We don’t often post this type of thing here, but you could help a young filmmaker win the contest of a lifetime… and he’s EXTREMELY talented. Evan Sussman’s film short, Escape, is a fantastic voyage into a freedom from the stresses of modern life. It is a contender for a $30,000 prize from The Doorpost Film Project. If you like the film, please vote for it!

Evan talks about how he created the film, including the special effects, working with expressions in After Effects and using Trapcode plugins. Read the full interview here

Get the full information here

Adobe recommends users of Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9 update to Adobe Reader 9.1 and Acrobat 9.1. Adobe has updates for Adobe Reader 7 & 8 as of March 18th. In addition Adobe plans to make available Adobe Reader 9.1 for Unix by March 25th.

Download Updates Here

• Adobe Reader users update to Adobe Reader 9.1
• Acrobat 9 Pro Extended users on Windows update to Acrobat 9.1
• Acrobat 9 Pro users on Macintosh update to Acrobat 9.1

Adobe categorizes this as a critical issue and recommends that users apply the update for their product installations.

LME has another great freebie for After Effects 7.0 and higher – Lights! It doesn’t require any third party plug-ins.

Download the 4 FREE Presets here

Check out the multitude of great libraries of AE presets and comps available from LME, including full sets of Light configurations and Trapcode presets. Quality, varied stuff and at a low price.

There is a known bug when exporting from Premiere Pro or After Effects involving modified bitrate values. If you modify the bitrate value of an encoding preset, the default bitrate for that preset will replace the custom bitrate you specified.

As a workaround, you can:

Manually change the bit rate of the video file you are exporting to the desired value once the file is in the Adobe Media Encoder encoding queue…

-or-

Add your video to the list of files to encode from Adobe Media Encoder itself. You can drag a file into the list, or click the Add button and select a file on your computer.

Note: To add Adobe Premiere Pro sequences or Adobe After Effects compositions to the list of files to encode, you must use the File > Add Adobe Premiere Pro sequences or File > Add Adobe After Effects Compositions menu commands. These file types cannot be dragged into the list of files to encode.

For more information see, Workflow for exporting files in the Adobe Premiere Pro help.

Personally, I’ve been having a problem exporting from Premiere Pro through the Adobe Media Encoder, period! It starts in the Media Encoder, then fails. As a workaround, I’ve had to use dynamic link and send it to After Effects, then go through and fix any transitions and titles I may have used. I still love to edit in PPRO, but I hope this issue is fixed asap. Anyone out there have a better solution for me? Thanks in advance.

I’m sure most of you are starting to feel the economic crunch, so we’ve put together a section for plug-ins that are $99 and under. These are useful plug-ins by well known plug-in developers like Red Giant, Trapcode, Digieffects, Noise Industries, Nattress and others.

Plug-ins for $99 and under

If you’d like to take the plug-in for a test drive before you buy it, most of the plug-ins are available for download on our demos/trial page: http://www.toolfarm.com/demo/demo.php

I would like to recommend anyone interested in being able to author ‘replicatable’ Blu-Ray titles to sign this petition that hopes to simplify the licensing and especially reduce the cost of AACS copy protection implementation. It’s the only way we’ll ever see Blu-Ray support ‘officially’ in Apple’s Pro Apps, or in Adobe Encore DVD.

http://www.dvda.org/petition/

I’m behind disk authoring because I’m a movie lover who eats up the hours of extras on special edition releases – the same documentaries that are glaringly missing from digital downloads.

In this episode, Aharon continues to explore how audio can be used to control time, but he expands on that by showing you how it can be used to change the look of the footage as well.

Watch | Download Project Files | Example Video

Products Used: Magic Bullet Looks, Trapcode Sound Keys

Try a free demo of Looks and Sound Keys here: Free trial of plug-ins.

Watch podcast here (pops)

If you don’t have Boris Continuum Complete, you can download a free demo here. BCC works in a whole slew of hosts, so check it out, even if you’re not a FCP user.

And if you’re loving it, buy BCC here.