Creative Workflow Hacks

Hey Everybody, My blog was hacked and not in a Creative Workflow way, so things are in a little disarray after restoring and not being sure what files were compromised. It may take a while to sort things out so thanks for your patience. Dale 

I try really hard to be platform agnostic in the work that I do. When somebody feels more comfortable with a given tool or piece of hardware, productivity gains are likely to dwarf the costs of acquisition and support. That said, I’ve always been a bit of an Apple fan boy. Recently, I’ve also started to do some programming in Apple’s Cocoa environment and, despite the fairly steep initial learning curve, I’ve been amazed at how quickly a single developer can develop useful tools on the platform.

So, I was primed to enjoy the Apple Leopard tech talk as it rolled its way through the last stop of a 9 city North American tour. I can’t go into a lot of detail because of the NDA, but I left really inspired by the tools that will shortly be available. Apple’s frameworks make it really easy to develop compelling applications where they do so much of the work for you and the developer is able to concentrate on the parts that make the application interesting for his or her niche.

I also think it’s likely if you’re supporting Mac environments that you should plan on quick adoption of Leopard. There are some really compelling technologies that will be Leopard only and my gut says that a lot of must-have applications will start to appear that will require a Leopard install. Apple has traditionally had a quick adoption curve, especially compared to the folks toiling away in Redmond, but I bet it will be an even quicker ramp up with this release.

When asked to recommend an After Effects book, I’m quick to reach for Adobe After Effects 7.0 Studio Techniques by Mark Christiansen. Mark has a really in depth knowledge of After Effects and is a master at explaining difficult concepts in an in-depth, but approachable manner. So, I was excited to see that he has started a blog called flowseeker.

Mark writes…

This space will contain thoughts on matters relating to my book – digital cinema and visual effects compositing in particular – as well as whatever other miscellany takes hold. Paradoxically, it’s the way that writing these monologues/blogs puts people more in touch with other people that compels me to do it. By all means, especially if you liked the book, let me know what you want to hear more about. …

I’m really looking forward to following what Mark has to say. I’m sure it will be insightful, just like his book.

I’ve always been skittish around After Effects expressions, which when you think about it really doesn’t make much sense. I’m pretty good at programming and I get the concepts, so why the discomfort? Recently, I was adding some expressions to scripts and found myself really enjoying the process. I thought about it a bit, and it wasn’t the expressions I was skittish about, it was the entering the expressions that was making me uncomfortable. The one line data entry, the hierarchical function list, even the pickwhip with its cool little animation feels utterly confining and claustrophobic. What I was struggling with was a programming interface developed for use by designers.

And it’s not just After Effects. Flash has had that same kind of push and pull between developers and designers. From the hideous Normal/Expert mode to the pick your identity at startup evolution, every version seems to take another stab at the right mix. Even tools that have evolved into developer focused applications continue to show the roots of the struggle. I wince when I watch my Filemaker Pro using friends developing Repetitive Stress Injuries from the legacy programming environment, which amounts to a 400px x 200px bit of screen real estate, filled with buttons. Ok, I exaggerate, but still.

I’ve always been the type of guy who pinballs between the left and right sides of the brain. I’ve got a design background, but I like to program and end up working on the technical side of projects a fair bit. I think this is pretty common these days, Jen deHann coined the term deseloper (not much here right now) to describe that combination of designer and developer. What happens sometimes when I have my developer cap on in a design tools environment is a sort of cognitive dissonance between the ideas I want to express and the program interface.

I think this happens from a misguided understanding of what being a designer is all about. Design is not about being able to twiddle buttons and graphics, but about problem solving. Some of the most amazing problem solvers and process experts I know are designers. There has to be a better toolkit for letting designers express their ideas. There is a term used in computer science about a languages expressiveness or its ability to let the programmer express her ideas easily and without hinderance. I think there is a lot of room for design tools to develop that expressiveness outside of the gui toolkit. It’s obvious from the experimentation in interfaces within design applications that there is an embrace of the problem I’m trying to articulate.

My main hope is that there continues to be a flowering of cross discipline avenues of exploration. I hear similar complaints from my developer friends who feel like they are pushed away from creative solution making. I think there will always be folks who are more comfortable in a more analytical setting as well as others who embrace the more feeling parts of the Myers Briggs spectrum, but there’s also a fertile middle ground for us deselopers to explore.

Apple released Pro Application Update 2006-01 this morning. It’s mostly a bug fix update, but a couple of important things in the release notes caught my eye.

Uncompressed 422

Uncompressed 422 delivers a fix for changes in color-space and/or gamma when moving clips between Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects and addresses a codec issue leading to drawing errors in 16bpc After Effects projects. It also fixes discrepancies found between former AltiVec and the current Intel (scalar) code and delivers some performance improvements on Intel-based Macs.

This update is required for customers using Final Cut Pro 5.1 and recommended for customers using any of the Final Cut Studio 5.1 applications and Shake 4.1

This is a big deal if you work with FCP and After Effects. I’ve been chasing my tail with color shifts between these two apps for too long and I’m hoping this takes care of it once and for all.

Also…

FxPlug

FxPlug delivers a single image-processing plug-in architecture for pro applications.

This one has been out there for a while in Motion, but it’s good to see a cocoa plugin architecture develop for FCP which is a big deal if your a cocoaHead developer and great as a user because you get accelerated GL graphics and things like Core Image and Core Video. Combined with the rumblings about the Shake price reduction and rolling in to some unnamed future compositing app there seems to be a lot of rumblings behind the scenes. I just wish Apple wasn’t so secretive in announcing their plans so I could, I don’t know, plan and stuff. That’s why you get all of the crazy rumors sites, etc. and it’s kind of fun if your just a casual user, but it’s much less fun if your trying to figure out what your next steps should be. And while I’m wishing, I wish they’d publish the PRODataInterchange cocoa protocol as a public spec.

So it looks like Adobe has updated the After Effects SDK to version 7.0r2. Why should you care? Well if you’re a developer and on the Mac this is the first version with Xcode sample projects. So if you’ve been putting off developing plugins because you didn’t want to buy Code Warrior now’s your chance to dive in. I want to do some timed tests between AEGP plugins and scripting and see if it’s worth my time to dive into the minutia of C and C++. Also looks like the Windows side runs in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2005, though I’m less sure if you gain .NET benefits here.

We’ve been doing HD work at Primal Screen for a few years now. Both for delivery to fledgling HD Networks like Animania and as an acquisition format for live and studio shoots. Like any endavor there has been a bit of a learning curve. My biggest takeaway that I’d like to share is to treat your acquisition and delivery formats differently.

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