If you have an image that was taken from a freeze frame from film, you might see lines going all the way across it. This is called interlacing and it is caused by the horizontal lines used to make up the images on tv.
To fix it, go into Photoshop and and select Filter > Video > De-Interlace. The deault settings are Odd Fields and Interpolation. They are generally fine.
Last thing to do if you are going back to film with it or re-importing it into Final Cut or Premier Pro etc, is go to the Image Size dialog and UN-check the constrain proportions option. Make sure the sizes suit your video output size ie 720 x 576 for DV-PAL.
To apply the same filters to a bunch of clips in Final Cut Pro (or Express), select them in the Timeline and then go to Sequence > Nest Item(s). Once they are nested you can apply your filters to the group, all in one go.
To edit the filters again, Alt + double-click them in the Timeline to load them into the Viewer.
In Final Cut, there may be times when you want to change the speed of a clip, but not it’s overall duration in the Timeline.
To do this, put your playhead over the clip and press Alt/Opt+Cmd+F. This loads a copy of the clip into the Viewer. There are no In or Out points. Next, go to the Modify > Speed menu (Cmd+J) and change your speed to say, 30%. Grab your clip and do a Replace edit.
That’s it!
Depending on your footafe, you may want to send the clip to Motion and apply Optical Blending to clean up any ghosting that you get.
After having dominated the web browser market for several years, Microsoft have finally been forced to offer their customers a choice.
A European Commission Decision has made Microsoft now offer users of the Windows operating system the ability to choose which browser they want to use. This choice will be available to anyone buying a new build of a Windows 7 PC after February 19 2010, and anyone who downloads a new Windows update.
Browser Choice Screen
The panel above opens when you (re)start your system and clicking the OK link gives you a choice of the top 5 browsers:
Browser Options
Finally, there is the possibility that more people will choose a web browser that respects their right to privacy, isn’t riddled with security flaws and displays web pages as intended…
Hopefully, this is a time for change and some of the new css 3 standards can be enjoyed by considerably more people, making the web a bit more exciting again.
A popular look in film is to add a soft glow effect. This can be done in Photoshop to give your images a stylised finish very simply and very quickly.
Here is an image with the effect applied:
Before
After
To achieve this look here are the steps:
Make a copy of your background layer. Using the keyboard shortcut of Cmd (Ctrl) + Alt + J lets you copy the layer, name it and specify the blend mode in one go. Choose Screen for the blend mode.
This will make your image look dramatically different, but the effect is too harsh and we need to add some Gaussian Blur. (Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur.) For this image, I chose a 5px blur but this will vary and depend on both the image and image size.
Lower the layer opacity to around 50%.
Select your background layer again and create a second copy using the Overlay blend mode.
Add Gaussian Blur (I used 3.5px) and lower the layer opacity to 40%.
Move your Overlay layer to the top of the layer stack. The position of your layers in the stack will give you a different look.
Layer Order
Play with opacity and blur amounts to suit your image. You can also push this further by adding a little grain or noise to a 50% gray layer, set to overlay, with reduced opacity.
Another variation on this effect can be achieved by using the Photoshop Diffuse Glow filter with these settings:
I have just decided to add a new 1TB Hard Drive for my Time Machine backups. Changing the designated drive to a new one starts the Time Machine process from scratch, but what if you want to copy your previous backups to the new drive?
After months of unsuccessful attempts to update Adobe Acrobat on Mac OSX 10.5 > , Adobe have released a patch. Actually, they have pre-released the installer through a Prerelease Program.
Users have to delete the previous installations of Acrobat 9 prior to running the new installer (a 525.5 MB download), either through the running of the Acrobat Uninstaller or manually, by deleting several dozen files from the system.
Once this is successfully installed, the Adobe Updater can be run and the program can be updated to Acrobat 9.3.1.
