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I ended up walking to the convention center from the Sahara today. Not to bad a walk, it is only about a half mile to the main floor, and the weather has been surprisingly nice this year. In fact, it seemed to be much warmer on the show floor than outside. The cause? Last year the LVCC had a very open show floor with park benches and wide open spaces for one to stroll along and relax. No such luck this year, the show floor is packed.
I thought my low profile backpack wouldn?t be in the way as I navigate the aisle and booths, but at times it was rather difficult to get around simply because of the shear number of people.
That means good things for the industry as a whole. If more people are able to attend the show, then that means more people have money to spend. More money to spend means a better economy, more jobs, and of course a plethora of companies offering new products.
What new products you ask? Read on?
Media 100
I was a bit unsure if meeting with Media 100 would be worth my time. Charlie White has written numerous articles and interviews about the financial difficulties Media 100 has been in over the last year. After meeting with them, I was glad I did. While Media 100 has been shipping v.3 of the 844/x line, I had a chance to talk with Rick Keilty, Vice President of Product Marketing, who said that things were really looking up for the company.
The company hopes to announce that all dealings with Optibase are finalized by mid may, which means good technology for Optibase and much needed capital for Media 100. Rick pointed out that Media 100 and their NLE products are still going strong and progressing and new releases will be announced soon.
Why is this good information for users? Obviously it means continued support for the entire Media 100 line of products, but more importantly it means that your editing platform is not dead. In fact behind the black curtain Media 100 was showing new feature enhancements for the next version.
Trapcode
If you read my After Effects articles with any regularity, you are probably aware that I really enjoy using the Trapcode line of products developed by Peder Norby. This guy is a genius when it comes to programming killer plug-ins for Adobe?s compositing application.
This year Peder was doing booth demos of his latest offering ? particular. This sprite based 3D particle engine really rocks! Not only do you get to work inside After Effects to generate very complex and real looking particle based animations, moving the camera allows you move around the particles in real 3D space. While particle engines are nothing new to After Effects, they are mostly 2D engines.
Particular comes with nearly 40 particle presets, and has the ability to interact with other layers in the Timeline. This allows you to bounce particles off a wall, floor, or other object in your composition. In one example, Peder created a text with AE?s Text Tool, precomped the layer and then had the particles interacting with the text. What is really cool is that Particular recognizes the alpha channel of the text, and allows some particles to pass through, while others bounce off the letters.
Trapcode has an introductory special for Particular going on now, with an expected release date near summer.
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