video

Compress H.264 in dimensions divisible by 16

Posted in video, web design on May 27th, 2010 by markcoppock – Be the first to comment

For the iPodPhonePad and other mobile devices. Good overview article from the Adobe Developer Connection here (Note the error in their table. See corrected table below).

It’s all about the hardware acceleration

We love hardware acceleration. Hardware acceleration is why a $40 DVD player from Walmart plays DVDs perfectly and a $1500 computer plays them poorly.

Use these resolutions to support hardware acceleration:

4:3 16:9
640 × 480 640* × 360
512 × 384 512 × 288
480 × 360 480 × 272

*there’s a typo in this table in the article. The correct value is 640 x 360, not 480 x 360.

H.264. In English.

Posted in video compression on April 22nd, 2009 by markcoppock – Be the first to comment

h264Great Adobe Developer Connection article/white paper: H.264 for the rest of us.

The direct link to the PDF white paper is here.

Hi, I’m from Adobe and I’m here to help you

Posted in After Effects, video on April 14th, 2009 by markcoppock – Be the first to comment
Adobe shirt with the original statement 'Adobe has your back.' with an iron-on knife added below, bleeding.

That's gotta hurt. The original shirt is of course without the bloody knife. That's an iron-on.

First of all, this is for video folks. Print and web people, breathe easy. I think.

The instigator of the shirt thing is planning to wear and distribute these shirts at the Adobe booth at NAB next week. Here’s some background, from the Avid-L2 yahoo group:

Premiere is the biggest villain.
You should do a review of Premiere and then you’d see clearly the
frustration. Lots of nice talking points for marketing, but no real
substance.
Encore is just as bad as Premiere. It is the only Adobe product that is not
cross-platform. Soundbooth and Audition are decent. Photoshop and AE are
very good. But Adobe only seems to care about selling suites, and not how
good/bad an individual product is. As long as they are selling well, they
could really care less about the issues that face editors every day. I
haven’t called Premiere “Pro” in quite some time. In fairness to Adobe, two
years ago at NAB a group of us called “Make It Pro” met with senior
management at NAB. They listened intently and upper management followed up
quite a bit, but the product manager of Premiere NEVER did. Apparently he
has been too busy with his Master degree in business to properly oversee
Premiere’s development. Not a single thing we discussed was addressed in
CS4.

The real issue is this: you cannot edit anything with clients over your
shoulder. CS4 is as flaky as a box of Post Toasties. It is not even close
to the stability of Final Cut or Avid. So Avid should be very happy that
Adobe has missed the boat. Sure all the metatdata sounds nice. So did
“dynamic link” but it reality it is totally useless. Avid or Apple have
nothing to fear as far as editing. What I wish is that Premiere would be
dumped completely and then that Adobe might work with Avid and/or Final Cut
to create links with Photoshop, Soundbooth, Illustrator, & AE. AE is a
wonderful product that continues to develop (even though they still don’t
understand fields for previewing and probably never will).

Sadly after all these years, there is NO ONE that “gets” the editor’s point
of view. That’s why I use several programs to achieve what I’ve always
wished one program could deliver. Having been on many different betas, and
even an employee dealing with 3rd party developers and technical support for
a major NLE company, I feel I can voice my displeasure based on a lot of
experience. Avid is the ONLY software that was designed from the ground up
AROUND the every day editor. I’d bet you would be hard pressed to find a
single manager of product development in this industry who has actually been
a professional editor with client supervised sessions. You know who does?
Avid and Autodesk. It clearly shows in their products.

I was “a professional editor with client supervised sessions” for a bunch of years, and what he is describing gives me the willies. Please fix, Adobe!

Layer Tennis

Posted in Illustrator, Photoshop, video on February 13th, 2009 by markcoppock – Be the first to comment

Adobe CS4 presents the 2009 season of Layer TennisLayer Tennis:

Two competitors will swap a file back and forth in real-time, adding to and embellishing the work. Each artist gets fifteen minutes to complete a “volley” and then we post it to the site live. A third participant, a writer, provides play-by-play commentary on the action, as it happens. A match lasts for ten volleys and when it’s complete…

But I’m still agreeing with people who say the CS4 logo looks like a TV station’s (mentioned ~4:00 in):