Adobe Capture is quite cool

While I could easily use this blog to geek out about the new saber plugin that VideoCopilot released, (that'll be for a later date) I would like to bring to light the really cool app that Arturo showed us right at the beginning of the semester.  It was this neat little application called Abode Capture, and one of its main functionalities is that it can take a picture and identify the color palette within the photo.  But what's intuitive about it is that the palette isn't completely locked once you take the picture; you can drag your finger on the colors it captures and move it to other areas to change up your palette.  

What really caught me by surprise though was how after I was playing around with it and picking up a lot of color palettes, the data showed up in one of my After Effects windows in the library panel.  When you sign into the app on your phone it will automatically sync the palettes to your Creative Cloud library, and that way you can use whatever you find on the go in your creative projects on your computer.  That made me realize that this app can be a very useful tool, because you could come across a range of colors that you might want to save for later, and with the help of this app you can accomplish that and integrate it into your projects.

What's even cooler about it that I just discovered recently is that you can take a picture of a pattern and save it as a special brush preset for Photoshop or Illustrator.  This pattern can really be anything; a pattern on a wall, a clothing texture, or even your own hand-drawn pattern on pencil and paper.  The Youtuber Draw with Jazza was the way I heard of this, and he was able to take a hand-drawn pattern and integrate it into his animation for the new Adobe Animate CC.  I think this is a great invention to come from Adobe, as it can totally help bridge the gap between hand-drawn and computer animation techniques.  For more information on the app, check out this video:

My First Day of After Effects

Before this week, I’ve had almost no experience with After Effects and this is something that I would really like to change. I’ve been messing around with a few fun projects as well as watching lots of Video Copilot tutorials this week, and I’m only just starting to get a taste of the really cool things After Effects can do. While watching one of these tutorials, an idea came to me - I should spend a little bit of time each week working on a small, fun side project as a way to track my experience with After Effects. By the end of the semester, I’ll be able to look back and see how my skills have progressed (and probably laugh at how poor my work was at the start). For that reason I’ve uploaded my first animation of this series to Youtube.

My project this week was made on the night of our first class session. It’s simply a solid blue cube changing position, size, and rotation using keyframes. I used the “Easy Ease” option in the Keyframe Assistant to give the the cube more realistic physics, i.e. nonlinear speed (picks up speed gradually and slows down as it approaches the next point). Easy Ease is something that I picked up from Video Copilot, and it was very easy to understand and to use. I think that if I stick with those tutorials, I will be able to learn a lot of useful tips and tricks fairly quickly.

New updates to Creative Cloud to be announced next week

It's just about that time of year again where tv nerds like myself go crazy, NAB. Next week the annual National Association of Broadcasters Show will take place in Las Vegas. This is a massive convention where there are workshops and all the top vendors show off new stuff. One of these vendors will be Adobe who recently announced there will be some major updates to Creative Cloud announced at NAB this year. There will be a live webcast on April 16th but if you can't wait check out this website for more information.

http://thenextweb.com/creativity/2015/04/09/adobe-will-showcase-upcoming-creative-cloud-video-suite-upgrades-at-broadcasters-annual-meetup/