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:

Animation Apps

Let us talk about some animation apps! #emergingmedia

1. Animation Studio - $.99 - This app includes all of the necessities (brushes, tools, layers)  that one would need for drawing or creating 2D animation on a mobile device. You can upload your content directly to Youtube from this app and it allows you to add audio. It even includes premade stickers and characters that you can animate.
2. Animation Desk - $2.99 - This is an app that is more geared towards the iPad and is specifically designed to be used with a stylus. This app is perfect for creating original art and then animating it. This app utilizes onion skins to hand draw animations.
3. Toontastic - FREE - This is a fun interactive animation app. There is a wide range of stickers to drag and drop around the screen and record their action. This app is good to get younger generations into animation because it is very simple to use.

*** MotionPortrait - FREE - This is an app that takes still portraits and using tracking points to animate the image into a slightly moving cartoon. This app is really useful for concept art and is a cool use of animation technology.

Green Screener App

Anyone who is familiar with green screen knows how difficult of a challenge lighting
 it evenly can be. This recently designed cinematography app does just that, Green Screener uses image banding as a way to determine the luminescence in an image. This image is a visual reference to further explain the technology, taken from the Green Screener website.

The app essentially takes your device camera and the green channel ultimately dividing them into 4, 8 and 16 bands. These can be related to the f-stops that we have learned about and thus would roughly correlate to the 2-stop, 1-stop or 1/2 stop resolution between the bands. Although Green Screener is not equivalent in the scientific sense of the f-stop it is much more accurate then a light-meter or a waveform-monitor. In simpler terms the application breaks down whatever image is being displayed and uses the bands to show different levels of light. Here is an example of the banding...

Overall if your trying to keep an evenly light background for your green screen and have a decently well trained eye accompanied with a light meter, for only $10.00 this is a significantly inexpensive tool that will do the job.

Green Screen From Your Phone

If you don't mind a much lower quality version of a green screen, you can get it right from your iphone with the Green Screen Movie FX app. As long as you're standing in front of a solid colored background, the app will be able to transmit a moving background behind you, or a video of your own if you upload it. It is similar to the application on photo booth where you can put yourself in space or on the beach but with the iphone app, you can control the chroma keys to create a more realistic video and then upload it online.

While it is far from perfect, it might be a useful tool if you are working with a green screen and you have uploaded the background in order to determine where to place your actors to get a clean final product when you import the real thing. Or helpful when trying to pick a background to use, to see which one would look best with the lighting you have.

Never.no and Vizrt to be partners

Over the past two years and especially during the current presidential race there has been a growing trend of integrating social media into live television. Viewers can tweet everything from questions for a political debate to comments about a live broadcast with the chance of it showing up on television screens across the nation. I'm sure a few of you, like myself have wondered exactly how this is done. As it turns out the system is much more complex than I first thought. Apparently television channels like the BBC and NBC out source this function to a variety of companies offering various options for creating an interactive environment for viewers by integrating  social media and mobile phone applications with live television. On top of the company who develops the technology to make this happen an entirely separate group of companies are hired to design the real time 3-D graphics you see on the screen. According to braodcastnewsroom.com two of the leading companies on both ends of this new technology have just announced a partnership that will not only be lucrative for them, but also has potential to make getting access to this technology a lot easier for clients. The website quotes the CEO of never.no (one of the companies involved in the partnership) as saying "Vizrt is the world leader in real-time 3D graphics, and never.no is the world leader in social TV solutions. Together we bring to the market an unmatched end-to-end solution to connect the audience directly to the action on TV." So, will we be seeing more and more social media on our television screens over the next couple of years? My guess it yes. Let's at least hope they come up with some good looking graphics to go with it!