The President's Corner by Jeff Tow, Chapter President What a year. I'd like to start off by thanking the board / committee members who helped out this year. Scott, Chris, Karen, Mike, Dawn, Michele... great work. We managed a turnaround of our chapter in a very short time; this time last year things looked a little grim. In fact, we were at Triangle Productions for the last meeting when people stood up and said "yes" we want this chapter to continue. From that day forward we made it happen. Of course, we don't take all the credit... I give the large majority of the credit to our members who showed up in record numbers this year. New membership is on the rise and we had nice student turnout. So, let's look ahead. As this is my last meeting as president of the Mid-Michigan chapter, I'm excited to pass the virtual baton to Scott VanderSchel. He is one of the most dedicated members of our chapter... year in and year out attending every meeting. He has networked like crazy and it has paid off... jobs for himself, jobs for others, and a whole stack of knowledge. We will be in good hands with Scott at the helm. I will remain on the board as past-prez and help out in any way that I can. The momentum is great and we want to keep it up. At the same time, I have been elected as president of MCA-International. This year, I am serving as president-elect, and will begin my presidency in 2009. Seeing this organization from an international level changes your perspective. My networking circle has grown from 50+ local members to 800+ international members. Why not work in California, Georgia, Wisconsin, New Zealand? Have a question that you can't find the answer to? Check with members all over the country? Need a crew somewhere? Check the directory and get a trusted resource. Member benefits, international web listing, plus the friendships, national conferences/meetings, video festivals and more. I will always be available to answer any questions you have. This is a great organization. Keep it strong... don't just join, be ACTIVE. Remember, one very small job pays for your membership (which is a tax write-off in the first place*). Hard to beat. Membership does have its privileges, take advantage of them. Thank you for allowing me to serve as president of the chapter this year. It has been a wonderful experience that I will always remember. *Check with your accountant

Rewind: March Meeting with Adobe

By Scott VanderSchel, Mid-Michigan MCAI President-Elect

Our Mid Michigan MCA-I meeting in March was a great success. Wolverine World Wide hosted the event with Adobe guru, Josh Fossard, providing an informative and entertaining presentation. Josh put Adobe CS3 through its paces, with lots of tips and techniques included along the way.

As an added benefit, those attending got a great tour of Wolverine World Wide and their top notch media production facility. Thanks again to Rick Bengelink for graciously hosting this event and thanks to Toolfarm for providing food.

The NAB Redux

By Michele Yamazaki

Sunday, April 13 - Arriving in Las Vegas

Alicia VanHeulen (fellow Toolfarmer & former Postworker) and I got into Vegas around 6pm and caught a taxi in the organized chaos outside the airport. I hate cabs. Hate em. I always get a weird cab driver who wants to come to my house or has some strange hobby he wants to tell me all about. This time, we got to spend 25 minutes hearing about how to prepare Lake Superior Whitefish.

We checked in at the Sahara, which was chosen souly on the fact that you don't have to walk through a casino to get to the monorail. We had plans to go to the FMC party on Sunday evening with John Kerr from Red Giant. It was $85 to get into the rooftop party at Pure at Caesar's Palace, however, RG was a sponsor, so we told them we were guests of John Kerr and they let us in with no problem. We had to walk through about a mile of corridors and stairways to get up to the roof where they had a small buffet of carved beef, shrimp on skewers and spring rolls, which were completely gone. We did have some refreshingly tasty drinks of vodka, cranberry, sprite, and grapefruit juice. There was a woman whose body was being painted on the patio, some people carrying around gobs of hula hoops, as well a big giveaway, that we didn't enter, unfortunately. We met some really cool people from Hawaii (Hi Shanti). We did finally meet up with John Kerr, Sean Safreed and Jeremy Hill from Red Giant, as well as our good friend Seth Hancock from ICVA and his lovely wife Lisa.

After the party, we headed to Mesa, Bobby Flay's restaurant, with the Red Giant guys and had a nice dinner. By the time we left, it was 3:00am our time, so we were tired, to say the least.

Monday, April 14 - Day one of the convention

7:45am - We took the monorail to the convention center. This was our first day on the convention center floor, and Alicia's first NAB ever. I took her to the doorway and pointed her to the Digieffects booth where she was starting her day, but I couldn't get in to the show floor due to the fact that I never received my badge! I had a printout receipt that I had registered in December. It took a while at registration but somehow they lost my registration. After 45 minutes, I was badged.

I headed over to Red Giant, where I had a presentation on Magic Bullet Looks at 10am. Looks is very easy to demo and lots of fun to use, and I have to say, the presentation went pretty well. I've just learned to get through the spiel within 10 minutes because people were standing and I wasn't giving a tutorial, but an overview. The Looks Theatre sold it for a lot of people. It was really great seeing everyone at the RG booth and meeting the new RG employees. Thanks for the nuts and popcorn, Beth! Delicious.

At 1:00pm each day I demoed Boris Continuum Complete and Boris Final Effects Complete at the Boris FX booth. This booth was on the middle aisle of the show floor in a highly trafficked area. Boris FX had a theatre set up with about 25 seats. It was the Motion Key plug-in for BCC that really seemed to get a lot of attention. I'll be putting together a tutorial for Motion Key in the next few weeks, because it really is an amazingly cool plug-in. It garnered lots of ooh's and aah's as a silver car driving across a busy street scene is removed from the shot with ease. I showed off the BCC UpRez plug-in, which converts SD to HD and uses a nifty feature called Magic Sharpen. I demoed the BCC Pan & Zoom which makes the Ken Burns style effects. I showed a few other BCC plug-ins and Final Effects Complete (FEC). Did you know all FEC plug-ins contain motion trackers and a feature called Pixel Chooser, which is a built-in masking tool? If you would've known that during the presentation, you could have won a Boris hat or training Class on Demand Boris Continuum Complete Training DVD.

Digieffects and Red Giant's booths were directly behind each other in the Plug-in Pavillion, which made things very nice for us. Digieffects was demoing the new Damage, as well as the Simulate and Natural Forces plug-ins for After Effects, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Combusion and Boris Red, which will be out in 4-6 weeks. We hadn't seen the new plug-ins at all yet, so it was a big difficult to answer questions. We ended up setting up little comps with examples, but then found the best way to demo was by using the little blue button. What is this little blue button? It's the randomizer. Shin Kurokawa, the engineer at Digieffects explained that he put the button in for testing purposes so he could see the range of values for each parameter without having to change all of the sliders each time, and soon realized that it's brilliant for getting ideas and seeing what variety of looks that the plug-in can produce. Tim Kolb, David Vieria and Robert Sharp were also at the booth with us all week. Robert... smart move on the couch rental. You can't go wrong with a big comfy couch, especially after you've been on the show floor all day.

Monday night was the IMUG Media Motion Ball 2008 at the Sahara Hotel, which I've attended the last 4 years. The crowd is generally IMUG and AE-List people. Brian Maffitt of Total Training was the speaker and once again and he was hilarious! Brian is a collector of crazy movie memorabilia and marketing gimmicks from William Castle fims. The presentation was about brilliant marketing campaigns for these movies. Macabre with the tagline 'So Terrifying We Insure You For $1000 against Death By Fright! (Not valid for persons with heart or nervous conditions)'. He showed us an original Tingler (filmed in "Percepto"). The best film of all, The House on Haunted Hill, filmed in "Emergo", in which an inflatable skeleton would pop out over the scene. Well, Brian had one of these inflatable skeletons with him at the dinner! We laughed, we cried, it was better than The Tingler.

Oh, there's lots more, but you'll have to come to the meeting May 6!

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments - we are here for you!

Best Regards,

Jeff Tow
MCA-I Mid-Michigan Chapter President