By Dylan Highsmith, DotLot Editor, The Buddy Group

As we mentioned on Wednesday, Adobe had a very knowledgeable tech staff presenting personal tutorials on some of the neater features of NAB. At DotLot, a good deal of our workflow takes place within the CS3 suite, so we’d like to embellish on the nature of some cool features that you may or may not be aware of in CS3.

First off, it was neat to see the integration of Photoshop’s Vanishing Point feature into AfterEffects. Simply by plotting a square mesh of each face of a photograph of a two-dimensional building, AfterEffects is able to interpret that information to generate a three dimensional object. Meaning, you can take any image of any flat-planed object from Photoshop, and within a matter of minutes have a three-dimensional representation that you can light and move a camera around in AfterEffects.

Also the brainstorm function in AE CS3 is an interesting feature that was demonstrated. Brainstorm takes any simple animations that you may have done, and extrapolates several other animations using the same parameters that you keyframed. Then, it allows you to preview them and choose your favorites, and continues making successive approximations based on your preferences. This is a very interesting feature if you are hitting a wall generating some motion graphics and want to see an array of different options without trying them one at a time; it really cuts down on a lot of trial and error.

Now we’re off to plan our upcoming client projects and figure out which of the cool new toys we saw at NAB will be the most useful and appropriate. We already own CS3 – the rest is up to budget approval. Did we mention we love our CEO? He’s great! Long live Chief Buddy Pete!