cameras and Panasonic P2 solid-state camcorders, to cover every sport in 1080-line-interlace HD at 50 hertz. NBC will mainly use its cameras to supplement BOB’s coverage of major sports such as track and field.
Avid is supplying a Unity ISIS shared storage system with some 224 terabytes of storage, Interplay work-flow-management software and 34 seats of Symphony Nitris and Media Composer nonlinear editing software. The Avid systems will connect to XT servers from EVS, which will be used by NBC to ingest live feeds (NBC has a total of 48 XT servers).
Avid has engineered a work flow that will allow the 100-mbps HD video from the EVS units to be seamlessly converted to Avid’s DNxHD mezzanine compression format (operating at 120 mbps for 50 Hz production, instead of the typical 145 mbps). This allows EVS’ IPDirector systems to transfer EVS clips directly to the Avids for editing and for finished Avid clips to be pushed to EVS for playback to air.
Avid Media Composer 3.0 is available at an academic discount price of $295.
Link via The U.S. Daily
 Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac is a much-needed and welcomed update. A much better graphical user interface GUI, powerful tools, and much more, all add up to the best version of Photoshop Elements for Mac yet.
When I do a review, I try to use the product in a real-world situation. For Photoshop Elements 6, I was able to use many of the tools and features in my everyday work. As an amateur photographer, I like to edit and crop photos; for my articles, I re-size images for the Web; and I use plenty more workflows.
Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac is available at an academic discount price of $63.
Link via AppleInsider
Following an earlier open beta, Adobe on Tuesday released version 2.0 of its Photoshop Lightroom post production photography software, which stands as the company’s first application to run 64-bit-native on Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard operating system.
The San Jose-based software developer is particularly proud of the accomplishment given that Lightroom’s main competitor, Apple’s Aperture, has yet to see native 64-bit support.
Adobe has committed to delivering 64-bit versions of Photoshop and its other Creative Suite applications, but said earlier this year that those updates will take considerably longer due to Apple’s decision to scrap plans for a 64-bit version of its Carbon developer tool set.
For Lightroom 2.0, 64-bit support will allow the application to address large amounts of memory in excess of 4 gigabytes, which will speed up overall performance for photographers dealing with large scale images that must be swapped into and out of memory during processing-intensive operations.
The software also aims to streamline and accelerate photographers’ workflows through an enhanced Library module featuring the ability to visually organize images across multiple hard drives. A Library Filter Bar and Suggested Keywords feature work towards simplifying the search and retrieval process.
Photoshop Lightroom 2 is available at an academic discount price of $98.
Learn Lightroom 2.0 via Bob Donlon’s Adobe TV Blog
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 launched today, and Adobe TV is your free ticket to a tour of what’s new.
Check out these 3 videos, presented by the venerable Julieanne Kost (host of The Complete Picture on Adobe TV), to learn all about a bevy of new features and improvements including enhancements to the Library Module, non-destructive localized color-corrections, tighter integration with Photoshop, and updates to the Print, Slideshow, and Web modules. It’s the best way to learn about this exciting update to an already solid tool for photographers.
Lightroom 2 is available at an academic discount price of $98.
Link via eWeek.com
NEW YORK—Adobe’s Flash is the dominant rich Internet application platform and the company is counting on its lead there to keep competitors like Microsoft at bay, as the RIA wars heat up.
In a meeting with eWEEK at Adobe’s offices here on July 30, Adrian Ludwig, group manager of product marketing in the Adobe Platform and Developer Business Unit, noted that Flash has 98 percent reach on the desktop and also is the dominant animation and interactivity software in the enterprise. Ludwig cited a Forrester Research report that said Flash is on over 97 percent of enterprise desktops.
Ludwig was almost hesitant to acknowledge that by Adobe’s tally there are about 10 million downloads of Flash each day. Flash is on more than 500 million devices and 75 percent of the video on the Web uses Flash, he said.
“The best way to do a really compelling application in the browser is with Flash,” Ludwig said. And ISVs appear to be aware of this, as companies such as Oracle, SAP and BEA Systems (now owned by Oracle) are using Flash for just that purpose, he said.
Flash CS3 Professional is available at an academic discount price of $245.
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