EL iMac is Established

The joy of receiving a new iMac is tempered by getting it up to speed. On the upside, no surprises on the machines performance. On the downside, finding serial numbers long ago forgotten. Video will be up quite soon once I can begin capturing again.

I attempted to shoot the PR Vegan first episode with worm compositing. It didn't go so well.

I've come to accept I hate compositing as an action. Worms are great. The other bugs they attract aren't. I'll have to shoot something else, like actually cooking something. The prior attempt ended with sludge. Could be compost or decomposition. Pretty nasty. It's muddy, not like "hummus".

More soon.

9.23.08 Enough is Enough

Adobe has announced the feature set of After Effects CS4.

Though it releases in November 2008, I’m not saving up or holding my breath. Here’s why:

Every new piece of software has glitches. You can jump in and go through the hours of troubleshooting to rule yourself out of the equation, and it might be an install glitch, user preferences that need trashing, or a bug. It’s one thing to be the beta tester. It’s another to work with a release that was not vigorously beta tested. Though I understand the software developers need to know if all the effort is worth it, I don’t care. I want software to work as advertised. Frankly, you can take dvGarage to task for releasing Conduit as they did. Kind of sucks to wait 6 months to get to use features they advertised on day one.

Still, I love the idea of Conduit. I just hate the wasted time discovering it was a waste of time.

So for all the fanfare of AE CS4, I’m not wowed.

I’ve finally learned the golden rule: the worse time to upgrade is during production. You want to take your toolsets for granted. An upgrade can introduce conflicts or glitches, all which take away from the main mission of completing your project (not being the editor with the latest and greatest).

As for the new plug-ins- so what? After Effects was great at AE7. CS3 is solid... and CS4? I guess if you absolutely have to. But there’s been ways of doing things with all prior versions of AE.

I dislike that CS4 is strictly intel only. No G5 support like AE7 and CS3.

It’s nice to know there’s a new AE coming out. And it’s nice to know there’s nothing I need of it. Despite all these crazy cameras being announced, the HV20 is solid.
Final Cut Studio 2 is solid. Motion 3 is solid. DVDSP could use a blu-ray authoring feature, but whatever.
AECS3 is solid. It’s enough.

Sometimes you need to accept enough is enough.