Adobe After Effects Professional 6.5 Review

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(More customer reviews)If you're about to buy this product. I'm about to, do you the biggest favor ever. I'm so glad you're reading this. What you need to do is buy the Adobe video collection, Professional Edition. Let me tell you why!
With the Adobe video collection Professional Edition. You get Adobe aftereffects professional 6.5 Adobe Premier Pro 1.5 Adobe encore DVD 1.5 Adobe audition 1.5 and Adobe Photoshop CS all for only $400 more. That is crazy go nuts!!!
Check here for video tutorials free
/www.xtreme-is-back.com/tutorials.html
You can download a 30 day free trial by going to Adobe's web site here:
/www.adobe.com/products/tryadobe/main.jsp
Have some fun and get it done

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The essential tool for motion graphics and visual effects.Adobe After Effects 6.5 software continues to set new standards in motion graphics and visual effects for film video DVD and the Web. Offering unmatched integration with Adobe Premiere Pro Adobe Encore DVD Adobe Audition Photoshop CS and Illustrator CS software After Effects gives you the speed precision and power to be visually innovative as you meet production challenges and deliver quality results. After Effects 6.5 is available in two editions: After Effects 6.5 Standard provides core 2D and 3D compositing animation and visual effects tools. After Effects 6.5 Professional includes all of the features in After Effects Standard plus motion tracking and stabilization advanced keying and warping tools more than 30 additional visual effects a particle system scripting network rendering 16-bit-per-channel color additional audio effects and more. * TOP NEW FEATURES - Advanced Clone tool Remove unwanted elements from multiple frames more accurately using theadvanced Clone tool which offers five presets and the ability tosimultaneously view the source frame as an overlay while you paint.- Disk caching Take advantage of disk caching to speed up your interactive work.- Animation Presets Save any combination of animation parameters -- includingtransformations masks Expressions effects and text -- as AnimationPresets to quickly reuse without setting keyframes.- Tighter Adobe integration Import Adobe Photoshop CS and Illustrator CS files with layers andother attributes preserved. In Windows copy and paste selected AdobePremiere Pro clips into After Effects and create motion menus andbuttons for use in Adobe Encore DVD and much more.- Color correction and grain management effects Adjust the color of footage and other elements with powerful colorcorrection tools such as Color Finesse. Use grain management tools toadd grain to make video look more like film or remove grain to givefilm the lo...

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Adobe After Effects Professional 7.0 Review

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(More customer reviews)Adobe After Effects 7 is the program to have if you want to create effects for film and video. In short, this program is amazing.
As the manager of the Seattle Flash User group, several times people have asked me what is "After Effects?" My response is: any of the effects in animation that you generally see in commercials, movie intros, or a Ken Burns special; chances are it was done in After Effects.
Now speaking from a Flash Designer perspective this is really exciting because with Flash 8 you can now effortlessly import video to your animations. This means blue screen effects, special effects, and text animations all done in After Effects. After Effects then easily exports .swf, .fla and all the major video and audio formats.
Adobe After Effects has a lot of canned text effects and they make it very simple to import them as a .swf file. Just keep the stage and frame rate the same as your Flash settings and amazing text animations are done in minutes.
I mentioned the blue screen effect. You can now place a live actor in front of a cartoon background just like Disney did in his Alice cartoons. This is possible because you can export them with the alpha channel.
A major difference between version 6.5 and 7 is in the interface itself. This is always a touchy area to change with veteran users of the program, but this time it makes sense. Now you have the pallet running across the top of the program like so many of the Macromedia products did. It has several preprogrammed desktop workspaces accessible from a drop down box and it is very easy to create and save your own configuration if you do not like any of the presets. Also, the whole interface scales together making it easy to drag open the one you are working in if you need more space and all the other pallets automatically adjust accordingly. This is a feature you really need to see to believe.
Ever work in a 3D program and you view your project from several angels all at once (the top, right side, left side, bottom)? Now you can do it in After Effects. A cool new feature to version 7.
What if your project has Photoshop CS2 images and you realize you want to make a change. No problem. You can now open Photoshop CS2 within After Effects. Open your .psd, make your changes, save it and your back to After Effects. It also features enhanced integration with Premier Pro 2.
After Effects is a very advance program with a steep learning curve, but Adobe does make is easy to jump right in and with a little knowledge you will be producing some impressive work.
Keith Johnson
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Adobe After Effects 7.0 Professional can be registered and upgraded. This is the full retail version not an Upgrade, Educational, NFR, or OEM version.
Adobe After Effects 7.0 is the industry standard for motion graphics and effects. You can animate your ideas and create compelling motion graphics and blockbuster visual effects with efficiency, precision, and infinite variety. Take advantage of unmatched integration with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator software. Adobe After Effects 7.0 Pro gives you flexible 2D and 3D compositing, and hundreds of effects and Animation Presets to bring a new dimension to your film, video, DVD, and web productions. Part Number 22070216.

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Photostage Review

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(More customer reviews)Not worth paying for. The program is easy enough to use, but there is nothing special about it. Use the Windows Movie Maker that comes with your computer.

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Adobe Premiere 6.5 Review

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(More customer reviews)Most people reviewing this product are reviewing it from an expert's viewpoint. I will review this product from someone with a little digital editing experience on lesser featured products, however a "newbie" to Adobe Premiere 6.5
First of all, this program is quite complex, and it is not intuitively obvious how to use this product or how to find a productive workflow. I tried using the supplied 6.0 userguide however I got frustrated pretty quickly.
I also ordered a SAMS Teach Yourself book for 6.5, and again became frustrated. It was obvious to me that the "drag and drop" interface can hardly be described by a book.
Luckily the product came with a video DVD called "Introduction to Adobe Premiere 6.5" by Total Training. I watched this video for an hour or two and shadowed some of the instruction on my own footage. I was able to produce a passable editing job on a five minute production after two hours (excluding time to capture footage), interleaving watching the Total Training video and trying some of the moves shown on the video on my own footage.
I bought the follow-up 16 hours of Total Training instruction for another $131 (including postage). If I get through this video instruction, I will have a pretty good handle on the product, but by no means an expert.
Premiere 6.5 is chock full of features, which means there's still plenty to learn six months or a year down the road. What is a little disconcerting about this product is all the "new features" that came with 6.5, however some of these features have already been available for some time in much cheaper software packages.
For example, I did not buy the bundle including DVDit, and Premiere 6.5 itself can't burn to DVD without having DVDit installed. Instead, I create the MPEG video and audio files using Premiere, then import files into a much cheaper video editing package that came with my DVD burner to complete the DVD burn. Hmmm. And now I'm supposed to fork out $300 for DVDit on top of paying for Premiere - I don't think so.
The bottom line is you can produce fairly professional results with Premiere 6.5. The big question is do you want to invest the 20 hours effort to learn the not so intuitive interface and working methods?
Well, I bought Premiere 6.5 with a firewire card for $200 so I'd say it's well worth it. And if another $130 worth of video training by Total Training and 20 hours effort to get me up to reasonable speed on most of the features I would ever use in Premiere, then $330 for software and training is a pretty good deal.
By the way, Adobe customer service seems to be pretty good. You can call them for up to 30 days after buying the product. After that, you have to pay for support. I never did like this pay for support idea, since basically your paying them because their manuals aren't so good or their software is not easy to use. And sometimes your paying them to report a bug in their software.

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Adobe Premiere 6.5 can be registered and upgraded. This is the full retail version not an Upgrade, Educational, NFR, or OEM version.
Adobe Premiere 6.5 is the essential tool for professional digital video editing.You get top-quality hardware support with this most adaptable DV-editing tool available. Take advantage of the new Adobe Title Designer, DVD authoring, MPEG-2 export, powerful audio tools, and much more to create remarkable video productions. Make your work more productive with real-time editing capabilities. Whether you want to work with multiple layers of analog footage on a professional, hardware-based system, or edit digital video on your laptop, Adobe Premiere is the best choice for video editing. Included in a 1 hour total training CD. Part Number 25500410.

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Nova PhotoImpact Pro 8.5 Review

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(More customer reviews)You might call me a collector of photo editing software. I seem to buy just about everything that becomes available; this area is kind of a hobby of mine.
I bought a copy of PhotoImpact Pro, having not heard all that much about it, and I was really surprised. I didn't expect the software to be so incredibly full-featured, but it puts even full-blown Photoshop to shame in many areas.
This program is brilliant when it comes to fixing and enhancing digital photos. But it's power-packed in so many ways. It's a veritable candy jar of special effects. I've been using it for two months and find cool new features hiding below the surface just about every time I run it. And it's every bit as phenomenal when it comes to creating original works from scratch as it is for editing existing photographs.
Slender Fungus (proof that all the good names are taken :-) is absolutely correct in the preceding review: You can't go wrong with this software.

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PhotoImpact Pro 8.5 is your complete set of easy-to-use tool for great Web graphics! It meets the needs of digital camera users and digital image enthusiasts, for enhancing & sharing photos.

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Video Pro X2 Review

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(More customer reviews)We have been in the digital conversion/production business for as long as it's been in existence.
We have tried a lot of PC based editing software: Sony Vegas/Architect, Nero, Ulead, Roxio etc... and NOTHING compares to the ease of use that Magix Video Pro X 2 offers. YOU DON'T NEED TO BE A PROFESSIONAL to use this, you don't need classes or even manuals.
The all-in-one package of designing and producing videos WITH DVD authoring sets this software in a league of its' own. Custom menus with professional animated buttons are extremely easy to design and work flawlessly.
Like any new software it takes a little patience to figure out the navigation structure and how to get different effects to work properly but once you get the hang of it the results are amazing.
(For our purposes we have noticed in newer versions the titles are getting crisper and the AVi streaming is better, these are the only weaknesses we can see in VPX 2.)
We have used this software to create many Youtube clips in HD we just export to a .wmv file then upload.
We did this clip using Video Pro X 2 (We could have used more color saturation)
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