Gear

Review of Premiere Elements 4 (4.5 out of 5)

May 07, 2008

AMAZINGLY CAPABLE VIDEO SOFTWARE FOR WINDOWS
“You might be thinking, “What’s consumer software doing in a pro magazine?” The short answer is that if you aren’t using the Adobe Master Collection or the Production Premium suite, you probably need Adobe Premiere Elements 4. Whether you work as an advertiser, designer, developer, or photographer, you most likely have an interest in making videos or DVDs.

Sure, Adobe offers the very capable video applications found in the Creative Suite product line but for many users, it’s hard to spring for the “whole enchilada.” When I sat down with Premiere Elements, I was immediately impressed. The product offers an easy-to-use toolset that addresses the needs of many users.

Here’s the lowdown: Premiere Elements only runs on Windows machines. If you’re a Mac user, you should be looking to iMovie and iDVD ’08 to fill the same needs. On the PC side, the market has been woefully underserved by offerings from Adaptec and Microsoft. With version 4 of Premiere Elements, Adobe clearly steps up to offer a dramatic redesign, combining power with ease of use (an Adobe trademark).”

You can read the rest of the review here...

NAB Video Blog

April 18, 2008

I just got back from NAB this morning... here are a handful of videos we produced while on the road.

The Red Scarlet: A First Look

Adobe Media Player at NAB 2008

On the Scene at NAB 2008

The AJA IO HD with Gary Adcock

The Litepanels Micro

Hope you Enjoy!

Final Cut Help - Compressing for the Web

January 22, 2008

Join Apple Certified Trainer Richard Harrington as he shows you how to compress your video for web distribution via Compressor.

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Want more training? Check out our DVDs.

H.264 Video in a Jiffy

December 27, 2007

If you need to create H.264 video files fast... be sure to check out the Turbo H.264 from Elgato. This USB sized device offers a dedicated H.264 encoding chip for less than $100. In our tests... we were flying through video compression tasks. For example, we recently encoded a bunch of hour long video, each taking about 7 minutes. The speed is amazing and the quality is very good. The new software they've released even lets you customize your export templates for custom sizes and data rates (several presets for other portable media players are included).

The Best Price we've found is $89.

Keep Two Sets of Cables Handy

November 23, 2007

A mantra that we like to repeat often is this: 90% of all problems are cable problems. A bad cable can destroy your production. From pops in the interview, to a flickering client monitor, a bad cable can do all sorts of damage.

Cables are cheap, re-shoots are not. To avoid expensive problems keep two sets of audio, video, and FireWire cables with your camera bag. And when a cable goes bad, toss it and replace it.

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