Apple released this morning updates to all of their applications in Final Cut Studio.

SoundTrack Pro 2.0.1

1. Improved stability
2. Improved performance
3. Delay Designer surround effect plug-in

Motion 3.0.1

Fixes for:

1. 32-bit float projects
2. Rendering of intersecting 3D groups
3. Final Cut Pro integration

What a great update to one of my most favorite applications that Adobe (and for that matter, any software maker) makes. Adobe Lightroom has been upgraded to version 1.1 and for a .1 upgrade, there is plenty of “new toys” to play around with, along with some great improvements overall.

First of all, if you are upgrading to 1.1 from 1.0, the upgrade path is very easy. Just download the file from Adobe.com (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/) and double click the install file. On the Mac and PC, the old files are replaced with the new one (on the PC, it installs a new “Adobe Lightroom 1.1″ directory and then deletes the old “Adobe Lightroom” directory.

After installing it, just run Lightroom as usual. Your library (.lrdb file) from your previous version will be converted to the new “catalog” (.lrcat) format. You will be prompted (see image below) to make a backup of your .lrdb file.

Adobe has announced seven upcoming online seminars (eSeminars) pertaining to PHP, Flex and Flex 3.0 development.

Flex for Java Developers (3 seminars dates)
Flex For PHP Developers (2 seminar dates)
Buzzword - Raising the RIA Bar with Rick Treitman
Flex 3 Beta Sneak Peak
For more information on these seminars, visit Adobe at

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=462539&loc=en_us

What a fantastic conference! The Adobe CS3 conference was a two day (June 19 and June 20) networking, product immersion and just plain old fun “experience” for only $199; can’t beat that!

That price not only included a bunch of classes and networking opportunities, but also a fantastic dinner on the first day (I mean shrimp, prime rib, Chinese food and even an open hosted bar).

There were plenty of networking opportunities as well, including the lunches and dinners, the get-togethers after the days ended and a bird-of-a-feather meeting.

Pre-conference Sessions
The conference started with a “Pre-Conference Session”. There were 5 sessions to choose from, including Rich Internet Application for Developers, Video, Management/IT, Photographers and Print Service Providers.

I’m sure that after you read the title of this blog entry, you are asking yourself, “What the heck is The Digital Media Dude smoking, and why is he not sharing?”

Well, first of all, I don’t smoke anything, but if I did, I’m a selfish person and I would not share it with it you.

Anyway…getting back to my story.

What do I mean by Object Oriented video production? First, I have to explain a little bit to you about programming.

Many years ago…though not that long ago since I’m still only 20 years old….times 2…I used to exclusively architect and program web applications and web sites (still do, but not full time, now I mix it up with video, podcasting and photography).

In web development (and really, any other kind of programming since the 90’s) you break your software into “objects”. That is, you look for “common code” that is used in many other places and you remove that code and create “objects” that then you call through out your application. This is called object oriented programming (OPP).

I watched the WWDC 2007 Keynote made by, of course, “Mr. I Only Wear Black T-Shirts and Jeans” Steve Jobs on my iMac last night (until 2:30am…I’m so dedicated).

It was a very uplifting, funny and energetic keynote. I like how this guys presents. He will be big one day! ;-) So, Mr. Jobs introduced many new things at WDDC 2007 (World Wide Developer Conference) .

Below is a short summary of some of the cool items (at least I thought they were cool) that was shown in the keynote.

Mac OS X Leopard
1) New desktop. More “3D” like. Full transparency on the windows (kind of like Vista).
2) 3D Dock With Reflections
3) Stacks – This is the ability to “stack” multiple items in your dock, kind of like you do with photographs in Aperture or Lightroom.
4) Spaces – You can open up applications, organize them by category and then create a space for those applications. Then you can create another space and open up some more applications there. Arrange your desktop differently there. Then you can switch between spaces. Neat concept. I can see myself having a “editing space” for when I’m editing and a “web development” space when I’m doing web design / development and then just switching between my spaces.

I’m not saying not to purchase a Mac. I love my Mac (can’t wait for Leopard and the new iMac….oh man…I’ll be in heaven…drinking too much Apple Kool-Aid).

Anyhow, back on track, I found this page on MacRumors.com that lists of all Apple’s hardware products and tells you if you should or should not purchase them. They tell you, based on rumors, if new versions of current products will be out.

For example, as of today, Thursday June 14, they don’t recommend you purchase the following products due to “new releases out soon”:

• iPod
• iPod Mini/Nano
• Mac Mini
• iMac
• XServe

Warning…Don’t Use the Windows Registry to Store ColdFusion Clients in Production

If you are a ColdFusion developer, you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you are not, either read this and learn about ColdFusion or wait until my next blog entry (which will be on the WWDC 2007 Conference).

Getting back to ColdFusion. In production, you should NEVER store your client variables in the registry (see image below).

Why? Simple. The more traffic you get, the more data will be written to in the registry and the potential to getting a “Registry Corrupt” goes up with every hit. Trust me. It happened to us. Many times, before we figured out that is what was causing the constant crashes.

1) Try to have more links coming into your site then going out. The more relevant sites linking into you will help rank your site better. I understand that’s not always possible since most people won’t want to link into your site unless you link back to them, however, if your business has partners that really want to do business with you, or vendors that you do business with, perhaps you can make it part of the “contract” between you and them that they must link into your site without your company returning the favor.

2) Large number of RELEVANT incoming links is key to proper website ranking, not just a large number of links. Do not get every website out there to link into you. Only websites that are relevant to what you offer on your site should be linking into you. For example, if you are a homebuilder, then sites that cover “new homes” in different locations or sites that talk about “home remodeling” or sites that talk about moving to a geographic location are more relevant to your business then sites that sell Nintendo Wii. Relevance is key, not company size. So if Nintendo links to your new home site, yes, you will get lots of traffic, but it will not help your ranking with Google because it has nothing to do with homes and the traffic that you get, though large, may not be relevant traffic that will turn those visits into actual conversions.

3) Links from influential sites are better then links from none-influential sites. Suppose you have a choice between two companies to get a link from them to your site. Company #1 is a large fortune 500 company with many employees, lots of yearly sales and a large (in terms of # of pages) web site. It has information that is relevant to your site. Let’s also assume that it has 100 incoming links from other external sites to it. Company #2 is a small business, managed by 10 people, also has relevant information to your site but the site is not as huge (in terms of pages) as yours. However, let’s assume this site is very well known on the Web with many (thousands of) incoming links from external sites to it. It would be more beneficial to your site to get an incoming link from Company #2 then Company #1 because it has many more links going to it and therefore Google would consider that website more “influential” and therefore, it would consider your site more influential (links wise).

During a video taping session I had in the studio the other day, after transferring my files from my Adobe OnLocation Project to my editing machine (I’ll blog about my workflow…which I think was great in a later blog) I noticed that some of my .avi files contained some clicks and pops. I’m not sure if this was caused due to the Microphone I had (it never did that before) or if it was something in the way onLocation captured the videos. (I need to do more research and will report my findings).

Regardless, instead of recapturing all of my video again (I also captured to tape at the same time as to hard drive), I decided to do some clean up on the audio of the video using Adobe Audition. Read on below to see my workflow:

Let’s start by creating your project in Premiere Pro 2 and then doing your rough edit. Below is my sample project that I already created and did a rough edit on.

Once you are done with your rough edit and want to do some sound cleanup, identify your offending clip and ALT + Click on your offensive audio click to “unlink it” from your video. Then Right click on the audio click and select “Edit in Adobe Audition”.