User Story: All-Purpose Animation
AUGUST 30—In the summer of 2000 I was hired by David E. Kelley Productions to produce character animations for the Fox series Boston Public. The animations would be photographed practically while playing back on a computer screen as part of a fictitious Web site.

Corel Bryce 5
AUGUST 23—I haven't even looked at Bryce since version 1 or so, so when I got a hold of Bryce 5, I was, needless to say, pleasantly surprised. Bryce 5 is Corel's 3D landscaping, modeling, animation and rendering suite that the company acquired during the dissolution of Metacreations. As with an awful lot of tools originally developed by Metacreations, Bryce has achieved something of a cult status among users, along with Painter (which Corel also owns), Poser (now owned by Curious Labs) and Carrara (now owned by TGS). There's better reason for this now than ever, as we'll get to below, as well as more reason than ever for professional 3D artists to consider Bryce as an addition to their toolset.

Review: Macromedia Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio
AUGUST 2—So here we have the granddaddy of multimedia authoring. I can remember playing with early versions of Director and liking it all right, but not being in love with it and not really caring for what was being produced with it. Last year, I got a hold of Macromedia Director 8.0, and all of that changed. With version 8, Macromedia did a serious revision of this hulking suite of authoring tools, tightened it up, brought in some usability features that almost made me cry and overhauled the workflow to make it about as easy to use as a graphics program, but retaining and expanding the robustness that gives the program its real power.

Review: Sorenson Video 3 Basic
JULY 19—Recently Sorenson released the Sorenson Video 3 CODEC. According to Sorenson, this CODEC is a vast improvement over Sorenson Video 2, giving higher quality video at the same bit rate with faster compression and making better use of VBR (variable bit rate). Currently, Sorenson Video 3 is available in two forms; Sorenson Video 3 Standard Edition, which is included in the latest release of QuickTime 5.0.2, and Sorenson Video 3 Professional Edition.

Review: Adobe GoLive 5
JULY 12—Adobe GoLive 5.0, now packed with many powerful enhancements, is an impressive upgrade. Despite the bevy of new features, this Web-authoring and site-management tool is still very easy to use. And buying the upgrade makes a lot of sense when you consider what you get: 360Code, which protects your code from accidental reformatting; the new WebDAV tool for workgroup collaboration; and Dynamic Link, which automatically writes the code for Active Server Pages. You'll also find enhanced table handling; an on-board Interactive Editor; support for W3C standards and other emerging technologies; integration with other Adobe products through Smart Objects and Smart Links; Photoshop's Save for Web image optimization, Tracing Image and Layers options; site-management and planning tools; and the Site Report controller. The price for the full-featured version is $299. Registered owners of GoLive 4.0, GoLive (CyberStudio) 3.x and Adobe PageMill, however, can purchase the upgrade for as little as $95.

Tutorial: Can Dreamweaver and ImageReady Get Along?
JULY 3—It seems more and more users in the forums here are trying to get Adobe ImageReady and Macromedia Dreamweaver to work together. ImageReady, of course, is geared toward use with Adobe's own GoLive, while Dreamweaver prefers files imported from Macromedia's own Fireworks. But can ImageReady and Dreamweaver play well together?

Editorial: Is Streaming Dead?
JUNE 25—I lie to you not. I went out to the Streaming Media West convention in Long Beach last week (against my better judgement, but I'll get to that in a moment). This is one of those shows where practically the only companies in attendance are there to beg for venture capital. You know the kind. (I went on at length about this around last Internet World. Streaming Media West is the same thing.) So, anyway, after I get done at this show, what do you suppose I find on my windshield when I reach the parking lot?

Tutorial: Post Processing in Studio Artist
JUNE 19—When you think of rotoscoping, you probably think of labor-intensive techniques used to remove wires from movie scenes or to clean up mattes or to perform some other technical clean-up job. Or maybe you think of Max Fleischer and his original rotoscope device, wherein an "artist" would trace over the individual frames of a live-action sequence to produce cartoons like Gulliver's Travels or Popeye the Sailor or Superman.

Curious Labs Poser Pro Pack
MAY 2—You're probably familiar with Poser, the 3D character animation suite formerly owned by the company formerly known as MetaCreations. When MetaCreations killed off its software division to focus on Web technologies, Poser went on the auction block (along with Painter, Carrara, Canoma, Bryce and a host of other well respected titles). It was snatched up by the team that originally created the software and others involved with its development and marketing. Thus was born Curious Labs.

Photoshop: The Secret of Good Gamma
MAY 1—Cross-platform computer users have probably noticed how different the same image can look when viewed on a Mac or PC screen. This lesson from Total Photoshop 6 is of especial interest to Macintosh web designers; instructor Deke McClelland shows how to use the Levels controls to approximate-and correct for-the gamma differences inherent in the two platforms. Let Deke help you to see your onscreen images the way "the rest of the world" sees them!

Masking in Amorphium Pro
MARCH 27—Last week I reviewed Amorphium Pro 1.1 from Electric Image. Amorphium Pro is a 3D modeling and animation package targeted toward designers, with a particular bent toward Flash designers. Its features have been implemented in a way that 2D artists can understand very easily, and these features are quite robust. So I thought we'd take a more in depth look at one of these today—namely masking—and see how it fits into the overall workflow of Amorphium Pro.

Electric Image Amorphium Pro 1.1: 3D modeling and animation with Flash export
MARCH 21—I've mentioned before that for designers, particularly those who work in Flash, skill with 3D is rapidly becoming a prerequisite. Last year, the only tool on the market for bringing 3D content into the Flash format was Swift3D from Electric Rain. Now, however, it seems that every 3D publisher wants a piece of the Web, and they're all either offering Flash expansion modules or are developing export options for SWF animation.

Review: Macromedia Fireworks 4
FEB. 19—I've been using Macromedia Fireworks just about every day for the last year. I've been impressed with its ability to crunch large files into tiny JPEGs with virtually no loss in quality, and I've fallen in love with its effects and batch processing capabilities. Now, for the last few weeks, I've switched to Fireworks 4, which is available as a stand-alone product or in a bundle with Dreamweaver 4. This latest release builds upon the firm foundation laid in Fireworks 3 with a refined interface, some improved functionality and a smattering of new features.

Review: Electric Rain Swift3D: 3D Flash animation software
DECEMBER 12—A little note before we get started: I don't want to give you the impression that this site is all about the Web. Yes, our last three reviews have been on Web graphics software, but this has been more of a function of the order in which I receive materials to review than any editorial direction toward Internet-based design. Too many sites these days are covering software and hardware for the Web at the expense of content designed for print professionals. This will not be the case with Digital Media Designer. That said, let's get on with this week's look at a software package that promises vector-based 3D for Flash.

Review: BoxTop Software's ProJPEG
DECEMBER 5—Let's own up to to one of the facts of Web design: Photoshop doesn't compress images for the Web very well. Neither does ImageReady. In fact, if anything, these applications seem to compress worse and worse with each new release. So what do you do? Well, you can go out and buy Macromedia's Fireworks. It's the undisputed leader in compression, and it's a full-blown image editor and Web graphics creation tool to boot. But not everybody wants to shell out the bucks for another image editor, even one like Fireworks that can do so much more than image editing. The other option is ProJPEG, a plugin for Adobe Photoshop whose sole mission in life is to make your JPEGs smaller and cleaner.

Review: Terran Interactive Cleaner 5
NOVEMBER 21—It would be physically impossible for me to write this review without gushing. I was first introduced to Terran Interactive's Cleaner family of products through Media Cleaner EZ and, later, through Media Cleaner Pro, and I was instantly in awe of the sheer data smashing power of these applications, which could take huge video files and shrink them down to almost nothing while maintaining great image quality. We've been crunching QuickTime files with Media Cleaner Pro (as well as the Media Cleaner Power Suite) here at Digital Media Net and DMN TV on a daily basis for some time now, and the results have been stunning. The quality is impressive; the speed is pretty decent; and the compression is nothing short of impossible.