Some Comp Sci nerds from Adobe and the University of Wisconsin have developed high-powered techniques for making your motion-sickness-inducing handheld camera footage look like it’s been shot with a Steadicam. I have no idea what they’re talking about, but the results speak for themselves.
Via John Nack on Adobe.
An endearingly simple animated spot for World Wildlife Fund. The illustrations remind me of LocoRoco.
Some very handy hints on creating a tutorial screencast over at AETuts.
Codec? What the hell kind of word is codec?
Well, it’s a contraction of the words “Compression” and “Decompression” (in much the same way modem is a conjunction of “Modulator” and “Demodulator”, but that’s another long, boring story). When you watch a video on your computer, a codec is being used to play it back.
ProRes is the name of a nifty codec Apple came up with – it squishes the file size, but keeps the visual quality more or less intact. It comes with Apple’s pro software tools, but if you’re a puny amateur wanting to play back a movie that uses a ProRes codec, you’re out of luck. Until now*. Thanks to the wittily named “Apple ProRes QuickTime Decoder 1.0”, anyone can enjoy the soothing effect of many, many images displayed in rapid succession.
* Actually until last August, which was when Apple published this plugin.
