Posts Tagged buy cheap software
Adobe After Effects CS3 buy cheap
Posted by admin in Adobe After Effects on October 20, 2010
Adobe After Effects CS3 buy cheap
It was seven years ago when I got my first look at After Effects. I’d heard people talking about it like it was the nirvana of filmmaking, and something that everyone involved in video production should know how to use. So I went to Adobe’s website and looked at their promo video, and all I saw was some Pixar-esque animation of a car flying around. I thought it was cool, but it wasn’t anything I would use in my video projects, so I said “meh” and forgot about After Effects for a few years.
In 2002 I started making movies again on a regular basis. Previously I’d always edited on a tape-to-tape ¾” machine, but now I’d decided to get into digital filmmaking, so I bought a crappy MiniDV camera and hooked it up to my computer. My capture card came with a copy of Adobe Premiere Pro, so that’s what I used to edit. It seemed pretty intuitive, so I stuck with it, but eventually I became annoyed at its limitations. First of all, there was no way to make titles that were even vaguely interesting; I kept seeing lots of cool title sequences in commercials and movies, and knew they couldn’t have been made in Premiere Pro. Secondly, the color correction tools were basically non-existent, and my crappy camcorder needed all the help it could get. And finally, the slow motion and resizing tools produced awful results. How’s a guy gonna do a Rodriguez rip-off without good slow-mo, or make a great documentary without the “Ken Burns” pan and zoom effect? I figured there had to be a better program that could help me with these tasks, so I started typing stuff in Yahoo (we didn’t have Google back then) and guess what kept popping up? Yep, After Effects.
So I gave in and got version 5.5, along with the Classroom in a Book. Unlike most people who dive into those books and then lose interest after a few pages, I actually went through the whole course and did all of the tutorials and projects. By the end, I really knew how to use the program, and more importantly I realized that it is so much more than a tool for making 3D objects fly around the screen. Quite frankly, now I couldn’t make a movie without it. I’ve used it in conjunction with Premiere Pro for every project I’ve done since 2003, and have created many promo spots using just AE alone.
In fact, I use AE so much that I simply don’t have the time or energy to deal with the bugs and new workflows usually associated with upgrades. AE 6.5 was working great for me, and, as the improvements in 7.0 weren’t as essential to me, I skipped over it. I figured that, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? But when CS3 came out with its amazing upgrades and integration with the new Photoshop CS3 Extended and Premiere Pro CS3, I knew I needed to fully explore the new package, so I bit the bullet and performed the upgrade. As a writer for Microfilmmaker Magazine, this gave me the perfect place to try it out and share my in-depth review of the package with all the other micro-budget filmmakers that frequent our pages.
Macromedia Studio 8 buy cheap
Posted by admin in Macromedia on April 17, 2010
Macromedia Studio 8 is a complete toolkit for Web designers and animators, and it introduces new features that will make creative mouths water. Many digital content makers can find their way around Macromedia software in their sleep, but the upgrade to Studio 8 makes common tasks easier to execute for those without coding expertise.
The suite wraps together an animation tool, Flash 8; a Web design app, Dreamweaver 8; and a graphics editor, Fireworks 8. Also included are the PDF maker FlashPaper 2 and the Web site manager Contribute 3. Vector graphics app FreeHand MX has vanished from the suite, partly because it duplicated functions offered by Fireworks. The most tantalising new product in this bundle is Flash 8, particularly because it introduces alpha channel video creation and provides abundant new effects that animators can manipulate in real time. To shrink the file sizes and hasten the playback time of Flash animation on end-user desktops, Macromedia gutted and rebuilt its popular Flash Player. And Flash, Fireworks, and Dreamweaver now optimise multimedia content for cell phones, PDAs, and other mobile gadgets yet to come. Just don’t expect Adobe’s plans to buy Macromedia to result in hybrid Adobe-Macromedia software quite yet; Studio 8 offers no such surprises. Studio 8 costs AU$1510, or AU$605 to upgrade from Studio MX 2004 or earlier versions.
We installed the entire Macromedia Studio 8 suite in less than half an hour without problems on our test Windows XP computer. To make room for the suite, Macromedia recommends freeing up 1.8GB of free hard disk space on a PC running Windows 2000 or higher. Once you open the programs, their well-organised interfaces look similar to those in version Studio MX 2004.
Nips and tucks include zoom-in views to examine layouts, as well as collapsible palettes to free up the work space. You can even save your customised work-space arrangements. To minimise the amount of code wrangling, Dreamweaver now nests and colour-codes elements within Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). And Flash includes Script Assist (similar to the former Normal mode of Actionscript) to visually guide you through coding.
Macromedia aims to make its complex suite friendlier for people who lack coding knowledge, although amateurs will need some education before diving in, particularly for the intricate Flash and Dreamweaver. But professionals and design teams can jump right into work-flow improvements designed to reduce multiple round-trips between apps. Large companies also get tools within Contribute 3 to centrally manage Web sites with multiple editors. And subtle layout changes throughout the suite, such as ruler guides within Dreamweaver, help import graphics from Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
Macromedia expanded Studio’s tools for making dynamic and expressive content. To start, Dreamweaver lets you drag and drop XML feeds into pages, handy for newsy Web sites and blogs. The addition of FlashPaper 2 to the Studio suite adds the ability to make print-ready, interactive PDF documents within the suite. But Flash 8 offers the most-intriguing new toys, such as the ability to lay video on top of video so that you can make, for example, a superhero fly above a traffic jam. Flash 8 also handles pixel graphics for the first time and provides better font control. Both Flash and Fireworks get a bevy of new blend modes and filters.
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