HD Video & Cool Vibes

Some of you may have noticed that my two latest YouTube videos are in HD. I do plan on continuing to upload HD videos on videos less than 10 minutes long, which I plan on doing more of and interspersing the longer project type tutorials at a rate more like two or three a month…ish. I am still working out some of the kinks having to do with the HD, but I have received a few requests for my settings and/or how I “do” HD.

I record my videos to AVI format and use Quicktime PRO to export them as .mov files which I upload both to YouTube and my site. This is as simple as going File>Export in Quicktime PRO. Once you are in the export window check out my combo-screenshot of the settings I use right here.

While we are on about HD do be sure to check out the newest Tutvid video on Soft Focus Wedding Style Vignette Image Effect right here

I also just finished up a few minor changes to the website here is a brief list:

CS4 Logos now on tutorials page and at the base of the site.

Blog displays full post on homepage.

Blog has a subtle background and border.

There is now one Dreamweaver video for sale (check out the buy video page).

Last but not least I just recently stumbled upon an old web design buddy of mine who I have not talked to in quite some time and incidentally he also creates tutorials (and has for quite some time now) and his site has a bunch of great Web/Photoshop tutorials. Check out PSDvibe.com

That’s it for now guys, Have a great New Year!

Holiday Season (almost) Over! BannerSnack is here!

Hey guys, boy am I glad we are beyond the 25th! The holiday season can be quite stressful, but it is nearly over and that feels great! Happy New Years to everybody by the way, hope you turn over some kind of new leaf and make some kind of cool or great (permanent this time!) change for yourself.

Well I just finished up creating a few training videos for the folks over at jumpeyecomponents, some of you may have seen the few flashEff tutorials I have up on YouTube, and they just finished cooking up a brand new web application called BannerSnack. You can check it out here!

Basically it is an application for creating sweet banners and eCards etc.. online and then publishing them to any number of social networking sites as well as bookmarking them, or even

just sending it to a friend via email right from within the BannerSnack interface.

It is totally free so no need to be worried about get hit with fees here and there. It is also super easy to learn how to get started and make your very own banners, matter of fact Yours truly has done the training video for them so be sure to check them out as well if you are interested in the application.

Have a good one everybody!

Yikes!

Hey guys, it has certainly been far too long between blog posts here and almost a week and a half between tutorials, but don’t worry! I have quite a line-up of material coming and not only that, but I am also making a conscious effort to keep the length of the tutorials down and from here on out anything under 10 minutes I am going to use YouTube’s new HD video option. I may even make a tutorial on my Quicktime settings for getting this quality. Hopefully I will also get more of the “small tip” type tutorials out, stuff you don’t have to sit down for 30 minutes plus to learn and create something.

As always if you guys have any great ideas for seemingly “quick” tutorials you would like to see, or would like to see me do, either leave a comment or drop me an email. You can never have too many ideas!

Earlier today I was flipping through the latest edition of Layers magazine (great publication by the way, those guys do a phenomenal job all around, check them out here: http://www.layersmagazine.com/) and I glanced at the gallery they include in each edition and a photograph caught my eye. This photograph was created by a fellow by the name of Jim Crotty I checked out his website which is www.jimcrotty.com and there is really some nice stuff over there!

I absolutely loved the black and white photography, some really nice work he has over there. In the Layers Magazine I also saw a tutorial by Dave Cross on creating water droplets in Photoshop, the technique is pretty similar to some others I have seen, but the real reason I am mentioning Dave Cross is because of his blog (…subtle segue…no?). The other day he posted an entry and mentioning that the graphics card creator NVidia was hosting a contest and giving away a free graphics card!

I went over to NVidia’s site and found the actual page with the contest info: http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_pixelbender_contest.html

If you do not have Adobe’s Pixel Bender, you can download it from Adobe Labs here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/pixelbender/

Lastly I also stumbled across a blog which has some interesting information for web developers in particular; although it has not been updated in a little while there is still a bunch of great info on this site! Check out Pete Freitag’s blog: http://www.petefreitag.com/ some really useful tidbits and info there for sure.

I have a few Photoshop and an Illustrator tutorial coming up within the next few days! Stay tuned….

Video Problems, More Tutorials, Dedicated Hosting, and Free Plug-ins!

Here we are about half way through the oh-so cold month of December and nothing warms you up better than checking out some great new tutorial sites and finding-on top of some great tutorials-other great stuff such as free plug-ins.

Let me get to the news first and we will talk goodies later. I don’t know how many of you have been experiencing problems with the videos on the site, but I have received numerous emails about jerkiness and failure of loading. The reason appears to be the hosting plan I have, I cannot however complain as I am using almost 1 Terabyte (about 950GB) of bandwidth monthly and this is on a so called “unlimited’ bandwidth plan, I am sure some of you have heard of the fact that there is really no such thing a “unlimited” bandwidth which is absolutely true and the overload that the site is putting on this particular server appears to be causing issues.

I am in the process of getting a dedicated server setup which should both allow the site and the videos to load each and every time as well as load a little faster. If everything goes well there may be a short down-time stint at some point, but the site will be back ASAP.

I also have two great tutorials coming this weekend, all I can say right now is one is for Illustrator CS4 and one for Photoshop CS4, I also hope to get a few new feature type tutorials up at some point soon.

While there is a lot going on I am also considering transcribing the majority of my tutorials with screenshots and creating text tutorials to accompany the videos. You could view the text if you prefer or use it as a quick refreshment course. Let me know what you guys think about this plan and maybe something good can come of it.

On to a couple tutorials some of you may be interested in. I actually ran into these completely accidentally, but they look quite nice and may be of interest to some of you, check them out below.

Creating a Magical Rainbow Flame in Photoshop:

http://veerle.duoh.com/blog/comments/create_a_magical_rainbow_color_flame_in_photoshop/

I really liked this one, 3D Pixel Stretch Effect:

http://www.tutorial9.net/photoshop/3d-pixel-stretch-effects/

I also stumbled upon this great post on PhotoshopRoadMap and it is quite interesting, especially if you enjoy plug-ins, more specifically free ones, check this out!

http://www.photoshoproadmap.com/Photoshop-blog/2008/12/04/15-fantastic-and-absolutely-free-photoshop-plugins/

Leave me a comment or drop me a line and let me know if there is anything you would like to see in the site, or any ideas you have that would make it better and I will certainly consider any ideas. I have received quite a few and am working on implementing new stuff into the site, but anything you have may or could be helpful. Thanks guys!

Lens Reviews, Actionscripting, and Color Pickers!

Well in this upcoming week I have a nice pair of Flash tutorials to get us through the weekend and hopefully next week some more Flash and an Illustrator tutorial, but after that things look quite bleak…no, no I am kidding. I actually have about 250 tutorials in a list on my desktop as I write and hopefully every last one of them will become a reality and I also already know some will need to be updated so that will be quite the task, but boy it will be great when you will be able to find a tutorial on anything, well virtually anything, on Tutvid? Personally I can’t wait because I sometimes forget how to do things I had made tutorials on! Anyway throughout the week a few things came up and there are a couple sites and little news I would like to share with everybody.

Picking color in Photoshop CS4 has gotten a little bit easier with this new color picker available over at John Nack of Adobe’s blog check it out! http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/12/photoshop_gets_1.html

Also in that post you can check out said, new color picker, download it for free, and view the installation instructions. It is now a little easier to fine tune some color picking especially when doing just about anything involving painting. All things considered it is pretty nice, a few things I would like to see changed, but having a bigger panel floating there for you to sample from is really easy to get used to.

Some of you know that I am a Canon shooter and for those of you that are Canon shooters as well you may well benefit from this next site. Essentially the guy running the site reviews and displays lots of info on a ton of Canon bodies, lenses, tripods, filters, accessories, and more! There are also some useful resources on the site.

Check it all out here: http://www.the-digital-picture.com/

A very common question I receive and answer on a regular basis has to do with learning actionscript 3.0 and readjusting oneself to the slightly different language. My answer more often than not is a recommendation I have for the book that sealed my move from 2.0 to 3.0. Rich Shupe and Zevan Rosser wrote a book called “Learning Actionscript 3.0” which is not advanced in anyway shape or form and is quite down-to-earth and easy to understand, I still find myself pulling it down from time to time to check on a thing or two! Check out the accompanying website and if you like it purchase the book! You will not be disappointed!

Check it out here: http://www.learningactionscript3.com/

Last up this time around is actually a bonus. I just finished up writing to a very kind lady named Melissa. In passing conversation see passed me her website link and I checked out some of her photography and it is quite nice! Check out her work and maybe buy a thing or two from her site which is located here: http://www.photographybymelissab.com/ While you are over there look for a photo called “Swan Grace” a very nice photo.

New slate of tutorials! Coming up!

With the past holiday week here in my neck of the woods things have been a little crazy, but I have been doing a lot of work behind the scenes and am happy to (Finally!) announce that I have 4 tutorials coming and by the weeks end they should be live and good to go.

I have been playing with CS4 for the past few weeks but still want to get a few more CS3 tutorials out which is why at least this week’s tutorials will be all CS3. CS4 is coming soon…I promise.

Here is a short list of the upcoming tutorials:

Flash CS3 Actionscript 3.0 Preloader: A great little preloader, super simple to create, minimal coding required and really easy to edit and customize the graphic that actually shows the loading progress. As always there will be the percentage loaded text and a little additional text field(s) that show the amount loaded compared to the amount that needs to be loaded.

Photoshop CS3 (Extended) Photo Wipe-Transition: I recently got an email from somebody who pointed out that I have nothing on animating in Photoshop CS3. I also know that CS3 has the new timeline animation which can be tricky considering the older frame-by-frame animation method. In this video we will figure all that out and make a very nice wipe transition which can then be exported from Photoshop.

Photoshop CS3 Using Actions to place Frames and Captions on Images: This is all about saving time using actions to do the little things, throw that finishing touch on your images. Basically we trim out our images with a nice black frame and apply a caption which can be customized as the action is applied. Pretty cool technique and maybe you pick a few neat tips and tricks from this one.

Dreamweaver CS3 Creating a Basic Fully CSS Web Layout: Yep it’s about time I do this. You and I both start with a zipped folder of a few images and from that we construct a nice light-weight web layout that auto expands and contracts depending on the amount of content. Learn all about Divs, CSS Rules, and all sorts of CSS jargon you have always wondered about! This is going to be great.

There may be some other assorted stuff maybe an extra video that goes up this weekend as well. Guess we just have to wait and see.

So those of you who enjoy working in flash probably often have moments of trouble when you just don’t get what the error is or how you would go about fixing something. This run-time error list Adobe provides is a great help and many times cure to your frustration when getting strange and confusing errors. Check it out here: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/201/langref/runtimeErrors.html