Sebastian Castilho

A lot of the new features are just insane. Some things are literally like magic tricks – the ones where the magician makes something on stage disappear and you simply can’t think how on Earth they made that happen. Except Adobe CS5 makes things appear magically.

• Photoshop Bristle Brushes: Now brushes can act like real life brushes- you can change bristle length, thickness, density and much more. I *think* you can also change the behaviour of the brush to make its paint act like watercolour or oil, or etc.
• Better performance in Premier, After Effects and Photoshop: Native 64bit support allows the applications to use over 4gigs of your RAM, allowing you to get much more done without things slowing down. Support for graphics card rendering further accelerates rendering in the programs. Support for many many different codecs allow you to use all sorts of different videos within one work area. And just overall across the board optimisations makes everything faster, especially now with all the use of high definition video.
• Publishing without knowledge of coding: There is now a secondary Flash program that lets you put your graphics together to create an interactive website or app without knowledge of coding. Furthermore you can publish things to be directly usable in things like the iphone.
• Content-Aware Fill: Take a photo, lasso around a person or anything that you don’t want to see. Use content-aware fill and the area is filled so that it looks like that person was never standing there
• Enhanced selection: Now you can accurately select individual stray strands of hair on a person or animal to crop them out. In After Effects, the rotoscoping tool allows you to easily select a person and then the program will automatically select the person for the rest of the frames even if they are moving and things like their collar are popping in and out of view. This makes matting so much faster.

In fact there’s just a ton of improvements everywhere; more than I have time to write about. So just head on over to http://cs5launch.adobe.com/ to find out more.

Now the question for me is whether to buy or not. I can get it for £360 since I’m a student. You have to understand that this is actually insanely cheap. Professionals have to pay maybe 1-2 thousand pounds more. But still, it’s £360 that I don’t quite have.

Well actually if I rationalise it, that money would just end up being spent on clothes, nights out or games. None of which make me any more productive.

SO WHAT WILL IT BE SEB?

Press play:

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This is one of six different music tracks I could choose to make a music video of.

I’m finding it insanely hard.

Let’s go through my usual hoops of making a project.

1. Receive brief. Yay! this sounds fun.
2. Make first notes on what to do.
3. Procrastinate for a while.
4. Suddenly get a load of different ideas.
5. Become spoilt for choice on ideas.
6. Suddenly decide I just need to do it.

I’ve just reached phase 6, and I need to show something substantial on Monday. Grim times.

Basically I could just hand draw the animation, but it would take an incomprehensible amount of time (see this post) to make over 2 minutes of animation. So what I’ve decided to do is use mostly Flash. Back in the day when I was 14 when my brain was like a sponge, I could learn new programs quite easily. Now it’s a different story!

Wish me luck.