Angie Taylor: NAB 2011 Report

Angie Taylor
Angie provides bespoke training and consultancy in Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro. She also provides training for Apple’s Final Cut Pro, Motion and Soundtrack Pro.

Well, here I am, back in the UK after an exhausting trip to Las Vegas to attend NAB 2011. I was speaking at the Post Production World Conference which I’m pleased to say was busier than ever. My sessions were very well attended and I met some great new people who gave me the most generous feedback, thanks to all of you! Keep an eye on this space for a recorded version of one of my sessions, coming soon!

I also got to catch up with lots of old friends and colleagues at the Media Motion Ball and the Adobe party. I’ve made many life-long friends through this industry and it’s great to see them all in one place, although it could be a bit overwhelming for me at times-all that love and talent in one room!

So, what did I see at the show that impressed me? Well, top of my list has to be the new version of After Effects CS5.5 and companion products in the Production Premium CS5.5 suite. The new Production Premium suite delivers improved performance, workflow improvements and new powerful audio editing capabilities via Audition which I’m happy to say is finally back on the Mac!

The powerful Mercury Playback Engine has better GPU hardware support for laptops and more graphics cards are now supported. All this makes the Production Premium more compelling than ever as a comprehensive studio containing everything needed from creating your source material and storyboards to transcoding and delivering your final product in multiple formats.

After Effects in particular is very exciting for me as it is my every-day application. The flag-ship feature is the is the ‘Warp Stabilizer’. Mainly aimed at folks shooting on DSLR and other hand held cameras, it tracks, stabilizes and scales your footage automatically. It also compensates for rolling shutter artefacts and can ‘heal’ the edges of the stabilized shot to minimize scaling. read more...