I've teamed up with some old friends to make a new Mac application, Boardfish, a tool for creating storyboards. Make panels in the graphics app of your choosing and drag them in. Boardfish will let you arrange them, add captions, and export to a PDF.
Boardfish is the brainchild of Matt Silverman, who runs the production studio Swordfish. (I've known Matt since forever, starting with ElectricImage user groups at the turn of the century.) At Swordfish, Matt & co. have often made storyboards using general purpose tools like InDesign, but making changes to the layouts was a pain. Matt thought it would be worth it to make an app dedicated to storyboards, so he brought me in to do the programming, Mauchi Baiocchi for creative input, and Brandon Smith for everything else (including the docs and website). Together, we are Mekajiki Inc.
When it comes down to it, Boardfish is basically a page layout app—a procedural one. Virtually everything about the layout of the boards is exposed: the number of panels on a page, the typeface and font size of each text element, the width and color of every line. Boardfish lets you make global changes instantly.
Several years agoProEXR added the ability to render the layers of an After Effects comp into an EXR sequence, each layer given its own set of RGBA channels that could be pulled out independently in AE, Nuke, or another savvy program. This feature was accessed through the standard After Effects render interface, made possible by various loopholes in the After Effects API.
Well, all good things must come to an end and those loopholes were closed in After Effects CC 2015 as part of the program's re-architecture-ing. As a result this feature is now found where you might have expected it from the beginning, under Composition ➤ Save Frame As ➤ ProEXR. Unlike its neighboring Photoshop Layers feature, the ProEXR layer export will let you render out a sequence.
Users of previous AE versions can still use the render queue as they always have, and that's the only way to render on a farm. Or since AE CC 2014 can read CC 2015's project files, you could always open your project in the older version and regain the render queue functionality.
Adobe has released an update to Adobe Premiere CC 2015 that includes something relevant to this blog: an OpenEXR plug-in. This is actually the same plug-in that has been a part of ProEXR for the past three years, and it is now free to all. (It runs in Media Encoder too.) Updating your CC 2015 is the easiest way to get it, but for those of you still using older versions of Premiere you'll find a free copy in the standard ProEXR download, replacing the old non-free one. The price of the remaining ProEXR plug-ins has dropped to $50.
After well over a year in public beta, today we're calling the free WebM plug-in for Premiere Pro officially released. In that time the plug-in has evolved greatly based on feedback from users and from Google itself. And it will continue to evolve, especially as Google continues to develop their libvpx encoder.
One thing that has been interesting to watch is how the VP9 codec has come along. When I posted the first beta, VP9 was experimental, had hardly any application support, and was incredibly slow to encode. Today you can play VP9 in Firefox, Chrome, VLC, and other standards-compliant software. And VP9 encoding…well, let's just say it's a lot faster than it used to be, thanks to multithreading and countless other optimizations.
Usually I use this blog to announce a piece of software I've written, but now I'm announcing something I'm hoping to write. It's MOX, an open source movie format for video and film production. You can read all about it on the Indiegogo page.
The reason to use crowd funding is twofold. First, this free software project is too big for me to just put it together in my spare time. Second, we are proposing to create a new standard so we need to know there's support for it before we get started, to know that it's really worth doing.
Continue reading for the details of how this all began.
OpenEXR 2.2 was just released, and it features a new lossy codec created by Karl Rasche of DreamWorks Animation. Simply called DWA, it applies techniques common in lossy image compression like the discrete cosine transform and Huffman coding, but it uses them to great effect. If you can accept a little loss in your HDR images, DWA can shrink them to a fraction of their lossless size.
I just posted a new version of SuperPNG for your downloading pleasure. The big new feature is the Quantize checkbox, which will convert your 32-bit RGBA image into an 8-bit indexed color image with transparency. And I'm not talking about GIF-style 1-bit transparency here, but full 8-bit transparency values in the PNG color palette.
That 75% reduction in bits can really crush PNGs even more than was previously possible. Lower the quality slider to use fewer colors, which means even fewer bits and an even smaller file. This feature is powered by Kornel Lesiński's pngquant library, and Kornel has agreed to join me as SuperPNG's co-author.
Another new feature in this version is the Clean Transparent checkbox. It turns out that your transparent pixels may have unseen colors in them that are making PNGs harder to compress, but this feature will wipe them out for you. See the manual for more details.
SuperPNG has always been free, but now it's open source as well. Check out the GitHub repository and see exactly what we're doing.
