Latest Posts in Creative Notes

Opinion: iMovie needs to open up to developers

Since my twins were born a few months ago, I’ve been getting a lot of use out of my Canon HF100 AVCHD camcorder (if you’re looking step up to HD yourself, check out our HD camcorder buyer’s guide).

After shooting some footage, I import it into iMovie ‘09, edit it, export it as a 720p HD movie, then upload it to Vimeo for hosting and embedding in my blog. After making a few dozen such videos recently, I have the workflow down pat.

And I’m also really bored with iMovie’s limited set of transitions and titles.

Let’s return to the old days, before Apple’s Randy Ubillos completely redesigned iMovie as part of the iLife ‘08 suite. Back then, people like Bruce Gee sold awesome collections of transitions, effects, and titles for iMovie users. With them, people could create movies that didn’t use the same tired effects that everybody else had.

Back to today: Although I love the simplicity that iMovie ‘09 offers for quickly cutting together and sharing a movie, one casualty of the new architecture (which debuted with iMovie ‘08) is that there’s no longer a way for companies to create third-party plug-ins that you can add to iMovie. That means every iMovie user on the planet is stuck with the same set of effects. Seriously, how many “Circle Open” transitions can you watch before wanting to gouge your eyes out?

The Apple-supplied solutions are either return to iMovie HD 6—which Apple stopped offering as a free download in January of this year—or use Final Cut Express or Final Cut Studio. The first option is no option at all: I found earlier version of iMovie to be poorly designed and difficult to work with. And stepping up to one of the Final Cut products is not only overkill, it also defeats the quick-and-easy nature of iMovie ‘09 that I find so helpful.

So I say to Apple, please give developers the means to create effects for iMovie '09. If that's technically unfeasible, at least create more of your own. My family will thank you.

Jonathan Seff is a Macworld senior editor.

Kodak runs out of ideas, turns to you

One of Shakespeare’s most abused quotes comes from Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2), “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet.” Juliet was arguing that Romeo’s parentage (i.e. his name) shouldn’t matter in the face of their great love affair. We all know how well that turned out.

Many tech companies find themselves in the same boat as Juliet: names matter. Kodak has recently come to this realization and is now turning to you, John and Jane Q. Public, to find a super cool name for their forthcoming pocket camcorder. Their existing pocket camcorders have less than inspiring monikers like “Zx1,” “Zi6,”and the forthcoming “Zi8” (I wonder what happened to the Zi7?), clearly those names need to be jazzed up.

That’s where you come in. You can suggest a name for Kodak’s new pocket camcorder by either leaving a comment on this blog post at Kodak’s blog or by tweeting your suggestion with the hashtag #nameAKodak. One hundred lucky (and randomly selected) namers will receive a free Zi8, which is pretty neat. The person who comes up with the winning name will be flown out to CES 2010 in Las Vegas to witness the product unveiling in person, and have their tale of the naming included in the camera’s packaging.

The contest ends at 6am ET, August 24th, so get to naming! I think the ZiBlankbaby has a nice ring to it.

Create a digital ID with Adobe Acrobat

Last week, we discussed how to create a digital signature that you can use to sign official PDF documents in your own handwriting. But what if you don’t have a digital ID yet and you need one? Stay right here, and I’ll walk you through the steps you need to take in Adobe Acrobat.

1. Open a document you wish to sign and choose Advanced -> Sign & Certify -> Place Signature. Acrobat will prompt you to click and drag a rectangle defining the placement and dimensions of your digital signature. Do that at the appropriate place in the document. Immediately the Sign Document dialog will appear.

2. If you don’t already have a digital ID, choose New ID and, in the Add Digital ID dialog, select A new digital ID I want to create now. Click Next and populate the digital ID fields with your information. Note that only the Name, Email Address, Country/Region, Key Algorithm, and Use Digital ID For fields are required; the rest are optional.

3. Clicking Next will prompt you to save the digital ID file to a safe, permanent location on your computer and supply a password. Remember your password. You are required to enter it every time you sign a PDF to prove you are the owner of the digital ID.

4. Click Finish to save the digital ID and return to the Sign Document dialog, where you can now select your ID from the Sign As dropdown menu.

5. Beneath the Sign As field, enter the password of the selected digital ID. You may notice that, by default, the digital signature preview depicts a plain text signature with the distinctive Acrobat A logo behind it. This is the Standard Text appearance. Change it to your desired appearance—the one with your handwritten signature—by choosing “With Hand Signature” from the Appearance dropdown menu. The preview should update to match, showing exactly the signature appearance you created.

6. Click the Sign button to digitally sign the document, which also requires that you save it.

Ta da! You now have a document that is officially and digitally signed with your handwriting. It is your signature in digital format, and legal in every way.

Pariah S. Burke is the author of Mastering InDesign CS3 for Print Design and Production (Sybex, 2007), and other books; a freelance graphic designer; and the publisher of the Web sites GurusUnleashed.com, WorkflowFreelance.com, and CreativesAre.com.

Sign electronic documents with your own handwritten signature

Digital signatures are a legally binding way to affirm your agreement to PDF documents. They can include your name, your organization information, your e-mail address, and the date and reason you signed the document. Typically, though, digital signatures are cold, computer-generated text. For an extra touch of class or personalization, why not use your real handwritten signature in digital signatures?

Adding your personal John Hancock is easy if you follow these simple steps:

1. Scan your handwritten signature into the computer and save in PDF format. You can either scan directly to a PDF via the scanner’s software or use Adobe Acrobat’s File -> Create PDF -> From Scanner command. Alternately, you can first scan your signature as a graphic and then convert it to PDF format. Whatever technique you use to get your signature into PDF format, the important thing is that it must be a PDF cropped to the size of the signature itself.

For best results, write your signature using solid black strokes such as those you’d get from a felt tip pen, and a little larger than normal.

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A Zebra with stripes of a different color

We've all seen posters, logos, and headlines in which the text has a different fill color from its outline or shadow. Surprisingly, this isn’t always accomplished by using your software to stroke and fill the display lettering with different colors—sometimes the font actually includes several separate variations that you can stack and colorize. P22's Zebra is a great example; Adobe's Zebrawood is another.

How do these unusual font families work? It's simple: each part is actually a separate font, designed to match up perfectly if you stack two or more text containers on top of each other—some fonts even have three parts, allowing for tri-color text.

If you want this sort of look for your brochure, poster, or Web site, here are a couple of ways to accomplish it. If your desktop publishing or word processing application lets you create multiple named layers, create and name a layer. Then, place a text container on that layer and type your text into it. Format the text using one of the fonts, and give it a color. When you're satisfied with how your text looks, duplicate that layer and change the font in the duplicate text box to one of its other variations, and give it a different color. That’s it. You're done.

If your application doesn't allow you to create named layers, just copy your text container and paste it on top of itself. If your application has a Paste In Place command (Edit-> Paste In Place), even better—you won't have to reposition the new container to align with the first one! As above, change the font in the second box, and give it a different color. That's all there is to it. In Apple's Pages (), you'd copy and paste a text box, and then align it with the original. Fortunately, Pages (and Adobe InDesign []) provide active alignment guides as you drag an item. This makes it easy to snap an item to another item.

Of course, if you later need to change the actual text or its size and spacing, you'll have to make the same changes to both text containers. (QuarkXPress () has a unique feature that automates the process: Synchronized Text. When you change the text in one place, it changes everywhere you used it.)

P22 Zebra is available in several variations: Wedge, LineCut, and Stencil, in addition to the set shown here. The individual fonts are $20, the ABC set is $30, and the family is $60. Adobe's Zebrawood, Pepperwood, and Rosewood (all from the same designers) are available individually for $29, or as a set for $69. Be aware that set prices for fonts can vary.

There are scores of other ornamental "fill" fonts available for any kind of project. Explore these fonts at Web sites such as P22.com, Fonts.com, MyFonts.com, Comicraft, and Adobe. Try searching for Fill, Handtooled, or Signage.

[Jay J. Nelson is the editor and publisher of Design Tools Monthly, an executive summary of graphic design news.]

Time-lapse video: Macworld cover magic

These days, Macworld is much more than just a print magazine, but our print magazine is how we got our start, and our magazine is still read widely by people like you, our devoted readers. And a lot of hard work—by a lot of people—goes into producing that print magazine. Now we're proud to be able to share some of our behind-the-scenes work with you.

To illustrate one part of the production cycle—the cover-making process—our contributing photographer, Peter Belanger, has made a very cool time-lapse video illustrating most of that process for our September 2009 issue.

Peter approached me with the idea of trying to capture the cover process using time-lapse photography. It was impossible to show every step in the process (our cover meetings don’t make for great imagery), but the video does a nice job of capturing the bulk of the work it takes to make Macworld’s covers.

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News: Kontakt Player launched

Native Instruments has introduced Kontakt Player, a free software instrument based on its Kontakt 3 sampler. It offers universal playback for available Kontakt libraries and forms the basis of a new category of "Kontakt-powered" instruments.

The new player is the central instrument for all Kontakt sound materials for both studio and live performance environments. It accommodates all regular Kontakt-format libraries as well as all generations of third-party Kontakt Player instruments, including Kompakt and Intakt formats as well as Native Instruments' Akoustik Piano, Elektrik Piano, and Bandstand instruments.

The new player is based on the Kontakt 3.5 engine, and features 64-bit support, extended memory addressing, advanced DFD streaming, true multiprocessor support, and more. It provides complete playback functionality with universal import and sound manipulation via its Performance View panels. It omits only the in-depth editing features of the full-featured Kontakt 3.5. All sound libraries are managed in a graphical library browser, providing an overview of your sound collections.

Kontakt Player is also the basis for a new range of self-powered, sample-based instruments, which will be available for download and purchase directly from Native Instruments. Now available are the company’s new Maschine Drum Selection—hard-hitting drum and percussion sounds for modern electronic and club music styles—and Evolve Mutations—a new instrument for movie, TV, and game composers.

The Maschine Drum Selection, priced at $59, contains 20 full drum kits adapted from the company’s Maschine factory library. As a Kontakt-Powered instrument, the Maschine Drum Selection is ready to play both as a standalone instrument and as a plug-in for all major instrument hosts, providing an assortment of gritty urban kits, heavily processed acoustic drums, and vintage analog samples for various electronic music genres. It offers soundshaping controls, and includes a flexible graphical step sequencer that can be used to set up intricate grooves directly within Kontakt Player and Kontakt 3. All kits are also included in additional formats for use within Kore 2, Kore Player, and Battery 3.

Developed in collaboration with sound design house Heavyocity, and powered by the Kontakt engine, Evolve Mutations includes instruments, rhythms, and ambiences designed to add depth and impact to dramatic music. It contains 275 new instruments based on 2GB of exclusive sample material. It offers playback and sound shaping functionality within the Player software, including efficient envelope, filter and effects control. All sounds can also be loaded into the full version of the Kontakt 3 sampler for advanced sound editing. It sells for $119.

The launch of Kontakt Player is also accompanied by the free Kontakt Factory Selection, a 650MB download featuring 50 instruments from the Kontakt 3 library. This collection features sounds and instruments from Kontakt’s Band, Synth, Urban Beats, Vintage, and World libraries.

Kontakt Player runs as a stand-alone application or as VST or Audio Units plug-in, and as RTAS under Pro Tools 7 or 8. The Kontakt Player requires Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5, a G5 running at 1.8GHz or an Intel Core Duo processor running at 1.66GHz, plus 1GB RAM.

Working through the video-editing backlog

Once you’re back from vacation, it’s all too easy to stash your latest video footage on the shelf with vague intentions of spending lazy evenings cutting together the footage. But the video can quickly pile up, until soon the idea of editing may seem overwhelming.

The trick to assembling your video—and sharing it with family and friends—is to break the process into smaller, more manageable chunks. Here's how.

1. Get it into iMovie. The Import window in iMovie ’09 (choose File -> Import From Camera) lets you review and selectively import clips from your camera, but I’m more inclined to import everything and do the reviewing while I’m editing. (This option does require a lot of hard disk space, but storage is relatively inexpensive these days. If you can afford an external hard drive, it could make working in iMovie a lot easier.)

Let iMovie import while you’re doing something more interesting than watching a progress bar (especially if you choose to analyze the footage for stabilization, which can take four to eight times the duration of the footage). This is particularly important if your camcorder records to memory cards or an internal hard disk: you’ll want to offload the footage so you can use the cards for the next event.

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Pixar to offer higher-powered RenderMan 3-D rendering app

The following article is excerpted from Digital Arts.

Pixar Animation Studios has debut RenderMan Pro Server 15 and the brand-new Tractor 1.0 render management software, and announced that owners of its RenderMan rendering software will soon be able to use the product across all processor cores on a single machine for a single cost.

Unlimited threading will enable studios and artists to maximize the power of their render farms, according to Pixar, allowing each license of RenderMan to utilize any number of threads on the latest multi-core platforms. RenderMan Pro Server 15.0 will be the first product to introduce unlimited threading when it is released in the fall of 2009. This will be followed with unlimited threading for RenderMan Studio and RenderMan for Maya.

The forthcoming RenderMan Pro Server 15.0 introduces new capabilities including true volume primitives, major additions to the RenderMan Shader Language (RSL), Disney’s Ptex per face painted textures, imager shaders, an API for subdivision surfaces, and more. Pixar says that release will also include significant performance enhancements for rendering production scenes, including optimized memory management and improved thread scalability.

Finally, Pixar is also releasing Tractor 1.0, a new industrial-strength distributed render management solution built on an architecture designed to handle the largest multi-core render farms of tens of thousands of cores or more.

RenderMan Pro Server 15.0 is compatible with Mac OS X, Linux 32 and 64 bit, Windows XP 32 bit, Windows Vista 64 bit and Windows Vista 64 bit HPC Server. All RenderMan Pro Server customers on current maintenance will receive unlimited threading at the version 15.0 upgrade.

Apple releases GarageBand 5.1 update

Late on Monday afternoon, Apple released a hefty update to its GarageBand 5 () software, which is part of the iLife ‘09 suite. The 139MB update to Apple’s consumer audio creation application includes several changes. You can now add GarageBand track effects and Audio Units to a guitar track; there’s improved support for Apogee audio interfaces and access to audio monitoring settings; and the program offers faster switching to full screen in Magic GarageBand.

The update also fixes a security issue—in the past, opening GarageBand would change Safari’s preferences to always accept cookies (as opposed to the defaut of accepting cookies only for the sites being visited), which could allow third parties and advertisers to track a user’s Web activity. With this update installed, Safari’s cookie preferences won’t be changed (although if you’ve launched GarageBand previously, you’ll need to check Safari and change the preference back if you so desire).

GarageBand 5.1 is available from Apple’s Web site or via OS X’s Software Update mechanism.