You know, it’s one of those days… It’s amazing how many people actually try to make a living in the media business, when they have not the slightest clue about how to use their programs nor even the most basic concepts of digital imaging or general principles. Let’s see what we have today.

First, we have this gentlemen who tries to tell me that the problem cannot be his Mac or the third-party hardware, because obviously using a Mac is such a sad thing that you only can select from a few thousand components and Steve Jobs being like unto the mighty God, he all tests them himself and writes each and every driver and bug fixes for OS X, ensuring that the only other evil forces must come from the outside, including After Effects CS5. That is, as he keeps saying in his iPad or whatever presentations and the recent HTML5 vs. Flash debate, everything is perfect in Apple land until someone else enters.

Their own users having reached a point where they are drawing similar conclusions is a sad thing indeed, so any attempt at seriously figuring out driver issues or potential file I/O problems in a 64bit environment become meaningless. If that weren’t enough, he tries to pull a fast one telling me I’m not his wife. I’m glad I am not! You know, the way my luck runs, he’s older than 45, overweight, has hair all over his body, bad teeth, a small dick and generally looks like he spent a night in the garbage dump… Exactly the kind of man I wouldn’t even consider for a blowjob, even if he were the last male human being on this planet.

Next on the list is this kid, who tries to get smart with me on whether or not to uninstall older versions once CS5 has been installed. Granted, I could have just said to leave it on his drives instead of pointing out the slightly foolish nature of his question, but you know what – since when is posting on forums an excuse to leave your brains and common sense in the laundry machine?

Highlight of my day, however, is being called a cunt, asshole and all these other nice things. That wouldn’t be so bad in itself, but the person posting apparently qualifies as what Americans call Trailer Trash – the posts were so full of bad grammar and general poor use of the English language, it makes any recent OECD studies about the US being at the forefront of education sound like an urban legend.

What’s most disappointing about any of those matters, is how long it takes for any of the moderators to lock those threads or even remove those posts once reported as abuse. I should know, I’ve been chastised a number of times for less. So I guess it’s a useless feature after all, is it?

…y a des marins qui chantent…. Of course there is other things in Amsterdam than just singing mariners, so this little excerpt from the great Jaques Brel chanson seems somewhat out of time, but is still a nice song. The Les Enfoirés version with Isabelle Boulay and Garou gives me goose bumps every time – just two great voices singing a great song. Among the more modern things the city has to offer is the annual IBC conference and show and while I would loved to go there, I just didn’t have the money to go there due to the ongoing shock waves of what everyone only now calls The Crisis rippling through our company’s bank account and making salary payments a matter of prayerfully staring at the calendar at the end of the month… So for the third year in a row, I won’t be there. *sigh* It’s always nice to meet the people and go hunting for those little souvenirs to bring home. It also is one of the few opportunities where ordinary people like me get their hands on more higher-end-ish equipment just to fell deluxe, but alas, it’s not happening so I’ll have to sit here at home and wait for the relevant news to trickle in. Incidentally, one such news is the availability of the After Effects 10.0.1 a few days after the Premiere Pro update whose fixes for RED, various digital SLR footage things and the notorious CS5 AIFF bug makes good marketing on the show, but of course is utterly useless to people like me who never use it. So can I fucking have this MacPro now to try it out, please?

Ah, one of those days… As I’m writing this, a whopping 500 megabyte update for Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder is downloading, which makes me yearn for the days, when we swapped software on floppy disks and developers competed for the best compression to get their programs among people as slim (and thus distribution cost friendly) as possible. Compare that to today’s gluttonous apps who seem to suck in extra bytes just to inflate file sizes… No wonder the internet is requiring more and more resources to keep up!

The latter also applies to Cinema 4D R12, whose demo weighs in with a hunky 1.6 gigabytes. I just gave it a spin for about 15 minutes, but there is really not much there to write home about. A few “me, too” features that competing apps have had for a while, but not really anything truly innovative. Feels to me like Maxon is the next Autodesk or in fact worse, because they hold on to their outrageously high pricing (strictly speaking about the only “complete” package, Studio), without being able to offer a similar return value to the user. Dunno, while I was willing to give them some credit on R 11.5 a year ago, I now again have completely fallen from faith. It’s certainly still a very usable and comprehensive package, it’s just technologically outdated in too many areas and nowhere near competitive anymore.

And what do we have on the hardware front? Yes, of course, Apple is presenting their annual updates to their iPod line of products. Now my 2 year old nano is showing signs of the battery getting weaker with every recharge cycle and a replacement would be due, but I just can’t wrap my head around this multitouch nonsense. The jog wheel was so much more practical – you could operate the damn thing blindly while it was in your pocket. Now you will probably have to take it out, unlock the screen and do some weird gesture every time you just want to skip a song. Mmhhh… at least they had the sense to add some buttons for volume control. In any case, I’ll have to take a look at the thing in a hardware store before making any decisions.

On that same note, Apple keep sending me those mails about “The best Mac Pros of all time” and indeed those new 12 core machines do look interesting. So who’s up for buying me one? ;-)

*sigh* Adobe really doesn’t know how to do these things. After their blogs had been mostly offline for 2 months now after some ill-conceived attempt to convert to WordPress prematurely, they are back, but what do we get? They actually made them even more ugly and more useless than ever before! I say: Damn you, Adobe! Really, it’s bad enough that you are boring us to death with Julianne Kost‘s repetition of the Photoshop manual, equally boring ponderings on Captivate and LiveCycle, weird ideas by product managers and pointless comments on usability and open source software, but the least you could do is to make it look nice and pleasing and actually have a proper navigation…. *argh*

While it may seem that Optical Flares has pretty much stolen the crown of lens flare simulation plug-ins (really can’t go anywhere these days without seeing those J.J. Abrams style flares from Fringe and Star Trek; on the bright side: the more it’s used, the quicker it wears off and we will one day see better intros without excessive flares again), it never hurts to have options. One has always been Knoll Light Factory and it now continues to be also for Adobe‘s CS5 products, meaning that at long last a 64bit version is available. Of course it still has the uglier editor, but on the other hand just as well renders a few elements much nicer than the competing product. if you can afford both, this makes the ultimate duo. If you can’t, either one can still be beefed up with elements from my After Effects projects download pages. As a useful side effect, there’s also now a 64bit version of Unmult. In other related news, Color Finesse, whose LE version is also included with your After Effects, has received a minor update to version 3.0.2 that fixes a few issues that didn’t make it in time for the initial release.

Since it’s one of those Mondays where a certain kind of people feels the urge to vent all their low IQ nonsense that has been on their mind the whole weekend on forums (the appropriate German term is geistiger Dünnschiss, if you feel like looking it up…), I’m actually quite glad that I keep finding myself a few excuses lately to not post so much any more – in case you haven’t noticed, there are days when I’m not around, which has never been the case in the past. One of those reasons includes now officially visiting the gymnasium at least twice a week! I had my first instruction today and while I have been doing sports for years, in particular intense cycling, it’s quite amazing how many other muscles you have in your body and how much you can feel them, if only stimulated the right way. Mmh, of course, I’m already more attractive beyond all those Clooneys, Pitts and Obamas of this planet, but a few more muscles surely cannot hurt ;-).

The Foundry have already been making some waves this year and last year with Nuke, Storm and Mari and while no doubt the After Effects plug-in branch is a pretty minor part of their overall business, we are not being left out. Today they released their Camera Tracker, which had been hinted at ever since NAB. If you are into 3D matchmoving for any kind of effects that require integration with existing footage, it makes an interesting alternative to standalone programs like SynthEyes or PFTrack. Below you can find a cheesy little test I threw together with the trial version.

CameraTracker for After Effects test from Mylenium on Vimeo.

Another release is Kronos, which is kind of a pimped up version of the Timewarp effect in After Effects. Of particular note are the massive performance enhancements based on using your graphics card or massively multithreaded conventional CPU code, which may make buying this stuff worthwile, if you have to process a lot of footage.

Many of you who take my work for and with Adobe as my primary public persona may not know this, but I’ve long had a life as an 3D artist before I ever even got near After Effects, Illustrator and Photoshop. A considerable part of that life – which may surprise you even more – was not driven by Cinema 4D (though for those MoGraph tutorials I guess I got a little famous), but rather Lightwave, which I’ve been using ever since version 4 (essentially the first PC version of it). Now that program has been forever and still is in limbo on some level, but has been a trusty workhorse for many artists especially in relation to doing TV series and broadcast work, which includes some of my favorite series’ FX in Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek – Voyager, Star Trek – Deep Space Nine, Space – above and beyond and of course Babylon 5. There are many more, but let’s focus on the important things before spending days listing them all.

The point I’m aiming at is, that just like any other program out there, we have our own set of "industry veterans"/ heroes that worked on all that cool stuff and just like everyone else, we care for them. That is why some sad news has reached us today and to my surprise, it had a considerable emotional impact on me. Larry Schultz, a.k.a. Splinegod, is in severe health trouble and one inch from leaving us. Now since my boss also had some serious trouble with his kidneys this year (AgI Nephritis) and was also on the verge of dying, I more than a little know the dangers involved and how quickly things take a turn for worse as do I know the exorbitant costs arising from treatment, if you are on private health insurance. Now I never got along with Larry in all these years of forum battles, but I know the meaning of decency, so I’m gonna hit that orange donate button on his wife’s blog any second now and maybe so can you, if you have a few bucks to spare. For the rest of the story, read this post on the NewTek forums and his profile.

I’m always looking forward to SIGGRAPH every year, both for reasons of catching up on latest product news and research papers, but sadly enough, this year feels quite empty. It’s as if it never happened. Several interesting products (Mari, RealFlow, various render engines) had long been announced and shown before the show, taking quite a bit the wind out of the whole event.

Additionally, what news we got on Lightwave, ZBrush, Houdini and Autodesk‘s products was not particularly spectacular or interesting to me as a user nor on a geek level. It feels like everybody is mostly trying to defend his market position with only minor enhancements that might still come in handy in your day to day work, but do not necessarily expand feature sets. One such thing would obviously be the whole Lightwave 10 situation with the VPR renderer – as I wrote, useful, but not necessarily the ultimate incentive for an upgrade so any user who already owns FPrime will have to think hard about shelling out the money. In itself it’s not a bad thing of companies focusing on more practical workflow things, but still, somehow I’m craving for those times when literally SIGGRAPH reshuffled all the players involved and you generally were a bit more excited. Well, there’s always next year and, which is also quite noticeable, there have been no news on some programs (modo, Cinema 4D), which leaves room for something to look forward perhaps later this year.

Research papers, as far as I have looked them up and as my puny brain understands them, were also a bit odd this year. Several of them focused on topics that are not necessarily relevant to an end user and are perhaps a bit too esoteric to ever become relevant for mainstream programs even. Of course there was once again a ton of fluid simulation stuff and the notorious foam bubble noise simulator (which seems to become a running gag), but lots of it focused on alternate implementations or resolving quite specific detail problems in the underlying algorithms. The same always strikes me when seeing those behind the scenes presentations about how specific effects in movies were created – sure, interesting to see the science at work, but 99% irrelevant for your average Joe who doesn’t have the resources to even run the simplest fluid simulation and constantly struggles with deadlines, because the render farm is always too small…

Doesn’t anyone else think it’s weird, that a company that makes a good deal of money by selling software for creating web stuff, seems to have no clue on how to maintain their own pages? I mean, we all know that it’s a colorful patchwork of thrown together sub-systems and most of us by now probably have accepted the slowness of the forums, the dysfunctionalities of the knowledge base (I truly do understand the frustration of users there when moderating their comments; it’s just a bloody mess) and even the ugliness of the store, but now even their blogs don’t work properly anymore. Maybe switching to the bitch that is WordPress wasn’t that good an idea, after all? At least the main landing page hasn’t updated properly for several days now. *yikes* That is one of the reasons, why I’m posting that little bit of info here or else you probably wouldn’t find it: Head master of all things After Effects doc, Todd Kopriva, has updated the foreign language versions of the online help to reflect some of the CS5 goodness that English users already have. And really, Adobe, when you can spend 185 millions on gobbling up another web company, clearly you must have those few thousand bucks to hire a WordPress expert to keep your blogs straight, don’t you?