It was a perfect event for Adobe Platform Evangelist Duane Nickull to cover in today's episode of Duane's World on Adobe TV -- the show that covers the developer scene from a decidedly heavy-metal angle.

One thing that Duane (pictured above) and I have in common is that we're both rock musicians turned technology geeks. I really dig his style of presenting -- and don't let all the credits at the end of the show fool you, Duane puts together 99% of the show completely by himself.

Today, Jake takes a step into the spotlight in the debut of his new series The Creatives on Adobe TV.

That's Jake in the middle, holding the clapboard.

Because Jake is uniquely tapped in to the creative community here in San Francisco, he's able to bring you a behind-the-scenes look at a variety of talented people who use Adobe tools to help express their creative vision. Today's episode features Jon Julio, the creative force behind the Velo Skate brand.

I get to see the results of the use of such skates every now and again as Jake is himself an avid skater and has been known to show up at the office on Monday morning with a variety of bruises and bumps.

John thought it would be great to have an animated character as the "virtual mascot" of the series, so we asked Kush to design one. For those of you that don't know who Kush is, he's (amongst many other things) the host of Ask The Adobe Ones, the production genius behind the Johnny Encore videos on Short and Suite, the designer of many of our program Icons -- basically the "renaissance man" of Adobe TV. He came up with the character Victor Vector, who you can see in every episode of Flash in a Flash.

Victor Vector on the Flash "Stage"

Like any great creative mind, Kush is loaded with ideas. So he initially presented 13 different character designs -- here are a few that didn't make the cut:

They are (clockwise, starting in the upper-left corner):

Flashy the Dramatic Prairie Dog
Flash the Flashgun
Blobby the Slime
Nikita the Flacheetah
F-Man
Bungie the Neurotic Rabbit

If it was my show I probably would've gone with "Blobby the Slime", but that's just me.

Check the Adobe Creative Suite boxes hanging on the wall alongside the garlic and salami.

What the heck is a Fibonacci? "You don't want a title that needs to be explained" I said to Rufus. Then he told me who Fibonacci was and spoke a bit about the Fibonacci Series and how it relates to design (click here to watch a neat Flash animation on the subject). Both he and Tim were adamant about the idea, and after all Rufus is from Italy. So I let them run with it and lo-and-behold it is now one of our most popular shows.

Today on Adobe TV, you can watch Episode 6 of Caffe Fibonacci, in which Rufus and Tim use a layer cake as a metaphor for layers in different types of design documents. I haven't yet watched the entire episode, but I did catch the ending which involves this little scene:

And people ask me why I don't attend all the shoots . . .

They're very well known in the Trekkie universe, so much so that during each NAB they hold a get-together at the Star Trek Experience in the Las Vegas Hilton which is well-attended by Warp 11 fans. I joined them at this year's event to partake in neon-colored drinks served in fishbowls with dry ice on top. I did not feel so swell the next morning.

What could Karl possibly to do top this? Well, he started an Adobe band -- not a band of Adobe employees, but a band that performs songs about Adobe. Johnny Encore and The Acrobats was born, and thus the premise of the Adobe TV series Short and Suite. Each episode features a new Acrobats video, which Adobe Evangelists Jason Levine and Karl Soulé then dissect to show how the song was recorded and the video created.

"Apparently it's a blues video, not a blue video."

This month's episode of Short and Suite features the music video for "I'm Your Puppet, I'm Your Tool" in which stills of the Acrobats were animated using the very popular Puppet Tool in After Effects CS3. Karl Soulé does a great job of explaining some of the advanced features of this tool, so if you're interested in character animation do check this video out.

Dennis Radeke, the host of the series (and one of Adobe's top experts in the field) presents a new episode every 2 weeks. But if that's not often enough for you, check out his "Bootleg Versions" which are shorter episodes created in a more "run and gun" style. Today on Adobe TV you can watch his first Bootleg Version, in which he shows how he places himself on a virtual set using Adobe Ultra CS3.

Ultra is an often-overlooked tool in CS3 Production Premium that came to Adobe by way of our acquisition of Serious Magic. It includes a virtual set library along with one of the most easy-to-use chroma keyers on the planet. It's specifically designed to pull chroma keys on "less than optimal" footage.

Take a few minutes to watch the video and you'll see how it all works.

Well, you do wind up with some rather interesting ideas, that's for sure. Today on Adobe TV, you can watch Episode 2 of the Clios Future Gold Challenge which documents a competition in which we invited 12 of the best young creatives from around the globe to compete in an exciting (and exhausting) 24-hour advertising challenge. In this episode the teams pitch their ideas to a panel of ad-industry veterans and face instant elimination. Kind of an "American Idol" scenario for the creative set.

And based on some of the ideas presented I can make a pretty good guess as to what went on behind the doors of some of those hotel rooms.

This series is part of the Designing Minds program on Adobe TV, which profiles some of the top designers working in the field today. If you're a designer, or have an interest in design, it's a definite must-see.

Check out these 3 videos, presented by the venerable Julieanne Kost (host of The Complete Picture on Adobe TV), to learn all about a bevy of new features and improvements including enhancements to the Library Module, non-destructive localized color-corrections, tighter integration with Photoshop, and updates to the Print, Slideshow, and Web modules. It's the best way to learn about this exciting update to an already solid tool for photographers.

You can also take Lightroom 2.0 for a free 30-day test drive, just click the "Try" link to the right of any of the Learn Lightroom 2.0 videos and you'll be taken directly to the free trial download page.

Big thanks to our friends over at Software Cinema for producing these great videos.

Then we moved to a new house and decided not to get cable or satellite service -- leaving me to get my TV fix solely from online offerings. Heck, 99% of what I'm interested in is available online anyhow (primarly baseball games and new episodes of The Simpsons). Can a recovering TV addict survive without a "traditional" TV set in the house?

When I tell my friends & colleagues that I don't have a TV anymore, I get funny looks. After all, I founded and run Adobe TV and spent many years working in the TV and video fields. I think I have one of the best jobs in the world right now -- I get to run an online TV network that educates and inspires users of Adobe software. I get to be involved in every aspect of the process of planning, producing, and delivering loads of great content. And none of it is going on "traditional" TV.

But I do miss some aspects of my previous job @ Adobe, especially the parts involving direct communication with all of youse guys. So I decided to resurrect my blog as a means of telling you what's up at Adobe TV. We typically publish between 2-6 new videos every weekday -- a considerable amount of content (to put it in perspective, we launched Adobe TV on April 9 with 210 videos -- and today we've got over 440). So I'm going to be writing about new videos we have coming online, and will also be throwing in some tidbits on how we use our own technologies to put it all together.

And if you haven't watched Adobe TV yet, what the heck are you waiting for?

The project that I founded and run @ Adobe launched tonight at 9pm Pacific. Adobe TV

Just go there. tv.adobe.com

You'll understand it - I don't need to explain.

More soon about how we put it all together

So if you’re looking for the “tutorial of the day” you should probably skip this post, otherwise, please do read on.

My fascination with television began when I was 7 years old. My father had decided to become a serial Game Show contestant (and by that I don’t mean he was a contestant on a “Serial Game Show”, but that he was a contestant on a few different game shows) –anyhow-- on Lincoln’s Birthday in 1974 I got to attend a live taping at ABC's studio on West 54th Street in Manhattan, to watch my dad compete on the then-popular program The Big Showdown.

Having already spent the lion’s share of my first 7 years front of the TV set, it was a huge thrill to spend an afternoon in an actual TV studio. I got such a huge charge out of the whole experience that I decided right then and there that I would work in the television business when I grew up. The fact that my dad won $7,000 that day probably didn’t hurt either.

My repeated pleas to mom about turning our living room into a game show set didn’t pan out so well.

Fast forward to 1984 and high-school-age Bob was watching cable TV at a friend’s house in Manhattan (we didn’t have it in the Bronx yet). He put on a show on channel “D” . . . well, you could hardly call it a “show” as it consisted of 2 knuckleheads around the same age as us horsing around in a TV studio. My friend though it was hilarious, and I thought it to be the stupidest thing I’d ever seen on a television screen -- but I was able to see past the crappiness of this particular show and realize that one could rent such a studio and put on a show and actually have an audience.

I had read about Public Access before but had never actually seen it. With a phone call to Manhattan Cable’s Public Access coordinator, and a fake Manhattan address in hand, I secured a half-hour slot on Thursdays at 5:30pm on Channel “C”, and found the cheapest studio deal in town at a place called Metro Access -- a fully equipped Black & White TV Studio, with a live feed into the Manhattan Cable master control, for 30 bucks an hour (incidentally, this was the same studio that the infamous Robin Byrd Show originated from).

I wasn’t aiming to just spend the weekly half-hour just horsing around as that seemed pretty lame. I wanted to “Produce” something – get talented people involved and make a real program. Since I was then a student at the famous School of Performing Arts (the school that the movie & TV series “Fame” were based on) I had loads of friends who could help me create something really entertaining. And so the “Darren Behr Show” was born. I don’t want to get in to who Darren Behr is, or why the show was named after him since he was never actually on it, but we did some pretty interesting stuff in our weekly half-hour, “cablecast” live on Channel C. I produced and directed the show (and funded it with the proceeds from my after-school messenger job) with several of my talented classmates working as the cast & crew (including Chastity Bono, daughter of Sonny & Cher).

What made the whole experience so amazing in was that there was this platform (Public Access) which in a place as large as Manhattan pretty much guaranteed you an audience. Remember, there still weren’t that many channels to choose from back in 1984.

Along came the time to start thinking about college, and my first thought was to study TV Production. But I was a Music major at Performing Arts (I’m a bass player), and was also thinking about that as a course of study. The decision was actually made for me when I discovered that you needed excellent grades to get into the really good TV Production programs. So off to Music Conservatory I went.

I didn’t really do anything at all with TV or video for awhile, as the short supply of bass players kept me pretty busy for the next 13 years (I had a pretty successful career as a professional musician). But in 1996 I decided to leave the music business behind (for reasons I don’t want to get into right now) and had to figure out what to do next.

I did have to make a living, and I did have some graphic design chops from my days of laying-out my college newspaper on the then state-of-the-art Macintosh Plus with it’s whopping 1 Megabyte of RAM and 20 Megabyte external hard-drive the size of a shoebox. And so I was able to B.S. my way into a temp job designing Power Point slides at the big Wall Street firm Smith Barney. Not a “career move”, for sure, but a relatively painless way to pay the bills.

I’d been there a few months when one day the head of the video department walked in and asked if anyone knew a program called After Effects as he needed to have some animations created for a video he was producing. As was my habit in those days, I said “yes” right away (despite not having a shred of an idea what After Effects was, nor any experience in animation) and immediately hi-tailed it to a large Manhattan bookstore to buy a copy of After Effects Classroom In A Book for AE 3.0.

Being a musician and having an astute sense of pacing, tempo, and time, I picked up the concepts of motion graphics and animation pretty quickly (I would learn later on that this is a common thread with many AE wizards). Being already adept at Photoshop made the interface and concepts in AE pretty familiar (as my friend Dean Velez likes to say “if you’re a Photoshop user you already know 50% of After Effects). I also understood video workflow from my days of producing a live TV show every week back in high school. It seemed that I’d hit on something that could be an actual career for me.

Soon after that, I landed a full-time job in Smith Barney’s in-house video department. I taught myself how to edit video using the (then rare and expensive) Avid systems, and helped launch the company’s in-house TV network “NextGen TV”, which was the first of its kind on Wall Street.

But creating corporate videos for a Wall Street firm can be . . . well . . . kinda dry, so I started branching out.

Tomorrow . . . on to making some “legit” TV and globetrotting in in hi-tech startup land.

The combination of my new gig, which has me working out of an office 5 days a week for the first time in YEARS, and this little project pictured below, has kept me far, far away from the blogosphere. I'm really happy to be back.

That's my son Theo, who's the biggest joy of my life, ever, and also the source of some of those lines on my face. The sleep deprivation is kind of like being jet-lagged all the time (which I'm pretty used to anyway).

So it's a "Web TV" blog now, eh? Well, my philosophy is that production methods should be the same whether you're going the traditional route of video distribution or you're planning to chuck something up on YouTube. Because something is "for the web" doesn't mean you should cut corners on production values. In fact, the way you rise above the fray is to have better looking content than everyone else. So as far as production techniques go I'm still going to be focusing on that alot.

The encoding, distribution, and playback pieces of the web TV puzzle can be confounding to those of you that come from a traditional video background, so I'm going to be focusing on that as well. These areas of technology are still in a great deal of flux -- the fact that the 4 major TV networks in the USA have completely contradictory strategies for their online video presence is a good testament to this. This article from Forbes.com features interviews with the heads of the online divisions of ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX so you can read it all for yourself. There's still a long way to go..

But I'm a true believer of being in the right place at the right time, and the fact that Adobe is the only company with a complete capture-to-consumption workflow for web video puts me (and you) in a pretty good place to do some amazing things with this technology. We just announced a long-term strategic partnership with the BBC which will now be using Flash Video as it's online distribution format, as well as Premiere Pro and CS3 Production Premium as their main post-production toolset (which they've been using since earlier this year). The Adobe Media Player went into public beta earlier this month (click the link and download it from Adobe Labs today!). And there are so many things coming down the pike that I'm finding the "perfect storm" is swelling on a daily basis right here in my own backyard at 601 Townsend Street. Stay tuned and enjoy the ride.

After many long months of work by our incredibly talented and dedicated engineering teams CS3 Production Premium is now shipping!

To celebrate, let’s make some fireworks. It’s almost July 4 anyhow.

Start off by creating a new composition in After Effects, in whatever resolution you wish to work in (File > New Composition). In the Composition Settings dialog, set the Duration to 4 seconds (0;00;04;00).

Create a new solid layer in your Comp by selecting Layer > New > Solid. In the Solid Settings dialog, click Make Comp Size and then click OK.

Go to the Effects menu and select Simulation > CC Particle Systems II. RAM Preview and you’ll see some sparks.

We’re actually not gonna have to do all that much to make this look real pretty. What we’ve got now is a constant stream of sparks. Let’s set some keyframes for the Birth Rate of these particles to give us a single “pop”. Drag the Current Time Indicator (CTI) in your timeline the beginning of the comp and then set an initial keyframe for Birth Rate by clicking on the stopwatch to the left of its name in the Effect Controls Panel.

Set the Birth Rate to 40, then move the CTI ahead 5 frames and set the Birth Rate to 0. RAM Preview again and you’ll now see that “pop” but we still have some work to do in order to make this more convincing.

Twirl open the controls for Physics and set Gravity to 0.2 (which will keep the particles from falling away so quickly) and set Resistance to 10 (which will keep them from traveling too far away from their point of origination, also known as the Producer).

Then twirl open the controls for Particle and set Max Opacity to 50%

Now let’s duplicate what we’ve done a few times to create a short sequence. First, trim back the tail end of the Solid layer to make it 2 seconds long by clicking and dragging the right-hand edge of the clip to the left until it lines up with the 2 second mark on the timeline.

Duplicate the layer by selecting Edit > Duplicate, and then change the position of the Producer by first selecting the CC Particle Systems II effect in the Effect Controls Panel, and then clicking-and-dragging the Producer in the Composition Viewer to a new location.

The Producer is a small circle with a cross inside it.

Repeat the above step 3 more times until you have 5 copies of the layer, each with its Producer in a different location.

Now to have these fire off in a sequence, select all 5 of the layers then go to the Animation menu and select Keyframe Assistant > Sequence Layers.

In the Sequence Layers dialog, make sure Overlap is checked. When one layer fires, we want the next one to fire 10 frames later, so this is basically a math problem which depends on your frame rate:

If you’re working in 30fps enter a duration of 1:20 (0;00;01;20)
If you’re working in 25fps enter a duration of 1:15 (0;00;01;15)
If you’re working in 24fps enter a duration of 1:14 (0;00;01;14)

Click OK, RAM Preview, and then sit back and watch the show.

To customize further, try changing the colors of the particles as well as playing with the different Physics parameters. Happy 4th of July everyone, and here’s to the most exciting release of video tools in Adobe’s history!

These little birds were just about everywhere, and I thought it would be funny to have this one peck the heck out of that bike tire. The first step here is to separate the “character” (in this case the bird) from the background using Photoshop. I used the Quick Selection tool to select the bird (you can see the selection in the image above), removed it from the background, and then used the Clone Tool to clean up the background plate (Photoshop 101 stuff.)

The bird, the background, and the cleaned-up plate.

Next, import the Photoshop file into After Effects, making sure to select “Import As Composition” in the import dialog. Once it’s imported, double-click it to load it up, then select the Puppet Pin Tool, which is that new push-pin looking thing on the right side of the After Effects toolbar.

The next step is to place pins on the character based on how you want it to move -- the fewer pins you use the better the results are likely to be. First select the layer in your timeline, then select the Puppet Pin Tool, and click on the image to place the pins. For my bird, I put one on his head, foot, tail, and back.

To animate the pins, you can twirl down the controls for the Puppet Tool in your timeline and set keyframes, but the easier way is to motion sketch. Just hold down the Cmd (Mac) or Ctrl (Win) key and when you place your curser over a pin it turns into a stopwatch.

Clicking and dragging records your mouse movements in realtime, and you see an outline of your character as you draw. It’s really easy to record an animation this way. You can do multiple passes, to animate as many pins as you want, and you see the ones you’ve recorded play back as you record new ones so you can easily synchronize motion.

I started out by doing a pass just wiggling the tail, and then I did a pass of his head pecking away at the tire. I then animated the scale of the scene to zoom in over time. Here’s what I got:

Now this is a really simple example, you can go in much deeper with this tool. Holding down the Puppet Pin Tool in the toolbar reveals the Puppet Overlap Tool and the Puppet Starch Tool.

The Overlap Tool controls which parts of the character cross in front of or behind of the others, and the Starch Tool pretty much does what it says it does – it keeps unwanted warping from occurring. You click on the character to apply either of these tools.

Just a reminder for those of you that haven’t downloaded it yet, After Effects CS3 is in Public Beta over at Adobe Labs, so you can start using it right now until we ship it in a few weeks.

For the next few months you won’t be seeing much of me out on the road, but you will be seeing a lot more content from me online (with a 6-week hiaitus thrown in there when my baby arrives later this summer). My colleague Jason will be grounded as well as he is in the same boat (impending Fatherhood) so you’ll be seeing some of our talented Adobe colleagues like Karl Soulé presenting at the types of events you’d normally find me or Jason at.

But enough about the minutia of my professional life. In the spirit of changes and transitions, I’d like to show you how to create an animated DVD menu transition using Encore and After Effects. One of the things that makes Encore unique is its tight integration with AE, so the process here is rather simple.

What I’ll do is create a transition so that when the user clicks the “Play Movie” button on the DVD menu, the menu will animate away to black and then the movie will begin.

I’m going to use one of the menus in Encore’s Library as the example here, so you can follow along if you wish.

The Library has loads of royalty-free content like menus, buttons, and design elements that can be easily modified, so you can do something quick like I’m doing here, or use the elements in the Library to save time when doing custom menu design. In this case we just want to see the template menus, so click on the first button on that row of buttons in the middle of the panel. That toggles the Library’s display to show only menus. By default, it shows you the menus in the General category, but you can search within any of the categories by pulling down the menu at the top of the Library Panel.

Making sure you have the General category selected, scroll down and locate the Entertainment Menu. Double-click it and you will see it appear in the Project Panel. To load your new menu in the Menu Viewer, double-click it in the Project Panel.

At this point you can customize the menu by, for example, changing the text by using the Text Tool along with the Character and Paragraph Panels (as I’ve done) or sending the menu to Photoshop for modification by right-mouse clicking (or cmd-clicking) the menu and selecting Edit Menu in Photoshop. But for now, let’s just take what we’ve got and create the transition. Go to the Menu menu (this always cracks me up – there’s a menu called “Menu) and select Create After Effects Composition.

You’ll get a dialog prompting you to save your menu as a PSD which will then open up in After Effects. I recommend you save this PSD as well as the AE project you’re about to save, in the same folder as your Encore project in order to keep everything together.

After Effects will launch and create a new project for you, with a single composition that contains all the layers of your menu. Go ahead and save it.

Double-click the Comp to open it in the Composition Viewer.

Yes, this is After Effects and not Encore -- the interfaces are nearly identical . . .

At this point there are unlimited creative options as this is a standard After Effects composition. For now, we’ll do a simple transition to black using the Burn Film effect, which simulates what happens when motion picture film gets stuck in the gate and burns away. In order to have the effect apply to the all the layers in our menu, we’re going to Pre-Compose them.

Select all the layers in your Timeline, then select Layer > Pre-compose

In the Pre-compose dialog, accept the default setting “Move all attributes into the new Composition” and click OK.

Now, apply the Burn Film effect by selecting Effect > Stylize > CC Burn Film.

The main parameter in this effect is Burn. Click-and-drag on the value for Burn in the Effect Controls to see how it effects the menu.

One thing about this effect is that once it “burns away” the image, it reveals whatever is beneath, which is in this case nothing. In order to make this look like an actual frame of film burning away, we want white to be revealed. So let’s create a new solid layer by selecting Layer > New > Solid.

In the Solid Settings dialog, click the Make Comp Size button, and make the color white, then click OK. Then, in your Timeline, drag the new White Solid layer below the Pre-comp layer.

There we go. Now for the finishing touches. Let’s have the image start to burn away from the area of the Play button by moving the center of the effect. Select the Pre-comp layer, then go back to the Effect Controls. Click on the name of the Effect CC Burn Film, and you will see a cross-hatch appear in the center of your Comp. Drag it to the middle of the Play button.

Now it’s time to animate the transition. Three seconds should be about right, so select Composition > Composition Settings and in the Duration field select all the timecode and type in 300, which represents 3 seconds and 0 frames.

When you’re done, click OK. Next, set an initial keyframe for the Burn parameter by clicking on its stopwatch in the Effect Controls, and then set its value back to 0.

Move the Current Time Inditator (CTI) in your timeline to 2 seconds (0;00;02;00) and change the Burn setting in the Effect Controls to 100.

Select Composition > Preview > RAM Preview and see what you’ve got.

The last step will be to have the transition fade to black at the end, so make sure your CTI is back at 2 seconds and select the White Solid layer. Hit the letter T key on your keyboard to reveal its Opacity settings, and then click on the Stopwatch for Opacity to set a keyframe.

Move the CTI to the end of the timeline and change the Opacity setting to 0. RAM Preview and here’s what you should have (click to play back):

Now, let’s get this baby over to Encore. All you need to do is click and drag the Comp from the AE Project Panel to the Encore Project Panel. This can be done by arranging the apps side-by-side, or by using the cmd-tab or alt-tab keyboard shortcuts to toggle between applications.

You can also go to Encore’s File menu and select Adobe Dynamic Link > Import After Effects Composition, then drive to your AE project and select the comp.

Finally, let’s weave the transition into the navigation of the DVD. For this next step you’ll need to import a piece of video and put it in a timeline, and this will be our “Main Movie”. Go to your flowchart and click-and drag from the Play button in the Menu to the Main Movie timeline.

Then set the transition for the Play button by going to the Properties Panel and clicking the Transition tab. Click on the Pickwhip (the little swirl) and drag it to the After Effects comp in your Encore Project Panel.

You’ll see a Transition icon appear in the Flowchart, in the link from the Play button to the Main Movie timeline. To preview your navigation, right-mouse-click on the Menu and select Preview From Here. Click the Play button and watch the magic happen.

Other ways of incorporating animated transitions into your menus is to do them from one menu to the next (e.g. to transition from the Main Menu to the Scene Selection menu). With some imagination, this can be one of the most creative and fun parts of DVD creation.

Hey, would you rather see these tutorials as a podcast as opposed to written in my blog here? Please send me comments and let me know . . .