Free Adobe Creative Suite Seminar Tuesday, May 18th

Adobe is on a nationwide tour with its new Creative Suite 5 Production Premium. First stop? NYC on Tuesday, May 18th.

Creative Suite (CS), if you’re not familiar, is Adobe’s ploy at making their apps all the more attractive by bundling them together and including such integration as ’round tripping’ where a change in an After Effects element, for example, is immediately updated in a Premiere Pro project.

CS5 comes in various flavors for designers (Design Premium), web heads (Web Premium), and NYCPP News readers, which means Production Premium (it includes Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop Extended–lotsa useful video capabilities there–and more.) Of course, if you have the cash (as in $2600), the Master Collection has every program that’s in each of the separate suites. (More here at Adobe’s comparison page.)

From its debut at NAB 2010, CS5 drew kudos for the capability of its full 64-bit architecture and Mercury Playback Engine, which is speedy enough to allow real-time playback of compute-intensive files from the Red camera and HDSLRs (when paired with an Nvidia Quadro FX card).

At the event, Creative Suite “video experts” will offer a free, in-depth seminar that features the new CS5 Production Premium software suite. Among the activities scheduled, you’ll see how you can work on HD and 2K projects with the “same ease as SD” via the native 64-bit support we’ve mentioned, as well as edit natively with an expanded range of tapeless and DSLR cameras without transcoding or rewrapping (causing a number of Final Cut Pro users to claim they’ll be moving to Adobe Premiere Pro).

Tuesday’s free event is at the Hotel Pennsylvania from noon on, but it might be best to sign up online first.

About Dan Ochiva

New York City-based journalist and NYCPPNEWS founder Dan Ochiva writes and consults on film, video, and digital media technology.

Kami Asgar and Jessica Parks are post-production heavyweights who work with major studios, namely Sony. As a sound designer (Asgar) and as a post executive (Parks), their collective resume touches on everything from Apocalypto to Grandma’s Boy to Venom.

Parks has recently shifted her focus from supervisor to hands-on sound design, and we talk about how it’s never too late to pivot on your career path and find the thing you love doing wherever you are in life.

Click on this link to read the rest of the article on No Film School’s site.

The coronavirus relief package that Congressional leaders agreed to this week includes grant money that many small proprietors described as a last hope for survival.

For the music venue owners, theater producers and cultural institutions that have suffered through the pandemic with no business, the coronavirus relief package that Congress passed on Monday night offers the prospect of aid at last.

To read the full article on The New York Times’ site, click here.

Phase 4 production guidance is available on the Film Permit website. All production activity, whether it requires a Film Permit or not, must comply with New York Forward Industry Guidance.

For more information see, please refer to the State Department of Health’s Interim Guidance for Media Production During the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency. Please review the guidelines and FAQ before submitting permit applications. The Film Office is operating remotely, so please allow additional time for Film Permit processing.

The above paragraphs contain links to the various FAQ – just mouse over the relevant words.

NVIDIA Research has invented a way to use AI to dramatically reduce video call bandwidth while simultaneously improving quality

What the researchers have achieved has remarkable results: by replacing the traditional h.264 video codec with a neural network, they have managed to reduce the required bandwidth for a video call by an order of magnitude. In one example, the required data rate fell from 97.28 KB/frame to a measly 0.1165 KB/frame – a reduction to 0.1% of required bandwidth.

To read the rest of this article on Petapixel, click this link.

Law360 (October 9, 2020, 5:22 PM EDT) — The Motion Picture Industry Health Plan’s board can’t be sued under ERISA for allegedly flouting its duties when it relaxed plan rules in response to COVID-19, a California federal judge has ruled, nixing a proposed class action filed by two cinematographers who still couldn’t qualify for benefits.

In an order entered Thursday, U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner granted the board of directors’ motion to dismiss Greg Endries and Dee Nichols’ Employee Retirement Income Security Act suit accusing board members of breaching their duty to treat all plan participants fairly.

Endries and Nichols, members of Local 600 of the International Cinematographers Guild, said in July that the board left them and others “out in the cold” in its attempts to address the problems COVID-19 caused for plan participants.

But Judge Klausner agreed with the board’s contention that the case, which alleged a fiduciary breach, should be tossed because plan administrators don’t act as fiduciaries when they amend health care plans.

Read the full article on the Law360 site by clicking here.

Anthony Russo and Joseph Russo photographed at the PMC Studio in Los Angeles for the Variety Playback Podcast.

The Russo brothers, directors of the all-time top grossing film “Avengers: Endgame,” quietly secured a roughly $50 million cash infusion for their production company AGBO from Saudi Arabia earlier this year, multiple sources tell Variety.

In a deal brokered and closed at the beginning of the pandemic, the Russos received the investment from an undisclosed Saudi bank in exchange for a minority stake in the brothers’ Los Angeles-based shop.