Latest Posts in Creative Notes

Siggraph: Rounding up the 3-D news

Every year, the top high-end 3-D companies in the world converge on Los Angeles, Calif. to attend the Siggraph tradeshow. This year’s show produced some interesting items for the industry.

E-on Software Previews Vue 7

E-on Software used Siggraph to show off some new features of Vue, the company’s product for creating natural 3-D environments. E-on showed Vue 7 xStream and Vue 7 Infinite, which is scheduled for release later this year.

The company’s flagship product, Vue 7 xStream’s tools are now fully integrated in the host application, providing direct access to the most advanced 3-D environment creation technologies, including EcoSystem Painting.

New features for Vue include the third generation of e-on’s EcoSystem had a very busy show, showing off two new versions of its products. LightWorks Studio Edition (SE) “is a new approach to integrated rendering.   It draws on a wealth of rendering development and implementation

Resolving preamp problems

The last time we checked in on my album-recording project, I had run into a recording roadblock—specifically, we ran out of mic preamps for recording. That problem is a thing of the past now, so I'm back to recording songs for the album.

Much of the credit for coming up with a solution goes to you, the readers, who came up with many great suggestions for fixing the problem. That's exactly the type of feedback I was looking for when I started this project—musicians and engineers helping out to make better music.

One other thing to clear up from the last article: I'm afraid I gave the impression that I dislike the Digidesign 003 Factory. I don't; in fact, I think it’s a great piece of gear for the home studio. I was definitely frustrated with my preamp dilemma, but some readers seemed concerned that I hated this particular piece of equipment. Rest assured that’s not the case.

New life for old Macs

For its fiscal third-quarter, Apple sold a record number of Macs, the fourth time in five quarters that it had broken its own sales mark. While the company doesn’t break down those sales between new and existing customers, it’s not too big of an assumption to say that some of that new hardware is being snapped up by people ditching their PowerPC-based Macs for newer, more powerful models with Intel-built chips. And within that group, it’s likely that a fair chunk of these Mac buyers are creative pros moved to upgrade now that their favorite applications run natively on Intel-based machines.

So let’s say you’re among the multitude who have bought that shiny new iMac or Mac Pro in recent months. Now what do you with that old G4 or G5 Mac? You could donate, recycle, or sell it, of course, though that last option is unlikely to fetch you a tidy sum in return.

But instead of retiring that old Mac, why not try to squeeze a few more years of service out of it? Macworld has covered this subject before—here are links to the 2007 and 2005 collections of new tricks for old Macs—but I’ve put together a list of things that creative professional can do with their old machines. In some cases, you’ll have to spend some extra money for a new display, and you’ll have to make room somewhere in the home or office for your extra Mac. But in my opinion, it’s worth the effort or few extra bucks.

First Look: Photoshop Lightroom 2

Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 has been out for less then a day, and I’ve already heard from a number of people asking about the new version released Tuesday. A few current users have asked if it’s worth the $99 upgrade from Lightroom 1.0 (). Others who have been on the fence about investing in a $299 photo workflow tool have asked about what Adobe did that make Lightroom 2.0 an improvement over the initial release. (I’ve also gotten a couple of the inevitable, “Which do I choose: Aperture or Lightroom?” questions, to which I say, download the 30-day demos and see which one feels right to you.)

I’m currently working on Macworld’s review of Lightroom 2.0, but here’s a quick summary of five key enhancements that I think make it a compelling upgrade.

Selective editing

One of the problems with the first version of Lightroom was its lack of selection-based adjustments. Any changes you made to a photo were applied to the entire image. For many photos, this wasn’t a problem—changing the exposure, color balance, or other tonal setting throughout an image made sense. But, if you had an image that had a perfectly exposed sky and an underexposed foreground, for example, you couldn’t selectively change the foreground without making the sky look bad.

Teaching audio engineering while on the road with Ozzy

Greg Price doesn’t mince words when it comes to giving career advice to aspiring audio engineers who want to rise to the top of their field.

“There are two prerequisites to becoming a great audio engineer,” said Price. “First, you have to play an instrument and second, you have to use a Mac.”

Too many mics, not enough preamps

I knew my ongoing project to record my first album would hit its share of snags along the way—it’s inevitable in a project like this. Still, that doesn’t stop me from feeling frustrated now that I’m smack dab in the middle of such a snag—especially since the problem cropped up when the whole band was gathered together for a rehearsal.

Put simply, we ran out of mic preamps for recording.

Here’s the background: When our band records the final copy of a song, we do it in isolation—meaning that we record with headphones in separate spaces or sometimes to a music rhythm bed (previously recorded tracks). This worked out pretty well for the four of us in the band, but the songs weren’t yet tight enough to hand over to the guy who’s going to mix the songs for a finished version. So we decided to get everyone together and do some live recording off the floor to get a better feel for what we were trying to capture in the song. While we are still recording what we are playing, the pressure of getting everything right the first time would be lifted. And that might give us some more inspiration for the song, too—an added bonus.

Acrobat finds a new home on the Web

Remember when hardly a week went by in the early months of 2008 without some sort of Apple product announcement? The past few weeks, Adobe has been doing its best Apple imitation, with a slew of product news aimed at creative professionals.

Following last week’s debut of a trio of public betas for the CS4 versions of Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Soundbooth, Adobe kicked off this week by introducing Acrobat 9 Pro. The new version of the PDF creation and editing tool should arrive in July, and Adobe has said that it will integrate Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro into Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium and Standard editions, Creative Suite 3.3 Web Premium and Creative Suite 3.3 Master Collection editions. CS3 owners can upgrade for $159. Pricing for full versions, as well as a host of optional upgrade paths can be found at the Creative Suite page on Adobe’s Web site.

Macworld has already carried profiles of Acrobat 9 and Acrobat.com this week. But I thought it would be a good idea to look at Monday’s announcements from a creative pro perspective.

Recording acoustic, electric guitar into your Mac

I am constantly confronted with choices as I continue on my journey of recording my first music album. For a guitar player one of those choices is the tone you want for a song, or even a particular part of a song.

I mentioned early on in this process that the music I write is blues-based hard rock, but that doesn’t mean all of the songs have to be fast. In fact, I’ve written a couple of acoustic songs, one of which, “You Only Get What You Give” will definitely be on the finished album.

With so many options available to me to shape the tone of my Taylor GS acoustic, I actually stopped recording for a while so I could play with all of the effects at my disposal. This meant running the guitar through all of my software applications to see if there was anything I wanted to add to the acoustic tone.

First Look: Epson Stylus Photo R2880 printer

This article is reprinted from Printerville, a Web site that provides information about photo printers and papers.

Epson on Tuesday announced the Stylus Photo R2880, the long-awaited replacement to the Stylus Photo R2400. The $800 printer, slated to ship in June, is a B-size (13-inch) inkjet that uses pigment-based inks, including two light-density black inks designed to produce optimal black-and-white prints on all types of media. And, while the R2880’s pedigree shows a clear link to the R2400, the new model takes advantage of Epson’s recent technology advancements from both the higher-end Stylus Professional printer line and the recently released Stylus Photo R1900.

Here are some of the Stylus Photo R2880’s key features:

Setting up Pro Tools recording gear

There comes a time in any music project when you have to make a decision on what gear you are going to use and go with it. I’ve reached that stage in my album-recording project—when it comes to a digital audio workstation, I’ll be using Digidesign’s Pro Tools for my final recordings.

Pro Tools is the industry standard in audio recording, so it made a lot of sense for me to work with it. Over the years, my coverage of music software has given me the chance to talk to some of the industry’s top audio engineers about how they go about their business; more times than not, they are using Pro Tools.

I’m using the Digidesign 003 Factory and Pro Tools LE 7.4. The 003 Factory is more than just an audio interface to route your instruments to the Mac—it allows you to completely control Pro Tools without touching the computer’s keyboard or mouse.