I find it interesting that Apple has resurrected Final Cut Pro 7. You can now buy it online at their store. Did they find too many editors were migrating to Adobe and Avid?
This resurrection won’t solve the problem of abandoning pro editors with FCP X. It just gives them more time to consider how they will jump a sinking ship.
– Rich Pulham
For those who want to build digital cities for filming, e-onsoftware now had CityEngine Vue. It looks to be quite and impressive program.
Made with CityEngine, you can zoom down to the street level where you can composite your actors.
– Rich Pulham
I made a trip to New York for the B&H Photo classes on AfterEffects. I didn’t have the money to fly there but fortunately my wife works for JetBlue and I get to travel free. So I flew on the red eye from Salt Lake and arrived at about 6:30 local time. After eating and hanging around the JFK for a few hours, I took the subway into downtown New York. After the classes, I went back to the airport, had dinner, and flew home. It was exhausting but I brought my own food so all I had to pay for was the subway.
The classes changed my world. CS4 links all the parts together making it much easier to work. For example, I can work in Premiere, link the clip to a composition in After Effects, make my changes, and go back to the Premiere window and see my changes updated. Any change I make in After Effects will automatically update when I look at Premiere.
Photoshop can be brought into After Effects and the layers used there. This is very helpful in doing motion graphics for titles, etc. I can also link a sequence in Premiere to an Encore project and burn a DVD, with or without menus.
Perhaps the biggest realization was that this suite is fully capable of editing a full-lenth feature. Rather than using Vegas and exporting clips to After Effects, then rendering the clip and importing it back into Vegas, I could skip all those steps.
Price was an obstacle. CS4 Production Premium goes for about $1600. But I found an upgrade at Newegg.com $760 and a copy of CS3 Web Premium for about $300. That gave my wife Photoshop and her other favorite tools for her computer and the Production Suite for mine.
– Rich Pulham
I became very frustrated with using Sony Vegas Pro 8. My feelings, of course, may be because of my inexperience. But I had a lot of trouble with rendering more complex projects. If often crashed before it completed. And my green screen efforts didn’t do well when I added more layers.
My long-term goal is to make movies and I just didn’t feel like it was up to the job. I learned a lot. It was inexpensive and gave me a lot of basic tools. It has an easy-to-learn interface. Then I went to a seminar on CS4 at B&H Photo in New York City. That was an eye opener.
At NAB, Sony announced Vegas Pro 9. They touted the features in the new version. It sounded exciting. But when I went home, I found most of those features were already in Pro 8. There was no compelling reason to upgrade. Maybe they fixed the rendering problem, maybe they didn’t. I didn’t care.
– Rich Pulham
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