Topscan

Macromedia this week delivered Studio 8, basically an upgrade to Flash and Dreamweaver. Macromedia offered a pre-sale for this upgrade and anyone who pre-ordered the Studio 8 also got a Studio 8 backpack. I pre-ordered the software mainly because the Macromedia suite of apps are crucial to my business. There is rarely a day that goes by when I don’t use Flash or Dreamweaver, so for me this was a given that I’d upgrade, and for a free backpack - why not?

Funny thing is, it’s a nice backpack! It’s perfect for the mobile computer user. It has a padded spot for a laptop, it has side pocket for an iPod and a cell phone. It has a spot in the back for CD’s and even a Palm Pilot or Pocket PC. Now I can go mobile and look like a geeky dork like all the rest of the backpack wearing fools!

Back to Suite 8. As I stated, it came with an upgrade to Flash and Dreamweaver. My previous version of Flash was Flash MX 2004, and I don’t believe it was the “Professional” version. The new Flash is the “Professional” version. It includes a nifty additional app called the Flash 8 Video Encoder. Now it is so much easier to add video to Flash projects. Very exciting. It’s also nice to see them dropping the MX + year, and go back to straight version #’s. Did the addition of MX increase sales?

I haven’t had much time to play with the new features, and there are some fun ones! But I am very happy with the subtle enhancements they made. The Mac version of Flash never had the ability to open multiple documents into one tabbed window. If you wanted to open more than one Flash doc, it opened in a separate window, and you had to keep going to the Window menu to select the document you wanted to edit. Not horrible, but the new tabbed appearance makes it so much easier to work with a number of documents. The biggest annoyance in the old Flash was that the Library palette would never remember its placement. Every doc I opened in Flash always reset the Library position to the exact center of the monitor. I’ve tried everything to fix that. The new Flash has fixed that and now the Library palette behaves! Wee!

As for the Dreamweaver updates, I’ll have to get back to you on that. I’m currently swamped with so much Flash work that I have only opened DW a few times for basic HTML edits. I will say that the interface looks much much friendlier. I’ll cover more on this as I explore it.
The Studio 8 upgrade came with a couple other applications too:
Contribute 3 - don’t know if I’ll ever use it…
Fireworks 8 - looks promising…
And…

Exploring Studio 8 Documentation. I need to make time to go through this to see how to best use the new features. Weeeee indeed.

The real question I’ll have to answer later - was it worth $399 for the upgrade?

Article from dizzyblog.com

When I started out in the visual arts, my passion was for comics. At first I was hooked on comic books. Then I really got hooked on comic strips, enough so that I wanted to be a comic strip artist for a career. I went on to become a strip cartoonist (seriously, thats what they call em!) for my college newspaper for 3 years. Sadly, I’ve never really gotten back in that field since I got into computers and the web.

My favorite comic books were the alternative comic books. I never really liked the basics - Superman, Spiderman, Fantastic 4. I did like Batman, and I did like Daredevil. My absolute favorites were the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (don’t laugh, the first 8 issues were great!). I even had a copy of TMNT #1 which went for about $150 on the 2nd market. I also loved Matt Wagner‘s Grendel. There was something totally unusual but exciting at reading about the anti-hero Grendel. It was the first time in my life where I rooted for the bad guy, if Grendel can be easily classified as a “bad guy”. My all time favorite, though, has to be Dave Sim’s Cerebus.

Cerebus and Dave Sim amazed me. Here was a guy who dedicated his life really to self publishing his creation. Not only self publishing, but he committed to a 300 issue story. The comic book followed the life of this character, Cerebus, on his journeys through life. It started out as a simple adventure comic, initially inspired buy Conan. It traveled throughout the land of Iest, with Dave and Cerebus giving his comments on Politics, Religion, Feminism, Love, and Art, among many others. As silly as it may sounds, Dave Sim created a world that is on parallel with Lord of the Rings. While more timely humor and social commentary was injected into Cerebus, the history, the myth, and the religions he created had just about as much depth.

On average Dave Sim published 10 books a year, meaning that this was easily a 30 year effort. He created the story/characters/setting, he drew the book, inked it (he later joined with an extremely talented inker (Gerhard)), and self published it. Dave just recently finished the 300th issue of Cerebus, and I hope he celebrated in a huge way. What an accomplishment!

One thing I noticed abut all the comic books I loved was that they were all illustrated in Black & White. Even the comic strips I loved were in black and white (makes sense seeing as they were in newspapers daily…) While growing up, Calvin & Hobbes was my addiction. Reading more about Bill Watterson and his creation led me to investigate the comics that inspired him. That led me to a love of Pogo, and Krazy Kat. After seeing those works of art I was stunned. That’s what led me to focus, during my college years, on strip cartooning. Looking back now I see that my attempts were basically poorly done imitations. I wasn’t great, but I wasn’t bad either. One of my strips won a journalism award!

I should have stayed with comics, but I know it would have left me sad. The reason I stopped pursuing comic strips was that I saw the market for comic strips dwindling. Newspapers were shrinking the sizes of their strips, and the strips that the newspapers did carry weren’t generally funny. Most of them were just plays on words. Not much depth. Of course Bloom County gave me a glimmer of hope, and introduced me to political satire, but that wasn’t what I aiming for. So, I put down my sketchpad and got into Visual Communications at an art school. This led me to interactivity and designing websites and other interactive projects, which I totally love. So really, I did find my home with multimedia, and I don’t regret choosing that over comics.

And now, I’m finding a resurgence of comics. Back in the day to make any sort of living off of comic strips, you had to get syndicated. The Syndicates would then sell your strips to newspapers around the country/world. But the Syndicates would only sell your strip if they thought it was marketable. So if the Syndicates didn’t like your work, you basically had little other options. And like every other creative endeavor, the internet has allowed the artist to bypass the middleman and deliver straight to the audience. Web comics have exploded! It’s never been easier to make a strip and self publish. No longer would a Dave Sim goal seem nearly impossible! Viva the ‘net!

And now that comics on the web are so popular, I want to get back into it. I’m in the beginning stages of creating a story specifically for web comicdom. And I’m quite excited. If you haven’t really explored some of the comics that are out there on the net, here is a list of some of my favorites:

Calvin & Hobbes
Dilbert
For Better or For Worse
FoxTrot
Get Fuzzy
Little Gamers
Penny Arcade
Player vs. Player
Rose is Rose
Wulfmorgenthaler’s Daily

And my new fave:
ScaryGoRound

Enjoy ‘em, and if you have some faves, post ‘em here so we can all find and promote some new talent!

Article from dizzyblog.com

I got a new Digital Camera and boy oh boy am I happy with it. I decided to go all out (as much as I could) and get the Canon 5D. This camera is pretty fricken sweet. It’s also pretty fricken heavy. It’s a full frame sensor 12.8 mega pixel camera. The shots taken with it measure 4,372 pixels wide x 2906 pixels high. When resized to 300DPI, the final image size is 14.5 x 9.6 inches. If I resize to 200DPI, the image size is 21.8 x 14.5 inches. Quite nice!!

I’ve also invested in some new lenses that, when paired with the 5D, really make for some great pics. Overall I am quite *quite* impressed. The only drawback is that the 5D does not have a built in flash. This really isn’t a problem because my old standby, the Canon Digital Rebel, had a built in flash, but I was never happy with the results.

So, I decided to do a comparison with this new Digital camera verses my Bronica slide film camera. I took a day with a friend of mine and we went down to a beach in Carmel, California and did an afternoon shoot. My friend (Kat) did the modeling while I took the pics. She did a great job, and this was my first ever “model” shoot - I’m usually shooting places, or city scenes, so this was a great day for trying new things! I started shooting with the 5D to get Kat warmed up and to get a feel for what I was going for. After about 30 minutes with the 5D, I switched to the film camera. I ended up shooting about 3 rolls (3 x 15 shots) 45 shots total for film. Then I ended the day with the 5D again. This time I switched the mode to the fastest shooting mode there was, 3 frames a second. I just kept shooting until we ran out of time. Total shots were somewhere in the vicinity of 45 film shots and 212 digital shots.

After going through the shots and identifying which ones were “keepers” and which ones could be thrown away, I ended up with 60 “keepers” from the 212 digital’s, and 20 “keepers” out of the 45 film shots. This is a pretty interesting test really. I noticed some worthwhile findings:

For one, digital allows you to take a LOT more shots. This is both good and bad. Good in that you have a lot more shots to choose from, but bad because you have a LOT more pictures to go through.
I noticed that the percentage of “keepers” with film is nearly 50%. The number of “keepers” with digital is 35%. However, I did shoot at 3 frames per second at the end of the shoot, so out of 9 pics from that 3 second period I usually only chose 1 shot. But it is interesting that Film was at 50% and digital at 35%.

Taking those percentages into account AND the timeframe to shoot all the shots the one thing became very apparent. With film I am MUCH more deliberate about my shot. I set up the shot, check the composition, make sure that the horizon is level, check the focus, check the exposure, check the composition again, aaaaannnnd shoot. Wind the film and redo. My film camera doesn’t have an in-camera light meter. I have a hand held one I use. So, this whole process takes time. But it also ensures that I’m getting the shot I want.

With the digital, I’ll admit right up front that it gives amazing amounts of freedom. I don’t worry about running out of film, and as long as my battery is charged and my memory card has room, I’ll keep shooting. But, I shoot quick. My compositions are quick. The 5D has a pretty advanced in-camera light meter, so I don’t have to stop and meter the scene before I shoot. I just shoot, check the screen and adjust the exposure + or - from there. Having the picture show up right after shooting it, and on the huge LCD screen on the 5D, is sooooo nice! And then to add the rapid fire shooting, which I have never used before, but I have found that while shooting a model it comes in very handy. While the model is posing, sometimes the best looks aren’t the posed looks, but the right before and right after the pose.

This now brings up a big issue for me. Should I keep shooting film? Last year I went to Napa to get a bunch of shots of the grapes while they were ripe during harvest season. I brought the Canon Digital Rebel and the Bronica. I showed the results to friends and family alike and without knowing which was which, the film won. It won hands down. I did the same thing with the results from Shooting Kat in Carmel. This time it was 40-60 digital to film. Film won again. In terms of simplicity, Digital rules. no need to develop, no need to scan. Etc… Flm still seems to capture color deeper and more vivid than digital. So, as of now I’m still shooting film, but for how much longer?

The above image is a merging of a Digitally Captured Image and a Slide Film Scan. Neither of these images has been touched up except for level adjustments. Both these images were taken on the same day, however the one on the right was taken later in the day. Its not an ideal comparison.

Ideally I’d have take the exact same shot with the film camera as the digital camera. That would have made for a better comparison. Have a look at each image see if you can tell which one is from film and which one is from the digital chip. Click here for the answer.

Article from dizzyblog.com