Being a creative professional means making the content you communicate clear, concise, and compelling. You’ve got a lot of techniques at your disposal: color, typography, photography, illustration, and so on. But no technique is more powerful than motion. In reality, the world does not stand still. If you are a graphic or web designer, an art director, commercial artist, photographer, illustrator, a communicator at work, or a fine artist, you see video and motion graphics overlapping in many different ways.
A basic understanding of digital video can help you expand your creative reach. When you show a sequence of still images to a human eye, the brain fills in the gaps and perceives continuous motion. Film and video use this same principle to animate photographic images, which appear to fluidly move when shown sequentially at an appropriate rate. With similar functions, the difference between film and video is a matter of physical media as well as genre. Some audiences believe that its dynamic range makes film a more expressive medium for arts and entertainment. The tradition of filmmaking— the painstaking lighting and direction of individual scenes typically shot by a meticulously positioned single camera in multiple takes, the art and science of processing film to achieve desired effects, the care taken in editing to dramatically develop a story, and the host of highly skilled professionals typically employed in both production and post-production—has also contributed to the perception that film is a more erudite or more valuable medium. Like still photography, film and video used to be only analog media. e “cutting” room was just that—the place where unwanted clips ended up on the floor, and selected clips were spliced together in the desired order. The technicians who performed this labor-intensive function were specialists.
In today's digital domain, as with other types of graphic media, computers have revolutionized the process of editing and assembling film and video, providing much more flexibility. With digital video editing migrated to the desktop computer, anyone with access to it could create their own movies. Today decent cameras are built into mobile phones that produce edit-ready footage. It's just a matter of connecting your device to the computer and editing right away. Going one step further, nearly all mobile devices are capable of editing videos without the need of accessories. Creating your own movies is practically as simple as it can be.
If you’re thinking that digital video is only good for making home movies, think again. With an ever-growing selection of software and apps for consumers and professionals, you can record your own video and achieve impressive quality at an affordable price. Even major motion pictures are being shot on mobile phones — making it easier and faster to enhance the footage with visual effects. The availability of effects that make the pristine quality of video appear to take on the characteristically so, film-like qualities many aficionados prefer is already old news. Today, digital video offers up to 4K and very soon 8K resolution, with technology delivering impressive tonal scale and brightness range. It appears that the ultimate outcome of the digital video revolution is that someday in the not-so-distant future, film will virtually disappear and everything from experimental videos to feature films will be shot as digital video.
There’s never been a better time to get involved in video and motion graphics. If you’re already proficient at using Adobe software, you can create content that can be viewed everywhere, from television and theater screens, personal computers, tablets, and cell phones. It can be distributed by means of the Internet or intranets, broadcast, cable, satellite, optical discs, and recorded onto more traditional media, such as film and videotape.
There are many ways for creative professionals to incorporate video and motion graphics into their work — such opportunities are as boundless as your imagination. You can use typography, editing, and animation skills to create montages, compelling presentations, and impressive PR content. Tools exist today that enable your plan to convert into excellent audio-visual content using hardware plus lots and lots of your imagination.
A basic understanding of digital video can help you expand your creative reach. When you show a sequence of still images to a human eye, the brain fills in the gaps and perceives continuous motion. Film and video use this same principle to animate photographic images, which appear to fluidly move when shown sequentially at an appropriate rate. With similar functions, the difference between film and video is a matter of physical media as well as genre. Some audiences believe that its dynamic range makes film a more expressive medium for arts and entertainment. The tradition of filmmaking— the painstaking lighting and direction of individual scenes typically shot by a meticulously positioned single camera in multiple takes, the art and science of processing film to achieve desired effects, the care taken in editing to dramatically develop a story, and the host of highly skilled professionals typically employed in both production and post-production—has also contributed to the perception that film is a more erudite or more valuable medium. Like still photography, film and video used to be only analog media. e “cutting” room was just that—the place where unwanted clips ended up on the floor, and selected clips were spliced together in the desired order. The technicians who performed this labor-intensive function were specialists.
In today's digital domain, as with other types of graphic media, computers have revolutionized the process of editing and assembling film and video, providing much more flexibility. With digital video editing migrated to the desktop computer, anyone with access to it could create their own movies. Today decent cameras are built into mobile phones that produce edit-ready footage. It's just a matter of connecting your device to the computer and editing right away. Going one step further, nearly all mobile devices are capable of editing videos without the need of accessories. Creating your own movies is practically as simple as it can be.
If you’re thinking that digital video is only good for making home movies, think again. With an ever-growing selection of software and apps for consumers and professionals, you can record your own video and achieve impressive quality at an affordable price. Even major motion pictures are being shot on mobile phones — making it easier and faster to enhance the footage with visual effects. The availability of effects that make the pristine quality of video appear to take on the characteristically so, film-like qualities many aficionados prefer is already old news. Today, digital video offers up to 4K and very soon 8K resolution, with technology delivering impressive tonal scale and brightness range. It appears that the ultimate outcome of the digital video revolution is that someday in the not-so-distant future, film will virtually disappear and everything from experimental videos to feature films will be shot as digital video.
There’s never been a better time to get involved in video and motion graphics. If you’re already proficient at using Adobe software, you can create content that can be viewed everywhere, from television and theater screens, personal computers, tablets, and cell phones. It can be distributed by means of the Internet or intranets, broadcast, cable, satellite, optical discs, and recorded onto more traditional media, such as film and videotape.
There are many ways for creative professionals to incorporate video and motion graphics into their work — such opportunities are as boundless as your imagination. You can use typography, editing, and animation skills to create montages, compelling presentations, and impressive PR content. Tools exist today that enable your plan to convert into excellent audio-visual content using hardware plus lots and lots of your imagination.
(Some excerpts are based on Adobe's whitepaper, "An Introduction to Digital Video for Creative Professionals").
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