Prolost Burns

July 23, 2013

When I was creating the demo video for the Prolost Graduated Lightroom Presets, I wanted a quick way to create the classic zooming/dissolving photo montages known as the “Ken Burns effect.” And because sometimes your scaffolding needs scaffolding of its own, I decided to make an Animation Preset to speed the process.

Prolost Burns is an Animation Preset for Adobe After Effects CS6 and greater that automates the process of creating this type of animation. It’s so handy that I thought you might get some use out of it yourself.

Set the start and end zoom values, and your layer will smoothly zoom over its entire duration. Changing the layer’s length automatically adjusts the animation.
Use any comp size and any layer size.
Layers automatically cross-dissolve based on how they overlap in the timeline.
Set a custom center point for the zooming animation, to draw the viewer’s focus.
Apply the preset to many layers at once for a near instantaneous setup.
Works with Adobe After Effects CS6 and CC, Mac and Windows.

Prolost Burns makes it insanely easy to set up gorgeous photo montages. Get it now.

Update 2015-05-17

Burns has been updated to version 1.7 and has a new price and a new home.

BulletProof Public Beta 2

July 11, 2013

Huge, awesome updates in this second free public beta release. I would totally use this one in production.

This may be my favorite thing we’ve ever made at Red Giant.

For a little while longer, you can try it out for free, and participate in making it even better.

Prolost Presets for Lightroom

July 10, 2013

As those of you who watched my Lightroom User Group presentation learned, I use a system of graduated presets for processing my photos in Adobe Lightroom. I’ve essentially used these presets to redesign the Lightroom user interface—instead of using sliders to specify adjustments, the presets allow me to see and react to visual choices, tapping into some of the same instincts I’ve developed behind the lens.

I quietly offered the presets to early adopters, but now it’s time to properly release them. The set of over 400 presets is available now for only $19.99. They work on Mac and Windows, and require Lightroom 4 or higher.

This is version 1.5 of the presets. I’ve tweaked a few things and added some new presets, including 5 extremely useful Color Treatment presets, the Prolost Technical group, and a Red Scale preset in Prolost Creative. If you bought the presets before as an early adopter, you probably don’t need to upgrade, but doing so is a lovely way to support future offering like this.

Prolost Graduated Presets for Lightroom

$49.00

Canon 70D

July 09, 2013

Canon has announced the Canon 70D, availble for pre-order at Amazon and B&H for $1,199.

On one hand, this camera, with its flip-out LCD, new sensor technology that allows better live-view autofocus, and built-in WiFi, seems to be the heir apparent to the APSC HDSLR throne.

On the other hand, it’s hard not to feel that Canon is updating their DSLR line as slowly as they feel they can get away with.

I like what Mike and Jason had to say on the RC podcast #132—essentially, one has to hope that we’re nearing the end of hoping for accidental improvements to the video capabilities of low-cost stills cameras.

The Canon 70D looks to be the best camera you can buy for DSLR video, and yet it’s impossible to get to excited about it.

Digital Bolex Sample Raw Frames

July 08, 2013

Elle and Joe have posted the first raw sample frames from the Digital Bolex.

On Wednesday we eagerly waited in the conference room as Mike had the guys put some final firmware updates on the camera. They brought it in, the sides were taken off, but the display was on. This was the first time we could hold the camera and see the display live. It was an amazing experience. This thing we had been dreaming about was finally working in our hands.

Read more here and download the samples for yourself. If I read the post correctly, these were not captured at 24fps, but they are raw frames from the production sensor.

Congrats guys. Like you say, these images aren’t perfect (there’s a bit of a grid pattern in the Elitar frame, for example), but holy crap, you made a camera.

Here are the three sample DNG frames at both the Lightroom 5 default settings (remember, there’s no such thing as “straight out of the camera” with raw) and color graded by me using Lightroom 5. Click to see the full-res images.