You can now make big budget, Hollywood-style special effects at used car prices. If this is not the beginning of a revolution then I don't know what is. In Adobe's latest release of the Creative Suite product line (known as CS5) they've brought back the Ultra green screen product (which went missing in CS4) and given it so much bang for the buck that I think it could topple a small third-world nation.

To begin with, the green screen product is no longer a stand-alone application, the functionality is now built right into Adobe's Premiere Pro editing package. This gives you, the filmmaker, a crazy amount of control over how your composites integrate into your scenes. For example, you can add any other Premiere effect on top of a composite and see the results instantaneously. In the sample composite I created for this article ("The Big Spider"), I added motion to my keyed layer so that it would match the motion of the layer underneath. I was also able to shrink and grow the dimensions of my keyed layer over the length of the piece (in attempt to hide some lights at the edge of my green screen). I was able to play with each of these effects one at a time, independent of the Ultra key effect, which allowed my project to act like a big special effects sandwich. I could easily open it up, throw in a different flavor and see what the results were. This is a monumental change from Adobe's previous approach which baked the green screen effect into the footage at the outset.

I finally got my hands on the new Adobe Creative Studio 3 and spent a couple evenings with the Studio's green screen product, which for some reason is called Ultra CS3. (Isn't that a detergent?) After producing a number of green screen clips I can confirm that even though Ultra CS3 delivers a crisp, attractive composite you'll find your sound element mangled so badly that you'll think the Siegfried & Roy tigers got to it.

Here at GreenScreenCinema we are continually seeking out new, afforable ways to shoot in HD. Until recently the Canon HV20 was our camera of choice. The HV20 employs the HDV format (1440x1080 pixles) which blows up nicely to 1920x1080. And with its $700 price point ($500 on close-out) you simply cannot find a cheaper way to shoot HD. Then the Flip camera came along. Then Flip HD. Then Creative Labs' Vado HD. Now you can shoot a low-end HD image (1280x720) for $99. These cameras cost less than a Steven Segal box set, but are they as unwatchable?

This article describes the trials and tribulations associated with animating a short film using Adobe Premiere Pro.

You might have heard that YouTube is moving into long-form content. They've been acquiring low-budget episodics and back-catalog film titles and have created a new page on their site to highlight the buys called the Shows page. While I am excited to see YouTube try new things, the mix of titles is truly baffling. On the one hand they feature Funimation titles like Full Metal Panic and Fullmetal Alchemist (which were huge hits in Japan) right next to the worst web series ever produced by man, Gemini Division. And then there's the obligatory National Geographic content, which is so overexposed that they will soon be giving away the online distribution rights as a prize at the bottom of cereal boxes.

The reviews of the Shows page have not been kind. "It was," one viewer commented, "like watching the Lusitania go down."

As much as I bemoan the technological disaster that is Disney Digital 3D (apparently 'Bolt 3-D' was about a dog, but all I could see were huge 3-D palm trees) there are still some things that Disney does better than anyone. Disney knows how to market to parents. If you have any doubt about this you should take a quick look at the email war they're currently waging in my inbox.

There's a really interesting spat going on right now between the Wall Street Journal and Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons. The Wall Street Journal insists he's turned on the net neutrality folks, and Lessig insists that his publishing empire and White House aspirations still require people to believe he's a great guy. I think he actually is a great guy, but his desire to get into politics may be causing him to soften his stance toward the nation's network providers.

I don't know if you keep up with online gaming services, but XBox Live just released an upgrade to their online service. Not the most exciting lead in, I will admit, but you have to stick around for the punch line. After the upgrade completes, the console presents the user with an astronomically long, 28 section 'Terms of Service' agreement that actually includes a 'no derivate works' clause. Here's a screenshot of the clause:

I think Michelle Gallina is sprucing up her resume. The Adobe product marketing manager was in charge of Adobe's greenscreen product, Adobe Ultra, up until this week's release of Creative Suite 4 which no longer includes Ultra. I was so shocked to see this product drop out of Adobe's line-up that I asked Adobe to comment about the future of Ultra. Here is the response I got from the company:

James, with regard to the inclusion of Adobe Ultra in Creative Suite 4, I want to inform you that this application is not included in any of Creative Suite Suites.

I hope somebody told Michelle.

Today I thought I'd share some of the challenges associated with maintaining the USC School of Cinematic Arts group on LinkedIn. To be clear, I think the LinkedIn site is an outstanding example of design and execution. They are really professional and they go to great pains to protect your privacy. With the exception of last week, when they went a little too far.

When you plug your new 3G iPhone into your Windows XP desktop, iTunes will pop up and ask you if you want to upgrade your software (to version 2.01). Though it may seem like iTunes has your best interests at heart, iTunes has a heart made of stone. Do not go along with the iTunes plan. Tie yourself to your mast and ignore her siren song. For she will crash your iPhone on a sea of incompatibility and brick the thing. She's a jealous mistress that way.

If you randomly type letters into your browser you might have come across Cuil.com this week, a new search engine that claims to have "Three times as many Web pages as Google!" The site has a Wal-Mart heir on the board, $33 million in funding and absolutely no ability to return relevant search results. It may be the biggest search engine implosion in the history of the internet.

I'm always keeping an eye out for the next big video platform. Nintendo's Wii never really caught my attention since Nintendo doesn't even mention its video capabilities in its marketing campaign. So when I bought a Wii for my daughter's birthday I thought it would be just another toy that the kids abandon after a few weeks. But within a few hours of the console's debut every single member of my household had used the device and an unruly line had formed next to the TV. When I heard my mother-in-law shouting "Die! Die! Die!" at the screen in Korean I knew I had a hit on my hands.

Can this addictive little device be used to deliver video? Read more to find out.

Here at Green Screen Cinema we've been around the block with a number of of web technologies (going all the way back to our Atari 800 and its 1200 bps modem). The technologies we really like these days are adCenter, Adwords and Feedburner. But since Google would not initially return our domain name when people searched for our domain name we had to set up accounts at Digg, Current, reddit, Vimeo, Metacafe, emPivot and every site that has the word "film" in the title, just to help people find us. It's not been an easy road. Minutes after joining Vimeo we received fishy email from a variety of sources. The reddit site might have been programmed by monkeys. And Metacafe still has not gotten back to me on the upload errors that my videos throw.

Needless to say we've taken the walk of shame home after locking lips with these guys. And these sites are not the worst offenders out there. There's one flack blog site we've said we'll never join. Never ever. Not if we were the last two websites standing and we had to repopulate the species together. Well, we're gonna have to eat our words since they own the 12th spot in a Google search result we're trying to break into. Pucker up, baby, because today we joined the Technorati.

I don't know about you, but I have been eagerly awaiting the video revolution. When the first consumer videocamera came out I thought, this is really an improvement on film: you don't have to wait for the lab, the viewfinder shows you exactly what the final image is going to look like. This is going to change the industry! But here we are more than two decades later and only now are high definition videocameras finally coming onto the market at a reasonable price point.

I don't know what derailed the revolution, most likely it was the high margins that all the new gear commanded when it first came out. The revolutionaries got fat and complacent. But in the last two years some low cost, high quality gear managed to break through the party apparatus and is now in the hands of consumers.

For this shoot-out we are going to compare one of the old guard, high margin video cameras (the Sony HDR-FX1) to a truly revolutionary camera (the Canon Vixia HV30).