Tuesday, May 24, 2011

We Need You | 05.25.2011

We just found out Stephen Garrow, Rob Backstrand & Mary Slowinsky will also be attending our Spring Speaker Series this Wed. They will take some time (either before or after our guest speakers) to talk about the Digital Media Arts program changes & answer any questions you might have. 
We started this club as a way to make a positive change in our education and involvement with our industry. Let's show the Department how serious the Digital Media Design Club & its supporters are about these goals. IT WOULD BE GREAT TO SHOW THEM WITH A PACKED ROOM. :)

AfterEffects With the Experts - Grett Marshall and Todd Kopriva (Adobe)

Jarrett attended this talk hosted by Aquent. Thanks for sharing your notes Jarrett.
.....
Wednesday, May 18th | 7-8:30 PM.  
Just got back from the meeting here is the rundown of info I got.... you can forward the center body on info and if you want to get in touch with Todd Kopriva about them coming to BC to give speaches for the Animation club you can contact him at korpriva@adobe.com (oh and I will be talking to Eric Jensen from Adobe about interning options, there are none as yet, but they are looking into the option...I was ask for more along the lines of an unpaid learning experience)

1.To turn off annoying auto "Easy Ease"
Goto Preferences and select "General"
On thid down select "Default Spacial Interpolation to Linear"

2. To export AE project for Flash
Goto "File"
Export->"Adome Flash Professional XFL"

3. 3D Dome or warp effect on a flat plane layer
Goto "Effects"
Select "Freeform Digi effects"
This tool is supposed to be a bit difficult and it was reccomnded to download a demo and look at the settings on that demo to understand it more, also to search "freeform"

4. Puppet tools "Skeleton Effect"
Download the "Duik" script for AE, it is said to be quite nice (and I hope it is free...sorry forgot to ask because I was loading on more questions that the entire group combined and didn't want to get beat down)

5.Audio playback option while working on large project to avoid need for prerendering
Press the "." on the number pad to mark a sart and stop point

6. Alts for moving the motion path of an item
A. Highlite all the keyframes then select a point of the motion path and move it
B. "Click" on "position" and the keys will all select the select a point on the motion path and move

7. Adobe AE blog with useful info:
http://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/

8. Open "Adobe Help" in web browser of your choice
Select Help
Click "After Effects Help" or just click "F1"
Once open slect "Edit"
Select "Preferences"
Click the Sixth option down "Open Help in Browser"

9. To make a single object a layered animation
"Right-click" item to replace and select "Replace footage"
Select "File"
Once in the file select window highlite range of pngs
Once range is selected the lower left-hand corner an option will un-grey for "PNG Sequence"
Once that is clicked you can also click the next option of forcing "aphabetical order"
 
10. Meetings in Seattle
There is a User group for Premeir on this approaching Moday at 7 PM in downtown seattle. I do not know the location yet, but I hope to get it. This group will focus on AE as well

There is an Adobe User Group at the Adobe Offices in Fremont by the bridge at this approaching Tuesday at 7 PM

Final Cut Users Group [Seattle]

Jarrett attended the Final Cut user's group meeting last night. Below are his notes from that event. Thanks Jarrett for sharing!

The meeting last night went from 7 to 9 PM. The meetings occur every month on the last Monday in Guitar center building (the next one they are going over the new Final Cut that is being released next month), there is a door at the base of the stairs from the parking lot on the roof.

     The first section was a speaker talking about "seed" files and meta data. He was pretty much saying to number the original videos in a way that made sense to you...i.e If you import clips from video files name mv_1201 you can alter them to firstdayshoot_001 and such so at later times you will know what they are. Then to place them in a folder so that folder's info (meta data) had some use to you, like "firstdayshoot". Then when you are working, use a copy to work from so that your original data is not lost. Once you name the new files they should have something in the name to point back tot he seed files, like "intro_firstdayshoot_001". He does editing for a living and seemed very staunch on this.

The second speaker talked about Photoshop.


He showed the advantages of using the Shadow/Highlights adjustment allowing for the dark areas in images to come out. He pretty much warned of going above 30% on them.  This one is in the image-adjustments drop-down.

Next he covered image merging where he explained to get the best results a user needs to pivot from one point to take the images and not to move left or right. The newest algorithm that is in CS5 has been greatly improved.

Once the layers were flattened to make one large image he cropped the image a bit to get rid of the larger areas of negative space, then he used the magic wand to select the blank areas. Once he had a black area he used the expand border tool in the select drop-down, increased the selected area by 4 pixels, then selected the fill tool in edit (shift F5) and selected the content aware feature which allows Photoshop to run a few algorithms that will calculate what should be in the blank area. It works quite well in areas with more randomness, but in areas with defined linear patterns or such you can notice issues. The examples he gave was for removing a cow from a field works great, while removing one form a brick wall or beam background would not work as well.

Finally he went into the use of Smart Sharpen (filter-sharpen-smartsharpen), that it is best not to go above 60-75%. He opened the advanced tab to show all of its features. Next using the LAB color scheme (instead of RGB) he places Gaussian blurs on the A and B levels to get rid of the image dirt or noise. (according to him the blue channel has the largest amount of noise
  if you were looking to see any)
Finally he showed histogram usage for colors by going to levels-adjustments-levels (he was in RGB at this time), just saying the proper way to color correct was to switch between the colors in the histograms and to make sure the far left and right triangles at the base of the histogram graph are at the edges of the rise and fall of the displayed graph or mountain that it shows.
That is all that happened. If you are looking for speakers David may be game for it, he runs the group, he works with several companies, and I think he teaches. He is going to look into inter options for me as well and hit me up with which places may be looking, and what they are looking for. If you want to talk to him about the animation club you can email him at david@dicoverytools.com

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Digital Media Design Speakers BEAU OBREMSKI & ROB MULLIN

05.18.2011, 2:00-4:00, Bellevue College N201
http://www.scottishninjas.com/
Beau and Rob are the creators of animated series Scottish Ninjas. Come hear their journey and experiences as animators for this adult cartoon.

Friday, May 6, 2011

Digital Media Design Speakers Molly Bennett & Anne Garber

05.11.2011
BC C130 
Two Interactive Design Recruiters from Aquent will share with club members. Find out how to prepare your portfolio, what the industry is looking for and where the industry is growing.
http://aquent.us/our-specialties/interactive-design/

Here's some of the links mentioned in their presentation:
Icon tutorials:
 
Free Microsoft tools (including Expression Blend):
DreamSpark: https://www.dreamspark.com/ - there are MANY Microsoft tools available for students to download for free on this site including Expression Blend
 
Free portfolio hosting/template sites:
http://www.indexhibit.org/ (decent, but not as good as the other two)
(we don’t tend to like Coroflot, Behance, or Carbonmade for sites – not as flexible and presentation not as nice)
 
Students are welcome to connect to us on LinkedIn! Here are our profiles:Anne Garber: http://www.linkedin.com/in/annegarber