Monthly Archives: December 2013

How many people post Vines?

Instagram, Uncategorized

Does anyone know? I’ve struggled to find any real info on the subject.

There’s no doubt that Vine coined an idiom (essentially animated GIFs + sound) that’s proven flexible & often compelling in the right hands. I’m less sure, though, that regular people create vines with any frequency. Of the 674 people I follow on Twitter, not one has shared a vine.co link in the time frame that Twitter searches.

For my needs Instagram video has been perfect for most cases, taking a huge bite out of my YouTube usage (though that’s changed a bit over the holidays; most Christmas carols won’t fit into 15 seconds!). I suspect that most people find it easier to make compelling content without looping & with more breathing room, and that for most video creation/sharing is a feature rather than a product unto itself.

[Update: If you routinely post vines, please speak up.]

They snuck in a flux capacitor!

User Interface

Here’s a great idea, featuring great UX details.

People loved the photo backup/sharing startup Everpix, but it keeled over after netting just ~6,000 paying customers. (That’s hardly surprising in a world where backup & sharing come free with every phone.) It started to popularize a neat feature called Flashback, one that showed photos from your archive taken exactly one year ago.

Now I’ve found Timehop, a free iOS app that finds the images you shared across various social networks, then gives you snapshots from one, two, and more years ago. The daily push notification it sends provides a little treat I’ve come to anticipate.

What sets the app apart, though, is the delight its creators take in otherwise-mundane UI details. The spinning loading indicator is a Back To The Future-style flux capacitor:

Flux

(In the app itself it animates.) They’ve also enjoyed making their mascot Abe paw at the pull-to-refresh indicator, seen here captured by Beautiful Pixels:

 

Well played, guys. Can’t wait to see what you cook up next.

[YouTube]

4D printing: 3D shapes that transform

3D

Interesting stuff:

Gizmodo writes,

In essence, the ‘fourth dimension’ represents change—4D printing simply refers to printers that create objects that can transform over time and, in some cases, self-assemble. […]
Kinematics is a system for 4D printing that creates complex, foldable forms composed of articulated modules. The system provides a way to turn any three-dimensional shape into a flexible structure using 3D printing.

[Vimeo]

Lovely, impressive animation: The Bear & the Hare

Illustration

Festive & fun:

But what’s really interesting is the ‘making of’ piece:

Elliot and Yves took the two most traditional and time-honored animation processes – stop-motion and traditional hand-drawn 2D animation – and combined them to create something innovative and unique. Their aim was to do almost everything in camera, using real lighting, lens and film craft to build a world where the audience can see and feel the painstaking work behind it. The 2D animation’s physical interaction with the set and the human imperfections inherent in the process create a hand-crafted piece full of heart and integrity.

The animation process involved constant shifts between 2D and 3D worlds. In order to achieve this complicated combination the whole film was first created in Blinkink Studios as a 3D previsualisation animatic with all the sets and characters built to scale. This allowed everything to be developed and planned alongside the modelmakers and animators, thus integrating the different disciplines and processes before the set was built or the characters were printed.

Aaron Blaise (Brother Bear, The Lion King, Mulan) and his team of veteran Disney animators at Premise Entertainment in Orlando, Florida, designed and animated the characters. The 2D-animation frames were printed onto mounted paper and cut with a laser. Each frame (nearly 4,000 in total) was then individually hand-labelled before going on set. Feature-film stop-frame animators then spent 6 weeks bringing the world to life.

[Vimeo 1, 2] [Via Steve Guilhamet]

Streetpong

Uncategorized

Check out this fun bit of urban art from Germany:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3Ozz6_pdMI
From the project site:

StreetPong is a concept about playful urban interactions. The starting point was the problem of waiting for a long time at pedestrian traffic lights. StreetPong can be played during the red phase at traffic light on a touchscreen display. The opponent can be anyone on the other side of the street who is also waiting to cross the street.

[YouTube]

Merry Christmas!

Uncategorized

…and Festivumakwanzanukkah and everything!

Wherever you are & whatever you may celebrate*, I wish you a safe & joyous day. I am profoundly grateful for the chance to help creative people express themselves better. Thank you so much for that.

Ps toolbar

*No matter what, I hope & trust you’ll have a far cheerier day than this guy:

 

"Our Drone Future"

Uncategorized

Check out Alex Cornell’s dystopian vision:

In the near future, cities use semi-autonomous drones for urban security. Human officers monitor drone feeds remotely, and data reports are displayed with a detailed HUD and communicated via a simulated human voice (designed to mitigate discomfort with sentient drone technology). While the drones operate independently, they are “guided” by the human monitors, who can suggest alternate mission plans and ask questions.

Specializing in predictive analysis, the security drones can retask themselves to investigate potential threats. As shown in this video, an urban security drone surveys San Francisco’s landmarks and encounters fierce civilian resistance.

Ah, but as that’s a bit dark, let’s see the real-life Mistletoe Drone:

 

[YouTube 1 & 2 ] [Via]

Sketchable: A new painting tool from Photoshop kids

Illustration, Mobile

The sons of Mac painting pioneer & Photoshop GPU/brushes maven Jerry Harris have released Sketchable, a fast new painting tool for Windows 8:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cODTMUdu4oQ
Digital painting trailblazer John Derry (one of the original authors of Painter) writes,

Silicon Benders is the brother team of Miles & Ryan Harris. Painting apps appear to run in the brothers’ genes: their dad is Jerry Harris, co-author (with Keith McGregor) of early Mac paint app PixelPaint Pro, the first full-color paint application for the Macintosh. Jerry is now a Principal Computer Scientist on the Adobe Photoshop team.
Sketchable is designed to be easy to pick up and start using with a minimal learning curve. It is a particularly pressure-sensitive savvy app offering a wide range of expressibility in concert with its tools. Sketchable has a simple interface with plenty of room for expansion. I have a feeling we’ll be seeing this app grow over time. Highly Recommended!

The icons are courtesy of painter Don Seegmiller.
[YouTube]

Awesome photographic history from NASA

Photography

You think *you’ve* had high-pressure photo situations? Spend a couple of minutes watching this great recreation of how the first earthrise photo was captured. (Hurry up with that damn color film!)

From NASA:

Using photo mosaics and elevation data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), this video commemorates the 45th anniversary of Apollo 8’s historic flight by recreating the moment when the crew first saw and photographed the Earth rising from behind the Moon. Narrator Andrew Chaikin, author of A Man on the Moon, sets the scene for a three-minute visualization of the view from both inside and outside the spacecraft accompanied by the onboard audio of the astronauts.

See more info on the NASA site. [YouTube] [Via Sebastiaan de With]

25 new video tutorials on Camera Raw

Photography

Former Adobe photography evangelist George Jardine has released an in-depth new series: 

This set of 25 all-new video tutorials contains over 4.5 hours of the most comprehensive training available on the Camera Raw 8 Photoshop Plug-In. In this series we cover the raw processing controls from top to bottom. Starting from the ground up, we guide any professional artist, designer or photographer through a complete understanding of each and every control. Then we dive deeper, digging into important details no other videos touch, such as the intricate relationships between the local and global adjustments, how Smart Objects work, as well as a deep dive on working with RGB files.

Check out George’s site for a complete listing of topics plus a sample movie. Access to the series costs $29.95.

A life-size Lego car powered by air

Uncategorized

Brilliant.

From the project site:

Super Awesome Micro Project Factoids

  • More than 500,000 LEGO pieces were used.
  • The car engine is made from standard Lego pieces and runs on air!
  • The engine has four orbital engines and a total of 256 pistons.
  • Top speed is not very fast, around 20-30km (We were scared of a Lego explosion so we drove it slowly)
  • It was built in Romania and shipped to a secret location in suburban Melbourne.
  • It’s a Hot Rod design, mainly because hot rods are cool.

Just as I was discovering this link, my boys were playing with their pneumatically driven Lego Unimog—which I previously would’ve called giant.
[YouTube] [Via Lin Kayser & Uri Ar}

Tastemade: The proverbial 1-inch hole

Mobile, Photography, User Interface

“People don’t come to us because they want 1-inch drills,” the CEO of Black & Decker is said to have remarked, “They come to us because they want 1-inch holes.”

The beautifully executed app Tastemade (App Store) represents an interesting evolution in creative software. Instead of offering an open-ended toolset for doing any number of projects, it aims to do just one thing well—namely, produce short, highly watchable person-on-the-street reviews of restaurants. The entire interface is built to walk you through making & sharing exactly one kind of content. Through constraint + automation, it tends to quickly produce a very nice “hole” (example).

The app is full of nice design touches. For example:

  • Based on its knowledge of your location & Foursquare data, the app can guess which restaurant you’re visiting, auto-populate the title field, then choose an appropriate font/music combo (which you can then change).
  • You’re prompted to capture a number of shots, and a colored progress indicator helps ensure you shoot enough but not too much.
  • When you go to choose a color look, your existing clips are played back at 2x speed, making it easier to see the impact of the filter on more footage.
  • One of the clips you shoot of the venue is placed behind the title & blurred.

Tastemade

Now, is this particular problem worth solving (i.e. do a lot of people want to record, share, and watch restaurant reviews)? I have no idea. (I’m not allowed out of the house; thanks, kids.) I think, however, that the radically reduced barriers to building & distributing software will keep reshaping the creative-tool landscape, producing more highly focused apps that nicely address one specific need.

Incredibly detailed illustrations to fight globalization

Illustration

Whether or not you agree with their politics, it’s hard not to be impressed by the nine years’ worth of work that went into Beehive Collective’s story-graphic, Mesoamérica Resiste:

Over the past thirteen years we’ve researched, drawn, and re-drawn the story of corporate-driven globalization in the Americas… Our intensive grassroots research and collaborative design process continued for several years. After the pencil work was complete, inking the final drawings took several more years, with rotating teams of illustrators and studios in multiple locations.

[Via]

Some interesting findings about digital publications

Uncategorized

To be honest I’ve been kinda skeptical about the viability of high-gloss, tablet-oriented publications. In a world of Buzzfeed & Flipboard, they’ve struck me as nouveau CD-ROMs. I’m pleased to see that evidently I’ve been wrong. Check out some recent findings from Adobe:

The number of downloads of magazine editions created with DPS since its launch in March 2011 passed the 150 million mark this month. Downloads have increased 115% year over year, and DPS-created apps have three times as many unique monthly readers as they did a year ago, Adobe announced. […]

Adobe found that subscribers spend around 50 minutes a month in a DPS app – a number that surpasses the 40 minutes per issue that GfK MRI found among print magazine readers in the fall of 2012. While that’s not an apples-to-apples comparison of engagement, it does indicate that digital magazines are replicating the lean-back print experience. […]

Social sharing tools are becoming increasingly popular, for example, as is the web viewer technology that Adobe added to DPS earlier this year, which lets readers sample tablet editions via their web browser.

"An Instagram Short Film"

Instagram, Photography

Thomas Jullien writes,

Instagram is an incredible resource for all kinds of images. I wanted to create structure out of this chaos. The result is a crowd source short-film that shows the endless possibilities of social media.

The video consists of 852 different pictures, from 852 different instagram users. If you are one of them, shout and I will add you to the credits.

Noting the eerie similarity of the photos, PetaPixel writes, “That’s great when you’re trying to create a seamless, crowdsourced hyperlapse journey around famous landmarks, but it stings a bit when you realize that your photos of *insert famous monument here* probably look the exact same as everybody else’s.”

[Vimeo]

Yet more awesomeness comes to Adobe CC video apps

After Effects, CC

Creative Cloud means continuous innovation. Check out the newest batch:

Adobe Premiere Pro CC has seen four new releases in this year – all within the 6 months since the CC version was announced. Guided by user requests, the Adobe Premiere Pro CC December 2013 release adds Open CL performance enhancements, media management improvements like multiple Media Browser tabs, new editing enhancements for even greater workflow efficiency, and delivers more intuitive voiceover recording.

The After Effects CC December 2013 release offers customizable output of file name and path templates, improved snapping behavior, enhanced scripting options, and the ability to migrate user settings when updating to newer versions.

The December 2013 releases also includes updates to SpeedGrade CC, Prelude CC, Adobe Media Encoder CC and Adobe Anywhere for video. Along with performance enhancements, SpeedGrade also offers expanded camera format support in Direct Link mode. Prelude CC has added support for the latest Adobe Anywhere protocols. Adobe Media Encoder expands Sony XAVC format support, and Adobe Anywhere introduces performance improvements and diagnostic tools for monitoring system status.

I like what my colleague Steve from After Effects had to say:

“Our team turned around this release in a matter of weeks based on direct feedback from our users,” said Steve Forde, senior product manager for After Effects. “With regular Creative Cloud updates, we’re able to continually evolve and enhance our feature set. Your tools just keep getting better.”

So, how's Adobe doing?

CC
  • 1.4 million+ paying subscribers to Creative Cloud (more than 400,000 signing up in the last three months alone)
  • 500+ new & improved features introduced this year
  • 2.4 million+ projects published on Behance (more than in its previous six years combined)

(Full details here)
Thanks for your incredible support this year, guys. We’re only just getting warmed up.

ByTheNumbers_sm

Check out the new Creative Cloud Learn

CC

CC membership is about far more than desktop apps. Helping you actually unlock the power & value of the apps is a key component, and to that end Adobe has just introduced the new Creative Cloud Learn.
The site features hundreds of video tutorials presented by expert trainers from Adobe, Infinite Skills, Lynda.com, Kelby Training, Train Simple, and Peachpit. For example, the Photoshop page is packed with content that spans everything from fundamentals to new CC features to masters-level techniques.

Thoughts? How can we deliver the training content that’s most useful to you, personally?

Some rather brilliant imaging tech from Microsoft

3D, Image Science

The company’s Photosynth technology has been public since 2006, and while it’s been cool (placing photos into 3D space), I haven’t seen it gain traction in its original form or as a free panorama maker. That could now change.

The new version stitches photos into smooth fly-throughs. Per TechCrunch:

[U]sers upload a set of photos to Microsoft’s cloud service then the technology begins to looking for points (“features”) in the successive photos that appear to the be same object. It then determines where each photo was taken from, where in 3D space each of these objects were, and how the camera was oriented. Next, it generates the 3D shapes on a per-photo basis. And finally, the technology calculates a smooth path – like a Steadicam – through the locations for each photo, and then slices the images into multi-resolution pyramids for efficiency.

Check this out:

Once you’ve clicked it, try hitting “C” to reveal & interact with the 3D camera path. Here’s an example from photographer David Brashears, who captured Mt. Everest during one of the highest-elevation helicopter flights ever attempted:

So, will we see this become more common? It’s the first presentation I’ve seen that makes me want to don a wearable, lifelogging camera on vacation.

Lightroom 5.3, Camera Raw 8.3 for CC, CS6 now available

CC, DNG, Lightroom

In addition to the new cameras listed below, Photoshop CC users get new features including Auto Levels-like functionality and Auto Straighten. PM Sharad Mangalick writes,

Please note that this is the final version of Camera Raw 8 and DNG Converter 8 that will be available for Photoshop CS6 customers on Windows XP, Windows Vista or Mac OSX 10.6.  Impacted customers can continue either update to compatible operating system or continue to use Camera Raw 8.3 for Photoshop CS6.

Photoshop CS6 customers on Windows 7, Windows 8, Mac OSX 10.7 (Lion), Mac OSX 10.8 (Mountain Lion) or Mac OSX 10.9 (Mavericks) will not be impacted and will continue to receive updated camera support through future ACR 8.x dot releases.

Newly added support for Tethered Capture in Lightroom 5.3:

  • Canon EOS Rebel T4i / EOS 650D / EOS Kiss X6i

New Camera Support in Camera Raw 8.3 & Lightroom 5.3

  • Canon EOS M2
  • Canon PowerShot S120
  • Casio EX-10
  • Fujifilm XQ1
  • Fujifilm X-E2
  • Nikon 1 AW1
  • Nikon Coolpix P7800
  • Nikon Df
  • Nikon D610
  • Nikon D5300
  • Nokia Lumia 1020
  • Olympus OM-D E-M1
  • Olympus STYLUS 1
  • Panasonic DMC-GM1
  • Pentax K-3
  • Phase One IQ260
  • Phase One IQ280
  • Sony A7 (ILCE-7)
  • Sony A7R (ILCE-7R)
  • Sony DSC-RX10

For a list of bugs fixed, please see the Camera Raw & Lightroom posts, respectively.

A giant space telescope made from plastic

Enormousness, Photography

Normally I’d call a 600mm lens big—but this bad boy dwarfs even the Hubble: 

DARPA says the MOIRE program is currently in its “second and final phase,” and has already been prototyped. When completed, such optical systems could result in more powerful telescopes that fit in smaller rockets and shuttles, with eventual use in tracking weather systems or for reconnaissance. Here’s a clip explaining more about how it works:

 

[YouTube]

New HTML coding goodness from Adobe

HTML5

Check out the Bézier Timing Editor & more in the new Edge Code CC:

  • HTML Live Development, including live preview which enables users to see HTML and CSS edits immediately in the browser without having to save or reload. Users can see results instantly making it easier to experiment and quicker to get results.
  • CSS Quick Edit makes it easy to jump from an HTML file into a new CSS file to make changes to the CSS. Now, you can also add entirely new CSS rules without leaving the context of the HTML file you’re working on.
  • The new CSS Bézier Timing Editor gives you the exact transition and animation effects you want through visual changes, rather than working with a string of numbers.
  • Preview images within the editor. Your image will be displayed along with file size and dimension info, giving you the ability to incorporate image files into your project more easily.
  • Plus additional enhancements and ongoing code improvements.

Check out a quick demo from excellently-’stached PM Jonathan Dunlap:

Behold… "Extraneous Lyrics 2013"!

After Effects

I’m delighted to announce that our team designer Dave Werner, together with our teammate Shaun Saperstein, has released the 2013 edition of his “Extraneous Lyrics” series:

As you might remember from last year’s edition, the videos (now with over 1 million views) feature Dave giving “some of the year’s most popular songs a wordier acoustic mashup treatment.” Each year he raises his technical game: 2012 was all about motion-tracked text in After Effects, and 2013 is a full-on green-screen extravaganza. Here Dave & Shaun take you behind the scenes:

 

[YouTube 1 & 2]

Photoshop Photography Program extended to Dec. 31

Lightroom, Photography

Great news:

We are delighted to announce that we are extending the period that the Photoshop Photography Program is available without restrictions to December 31, 2013. The offer is available to everyone, regardless of whether you have purchased a previous Adobe product. […]

Your response to the initial program has been incredible, well above our expectations, and I am thrilled we are able to extend this program so more of you can take advantage of it.

It’s possible that not all pages on Adobe.com have been updated to reflect this change; that should be resolved shortly.

999

Short film: "The Record Breaker"

Uncategorized

I noted the running time of 25 minutes and thought, “Oh, I’ll just watch for a sec”—but dang if I didn’t get sucked in. Try it just for a minute:

 

“The Record Breaker tells the life story of Ashrita Furman, the man with the most Guinness World Records of all time. [It] follows Furman as he trains to set a new record: climbing Machu Picchu on stilts.”

‘A swimmingly edited, life-affirming film. Genuinely touching.’— Robert Silva, IndieWire
‘Hands-down the funniest documentary of the year.’— Marianna Torgovnick, TED

[Vimeo]