Extra Topics (Joe’s Blog Site)

Many people have been asking me “Which video-editing software is better: Premiere or After Effects?” I never answered that question directly. Rather, I gave them to understand that Premiere and After Effects are not competing software, but tandem software. In other words, they work hand in hand.

Adobe After Effects takes footages and introduces effects into them (well, what were you expecting?), ranging from color correction like brightness, contrast, levels, balance, etc., to “full-blown” (for lack of a better word) animation effects like particles, fire, texture, morphing, whatever the artist’s imagination and skills can conk out.

This is also where you composite objects and scenes together, like when you take a shot of you standing against a green screen and put it against a disco background. After Effects is where you create, edit and export individual footages for use in your entire video project.

Unless you wish to give yourself a hard time, you don’t organize and finalize your video project in After Effects. Perhaps you can manage it with short films like commercials, but for something that goes to the average 30 minutes to one and a half hours, bad idea. True to its name, it’s got tons of effects, but it is not designed for organizing an entire video project.

That is the job for Adobe Premiere. It has basic color correction effects and other filters, but these pale in comparison to After Effects’ arsenal. Premiere’s specialty is organizing and finalizing your video project. Here is where you take your individual footages exported from After Effects, along with other footages, and audio files and put them together to form that final project. Here is where you get to do cool tricks (not effects) like synching the visuals with the audio, precisely timing transitions, etc.

Premiere is very powerful, yet has a very efficient and user-friendly workspace, making it the industry-standard video-editing software in the Windows Platform. In Mac, it shares the reputation with Final Cut. After Effects has no rival in either platform.

Depth of field or DOF in photography is usually done for artistic purposes. It also serves a useful function, in the sense that it highlights the object which the photographer wishes to bring attention to by blurring out all other details within the pic.

The basic element to achieve natural DOF is the distance between the subject of focus from the background, or from the objects assumed to be too close to the camera outside the focus area. However, it takes a professional camera, and even expensive lenses to fully take advantage of DOF. Most of us can only afford those “birthday party” cameras, or the electronic equivalent of an Instamatic.

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Most of us have been using Adobe’s Acrobat Reader for a long time. What have you noticed? Before, you’ve had to download a huge installer file, wait for an annoying splash window to disappear when you open a document and the application itself has a slow response.

I came across this neat FREE software from Foxit called Foxit Reader. It’s incredibly small (about 2.5Mb), fast, has a text converter and also has high security and privacy, and more. I’ve already tried it and it’s nice. It has all the features that you need from Adobe’s version.

Download Foxit Reader for Windows from this link.