No Stupid Questions with Colin Smith

We've all heard the term ""Ken Burns Effect"", but do you know that this random effect will sometimes zoom into areas you don't want to zoom into? This tutorial will show you how to easily import images and give you complete control to pan, zoom, and travel across images to create customized dynamic slideshows that you can output to Blu-ray, DVD or any device. The ease and power of this tutorial comes from using custom presets for motion and effects in Premiere Pro CS5; a feature that many users tend to miss.

Live Trace is one of Illustrator's most unique features but sometimes the vector result contains small unwanted artifacts. This tutorial shows you how to use Photoshop layers in combination with Illustrator Live Trace to fine tune the final vector result to give you gorgeous, transparent results with very little effort and still maintain complete control.

Adobe InDesign CS5 is the perfect tool to use when authoring books and this demonstration will introduce you to a simple technique that ensures the cover of your ePub will look exactly like the original artwork including rich typesetting, drawn objects and images. By placing and InDesign document into an existing InDesign document, you bypass the inherent restrictions of the ePub format and your book cover looks fantastic no matter what device you use.Special thanks for Colin Fleming for creating this fantastic technique.

Watch how Illustrator and After Effects can be used together to create organic animations using simple masks copied and pasted between the two applications. Also see how the Twirl tool in Illustrator can be used to distort paths and make it look as if “tendrils” are growing outward. This all comes together in After Effects by setting the first vertex and ensuring your blended masks don’t flip inside out.

Adobe Bridge includes a powerful feature that allows you to output PDF’s using the built-in Output module. This often overlooked feature makes create contact sheets, full-page outputs, and other layouts a breeze using ready made templates or even customized design. You’ll also see how to overlay transparent watermarks for image protection and branding.

Trying to remember where all your files are by filename alone is a losing battle with hard drives that hold hundreds of thousands of files. Metadata can help narrow your searches by allowing you to embed unique information about each file. Adobe Bridge will allow you to apply Metadata templates to thousands of files automatically so you can get started organizing your files today.

Photoshop is the perfect place to create and import complex 3D models, light them, animate them and output mind blowing creations. This demonstration will show you how easy it is to create a texture that uses animated layers that play back directly on 3D models and react to lights, environments and more.

There are times when you need to publish a video but hide a portion from view. Many times it’s someone’s face that gets blocked out by pixelating the area around it. This demonstration shows you how you can use the Extended version of Photoshop to import a video and add a non-destructive blur layer that follows someone’s face anywhere in the frame. The final result can be output to any video format or individual still images so you can guarantee no will ever know who was under that blur.