Yes, it is finally here. Take a look at the new Adobe After Effects® 7.0 Professional, Premiere® Pro 2.0, Audition® 2.0, and Encore® DVD 2.0. The seamlessness workflow they advertise is simply amazing. Check out the SWF “See it in Action” videos on each page.
Unfortunately, I fail to catch in what way the recently aqcuired Macromedia products intergrade. We may have to wait for the next release to see them merge.

Thanks to ImageShack for Free Image Hosting
Technorati Tags: adobe, premier, ae, audition, encore

Now that Adobe and Macromedia have finally merged, we are going to be seeing the fruits of this mighty union. Labnol.blogspot provides screenshots of the new Premiere Pro 2, Encore DVD 2 (the article missguidingly states After Effects 7), Audition 2, part of the Creative Suite Productions Studio that Adobe is expected to annouce on January 17. Premiere will now feature DVD authoring straight from the timeline, and can embed videos into PDFs.
Being a fan of Macromedia products, I hope none of them get scrapped by Adobe (except for Freehand).

Technorati Tags: adobe, premiere, macromedia, audition, encore

I came across an amazing piece of software today via Digg called Recolor, a tool that, with a little work, turns black & white photos into realistic color. Take a look at the examples provided… simply brilliant.
I ran the becahball tutorial included and it worked like a charm. More complicated photos require more work, but with the results, it is totally worth it.
I believe that this is the easiest method to do this, faster than photoshop and similiar processes.

This is based on a process discussed here which can also be applied to video (see bottom of page). Recolor doesn’t appear to support video at the moment.
LegendFilms and Off Color Films are sites that specializes in restoring color into old movies.

The author asks to you register it to encourage him to keep working on it, and he hopes to release a shareware version some time in the future.

Here is the link for direct download.

Technorati Tags: recolor, black, white, photo

Quitura has just annouced the release of their Web Search Client (currently available only for Microsoft Windows 2000, XP or Server 2003 with Internet Explorer 5.5 or above) as a free download. (I love the way people are doing that these days )
It is a desktop based app that shows link results on the right and a graphical “related tag” screen on the left. The tags are meant to narrow down your search. Select a tag and it is added to you current search query. Hover over a tag and get similiar tags for that one. — Click here to see screenshots of Quintura in action.

Search results for “Video Editing”

I, for one, am quite pleased with Quintura. Results may take 3 seconds longer on the first search but after that, it’s a breeze. I’m not very attached to desktop search apps, but Quintura might just get me into one. Will it be the next big thing in search? I don’t know… yet.

Technorati Tags: quintura, search, tag

One of the most frustrating parts of creative work is choosing the font for your lettering. Not so much as picking a good one, as finding a good one in your 1000+ font folder. Some programs make it easier to view and apply fonts, and some a pain. The font may look good, but doesn’t work with your selected text.

You need a font manager, and I can’t recommend any better than Font Tools from FontHit. It used to have a webpage of its own at software.fonthit.com, but apperantly the project has closed and what’s left is hosted at NewFreeware. I assure you that it is spyware free and all that but if you don’t feel comfortable in downloading it there, you can get it at Download.com, which is perfectly safe.

It has a nice interface, and easy to use. You can choose what text you want displayed in the Font Preview screen, allowing you to enter your text and see it written in all your fonts. Below that, it shows you each seperate character for that font. Installing and uninstalling is a breeze as well.
A nice touch is the integrated font search engine. It wont give you as many results as AbstractFonts, but saves you some trouble anyhow. It will make you fire up your browser to download the font tho.

Technorati Tags: font

Xilokit’s Deskloops tries to solve our ever growing annoyance with limited desktop space through a novel and fun approach. How does it work?

From Site:

At any one time, you’ll see window open on screen as usual, but in fact any number of other windows, set on that loop, can be rotated in from left or right. A strip of thumbnails on top of the screen maps the loop’s full content.
Deskloops does this by arranging windows along a virtual horizontal loop.

Watch it in action.

Well, I’m always looking for a way to streamline my work flow so I gave it a run. I was surprised that, even though it is 3D and full of effects, it didn’t stall my programs or consume much memory. So it’s pretty small and compact. That is of course, if the programs don’t consume much memory or pc power themselves. So it wont really help with my intense video and image editing.

Productivity: Well, if you only run say a word procesor, firefox, explorer, and maybe do some simple work with dreamweaver and fireworks, then you shouls be fine. However, if I were doing an important job, I probably wont trust it for several reasons.
One - You always need all the power you can get.
Two - This program has a nack for rotating windows whimsically. While I typed this, Deskloops switched my windows a couple of times, once when I press “enter” and another when I had to use the right-click context menu. This can be annoying.

Its drawbacks are that it uses the mouse right-click to navigate, a pain when actually want the to right click for some other reason. Another pain is if you do want to navigate, you get the context menu appear even though you dont want it. I found you can navigate with the scroller as well.

It also boasts a number of cool features that really make it a neat download. If you download widgets, sidebars, toolbars, then you won’t be dissapointed.

80gigs may sound like a lot, but when you are like me, downloading loads of software, capturing & editing videos, snapping pictures, editing them and never deleting the large project files, you find those gigs quickly evaporating.
When you actually get down to that long awaited spring cleaning, how the dickens are you going to find those space hoggers?
WinDirStat to the rescue! It graphically illustrates the files that are littered all over your system. The scan is even fast on my 80gigs hard drive. And considering it’s free, and small, it’s the perfect companion on your hunting trips for those terrible hard drive eating monsters.

As you can see, MXV (magix files - Dark Blue), PNG (Dark Red), and WAV (Green) files take up a lot of space. Time for a cleanup or a new terabyte hard drive.

Thanks to Martin of TipMonkeys for this find (or whoever he got it from )