Adobe After Effects – Simple Creativity #27: Rotating Earth

This video tutorial shows steps to create a rotating earth movie, whose QuickTime sample was presented yesterday. The project files are also available under the same article. Continue reading →

This brief video tutorial shows how to convert an audio track of a video clip imported to iMovie for Apple’s music players. The goal is to extract an audio file through iMovie and convert it into M4A. Continue reading →

Adobe After Effects – Simple Creativity #26: Evil Face in the Sky

I don’t know how it started, but my wife gradually became obsessed with Buddhism stuff in the last 5 years. She even bought a human-size Buddha statue last year. I asked her why, and she said it was for our safety. Que?? Anyway, she begged me to take her to the center of Buddhism, Thailand, last month.

Her obsession over Buddhism scared the hell out of me. I had to do something. When we arrived at a big temple in Bangkok, I told her that I had to go to men’s room. And I left her alone with Buddha statues. Then I went to a place where she could not see me. And I pulled MacBook out of my backpack and launched Adobe After Effects CS3. In a matter of 8 minutes or so, I created an evil face in the sky. And I heard her scream instantly. I went back to her pretending that I knew nothing about what happened while I was gone. She was terribly horrified and wanted to go home immediately.

Ever since we came back, she hasn’t talked about Buddhism. And she has thrown away all her religious items.

The following video tutorial shows steps to design a drawing with clouds, using Adobe After Effects CS3. The video clip used in this tutorial comes from Internet Archive. The original clip is compressed with MPEG, and we re-compressed it with H.264 beforehand. Continue reading →

Learning Graphic Editing Basics with Adobe Fireworks CS3 05: Making Selections

Compared with Adobe Photoshop, Fireworks doesn’t offer many selection tools. For example, Photoshop allows users to use Color Range. Color Range is effective in making a layer-wide selection in terms of colors. And there is nothing in Fireworks that is equivalent to Photoshop’s Color Range. In addition, Photoshop has Magnetic Lasso Tool, which is also color-differences-sensitive. And there is nothing in Fireworks that is equivalent to Photoshop’s Magnetic Lasso Tool.

On the other hand, Fireworks allows users to make many different shapes. And you can actually convert these shapes to selection.

This short video shows several different ways of making selections beyond uses of Magic Wand and Marquee Tool. Continue reading →

This QuickTime video first compares two versions of audio editing shareware title Amadeus from HairerSoft in reading Windows Media Audio (WMA) files. It also shows some of the basic features of Amadeus Pro 1.1.

The Mac model used in this video tutorial is iMac 2 GHz (PowerPC chip with Ambient Light Sensor). And the Mac OS version is 10.4.10. Although this video shows that Amadeus Pro fails to read WMA files, it is possible that you might get different results, depending on your machine (CPU, OS version), QuickTime plug-ins and so forth. In fact, the software developer has confirmed that he was able to read the same WMA file, which we couldn’t open with our copy of Amadeus Pro. In the meantime, it’s an unusual practice for us, but this Quick Overview video contains audio commentary. Continue reading →