Digital Video 2 – Week 01

Classwork

I’ve been looking forward to starting Digital Video 2 for a while now. Motion graphics are one area that I’ve never really had the opportunity to really try my hand at, but unlike my struggle with 3D last semester, I’m still quite enthusiastic to learn.

After Effects is also an exciting prospect, as it’s one of the few programs that I hear mostly good things about. Perhaps it’s because there’s a smaller community using it than say, Photoshop or Illustrator, but it sounds as though it’s one of those rare beasts: software that’s mostly enjoyable to use. It’s going to be our best friend for at least the first two-thirds of this subject.

Less impressive are Adobe’s lessons, found in their tutorial book. Similarly to my experience with Pro Tools and Ableton, the content provided in tutorials is pretty cheesy at best. Nevertheless, it was exciting to dig around in a CS4 product that appears to have finally followed through with Adobe’s long-touted promise to make their products play nicely together. Being able to take a Photoshop document, mix it with a Quicktime movie, Illustrator vectors and MP3s files, then composite and animate it whilst retaining the editable layer styles from other programs, and finally outputting it as, say, a Flash movie, is a pretty exciting prospect.

Research

Perhaps Adobe learnt from the train wreck that is Digidesign’s dTV and decided to use content from the excellent lynda.com. After watching a couple of their ‘Getting Started’ videos, I’m hopeful that there’s going to be quite a lot of information out there for a novice like myself.

%CODE1%