Finally,
Vanishing Point Exchange is another very cool feature. This is actually a new
feature of Photoshop CS3 Extended but it ties directly into
After Effects CS3 Professional, so we’ll cover it here.
In Photoshop CS2, Vanishing Point was introduced, which allowed
you to extend a perspective layer of flat objects, like buildings, and clone or
paint along that layer. Terribly useful for folks that wanted to extend walls,
buildings, and fences, the old version was a big hit. However, in PCS3 Extended, they took this to a new level by allowing vanishing point planes to
be connected as an actual 3D model with the underlying photo as the “skin”
of the model. From here, the model can be exported directly from Photoshop
CS3 Extended as the new Vanishing Point Exchange format (or as a .3DS format,
if you want to take it to a standalone 3D program), which can be imported directly
into After Effects CS3 Professional. Once imported into After
Effects CS3 Professional, you can light, rotate, and animate the model
directly. Done properly, this can allow you to create full 3D constructs of buildings
which can be panned around and zoomed in on. I could definitely see this done
so that the viewer zooms in on one of the windows which has cleverly been replaced
with a video pane of a film’s opening scene. This would be a very cool way
to commence a film after the credits.
(For
more information on this program, check out our standalone review here.)
Encore
CS3
At first look, I thought Encore had received fewer
upgrades than Premiere Pro. However, on closer inspection, the upgrades
it did receive completely revolutionize it as a content provider.
Everyone
knew that the new Encore would likely export to Blue-ray and it does. Its
results are very solid, although they don’t take advantage of a lot of Blue-ray’s
vaunted features.
With
that said, the thing that wowed us when Adobe announced and demonstrated it to
us as journalists was one of the first fruits from their acquisition of Macromedia
in 2005: the ability to export an entire Flash website from a DVD designed
in Encore. I recently used it to create a professional site for our Spec
Trailer Contest and it was extremely easy to use. While it’s got a couple
limits in that it doesn’t give you all the controls that Flash does
for video compression and it only creates Flash sites that are 640 pixels
by 480 pixels, it’s such an amazingly impressive feature that it easily
steals the show as one of the coolest features in the entire CS3: Production
Premium package. Finally video people can make Flash websites with
video, audio, and anything else they can put on a DVD without ever opening Flash
or encoding a single script.
Soundbooth
CS3
The idea of behind Soundbooth is really intelligent.
Basically, video
people are not audio people. In fact, you will rarely find two more disparate
groups of thinkers. As such, why put an audio program that’s based on audio-people
thinking into a predominantly video-people package? Adobe asked themselves that
question and realized that there was no reason. As such, they spent the last two
years designing a new app from the ground up for video people.
For
a first release, Soundbooth is very good. It simplifies what you need to
know to tweak some common issues with audio, like normalizing audio and removing
background noise. Most of these things operate out of a very simple five step
wizard to keep things short and sweet. When you get into actually doing things
like removing background noise, Soundbooth has a SoundSoap-like noiseprint
noise remover, which is even more sensitive and requires less time to get a decent
print. Additionally, it has a spectral view which allows you to visually “see”
problems in the audio, which you can then correct with Photoshop-like tools
such as the marquee tool and the lasso tool.
Finally,
Soundbooth has a music creator which allows you to create royalty-free
soundtracks based on customizable scores. While the customization isn’t
as profound as Smartsound’s SonicFire Pro 4 or Sony’s Cinescore, it
has the potential to be more powerful because Adobe is making 3rd party licensing
available to any audio composer who wants to create content for Soundbooth. (If any of our readers are interested in developing content, there is a develpment toolkit that can be downloaded from:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/soundbooth/ ) If this works the way Adobe’s 3rd party licensing for After Effects has, then Soundbooth could quickly have a library of music that dwarves
both Sony’s and Smartsound’s. (Sony and Smartsound apparently fear
this reality, as they just signed an agreement to share technology and try to
pool resources in regards to their music offerings.) Currently, Adobe includes
40 fully customizable scores to get you started, which makes
this very attractive for us as filmmakers. Soundbooth users can purchase additional scores and download, free of charge, up to 3300 sound effects from Adobe's Resource Central site.
