The 12.3-megapixel Olympus E-620 is one of the lightest, most compact DSLRs on the market. It succeeds Olympus’s E-520 and inherits features from the higher end E-30 DSLR. The E-620 has built-in image stabilization that works with any Four Thirds lens, and an articulated 2.7″ LCD that makes shooting with Live View efficient. Buttons on the back are illuminated for easy identification in low-light shooting, and Olympus has added the E-30’s wonderful Creative Art and Multiple Exposure filters to the E-620’s conventional command dial. Curiously, the E-620 bucks a trend by not including video capture—a compelling feature in this very competitive price range.

The plastic body feels solid; however, it has no weatherproofing seals and the comparatively shallow grip might feel uncomfortable in big hands. The overall design facilitates familiarity via quick access to frequently used features. It uses dedicated buttons for features such as Live View and Image Stabilization, plus an onscreen superpanel provides all the options for features including white balance, metering, and image quality. To a great extent, scrolling through menus is eliminated.

The camera records in RAW and JPEG formats and has slots for CompactFlash and xD memory cards. The RAW format is supported in both Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. The E-620 and E-30 use the same Four Thirds Live MOS image sensor; however, the algorithms and digital engines vary and the resulting image quality in the E-620 files, although not terrible, contain comparatively more noise when shooting in either low light or ISOs greater than 800. In general, image quality is quite good, especially at ISOs under 800.

The files have a wide dynamic range filled with shadow and highlight detail, and hold up to make 17×22″ prints. The sensor offers a choice of four aspect ratios—4:3, 6:6, 16:9, and 3:2—and the cropped areas are displayed in Live View mode. The optical viewfinder is slightly larger than the E-520, but I found it difficult to see the information displayed at the bottom—something to consider if you wear glasses. The E-520’s three-point AF viewfinder system has been replaced with a fast seven-point system that covers a wider area and provides for quick, smooth focusing. Continuous shooting is slightly faster at 4 frames per second versus 3.5. The five-mode metering system and shutter speed range of 60 seconds to 1/4000, plus Bulb, are the same as on the E-520.

The Multiple Exposure filter is a hoot. It allows you to take a shot and then view and compose another subject on the same frame, all while maintaining the original image onscreen.

The 2.7″ 230,000-pixel, articulated LCD facilitates composing subjects at low or high angles, greatly improving the functionality of Live View. It holds up relatively well in bright light. Displays in Live View include an alignment grid, a live histogram, and four live thumbnail previews of different white balance or exposure compensations to help you visualize your image before exposure. Live View offers three AF modes and appears snappier than previous iterations, but it’s still no match for the optical viewfinder when shooting a moving subject. When using Image Stabilization (IS) with Live View, the stabilized effect appears only briefly on the LCD. I preferred the E-520’s implementation, which held the stabilized image as long as you depressed the shutter button half way. Still, the E-620’s IS is effective and compensated for movement up to about three stops—it was rock solid at 1/15 second. The E-620 is a budget-minded, solid, easy-to-learn DSLR.—Steve Baczewski

Company: Olympus America Inc.
Price: $699.99 with 14–42mm lens
Web: www.olympusamerica.com
Rating: 4

Hot: Built-in wireless flash remote; effective dust-removal system
Not: No video capture

Olympus E-620 images

Click on a thumbnail for a larger image. All images ©Steve Baczewski.

Prezi is a Flash-based visualization, storytelling, and presentation tool that allows you to create nonlinear presentations. Using the simple editor, you can place text, images, video, Flash files, and draw lines to show relationships between each item. The final result is a visual map that lets users zoom in and out and navigate to content in a clickable environment.

It takes a while to get used to Prezi’s interface—especially the Zebra, which allows you to position and resize objects. The site offers excellent support with an online manual, tutorial videos, examples, and a blog. Perhaps the best feature is that it allows designers to focus on designing. Using Prezi, you can present a concept and supply multiple branches to supporting media without writing a line of code—it’s like sketching an idea on a napkin!

As a hosted solution, Prezi has three pricing structures: Free, Enjoy (approximately $58/year), and Pro (approximately $176/year). The Free version gives you up to 100 MB of storage on their site, includes the Prezi logo on your presentation, and makes your presentations public. For an annual fee, the Enjoy and Pro versions let you create private presentations and access additional online storage space. Pro allows you to download a desktop version of their editing software. Free and Enjoy users design online by uploading content to the Prezi server. All versions allow you to use the simple editor; download your presentations and show them from your computer; create groups to share and collaborate with; import images, videos, PDFs, and Flash files; and embed presentations into blogs and websites.

Prezi is easy to use but when putting together a presentation, I found it sometimes took several seconds to respond while moving or resizing an object. Even with its few glitches, Prezi is a unique tool you’ll want to consider adding to your toolset.—Cyndy Cashman

Company: Prezi
Price: Approx. $176/year (Pro)
Web: www.prezi.com
Rating: 4.5

Hot: Innovative; easy to use; affordable
Not: Occasional slow response

The new professional-level Quadro FX 4800 with 1.5 GB of memory brings a much-needed performance upgrade to the Mac Pro lineup. But why do you need a $1,799 graphics card? If you’re not a full-time design/graphics professional with a large budget, you probably don’t. But if you are, the timesaving and quality precision you’ll get with this card pays for itself in no time.

Where this card shines is the NVIDIA’s revolutionary new CUDA technology and Elemental Technologies Elemental Accelerator, which lets your system use all 192 GPU processor cores instead of just the typical eight cores in a Mac Pro CPU. Not only will your system benefit from the increased performance, using the GPU will speed up your workflow by freeing up your CPU to do other tasks. So, what does this mean for the Adobe Creative Suite professional?

Imagine being able to view After Effects’ nested compositions or rendering effects such as Bilateral Blur, Turbulent Noise, and Depth of Field Blur three to five times faster, or even seeing those effects in near real time as you make adjustments? Not to mention rendering the Cartoon Effect 38x faster with the GPU rather than CPU rendering. And it doesn’t stop there! You’re looking at massive speed increases in Photoshop CS4 vs. non-GPU accelerated computers, and the image’s interpolation quality far exceeds that of non-GPU-accelerated systems. In addition, the Elemental Accelerator allows Adobe Premiere to render H.264 movies using the GPU at faster-than-real-time speeds, which is pretty much unheard of with CPU rendering. Plus you’ll be able to render resized movies in half the time.

If you need a professional choice when it comes to workstation-level graphics on the Mac Pro, then look no further than the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800.—Eric Kuna

Company: NVIDIA Corporation
Price: $1,799
Web: www.nvidia.com
Rating: 4.5

Hot: GPU acceleration; CUDA technology; Elemental Accelerator
Not: Limited GPU support outside Adobe Apps; cost

The MAPublisher plug-in for Illustrator CS3 and CS4 is not for the timid: You should be familiar with GIS (Geographic Information System) data and have a need to publish that data in a visual format. Simply put, the plug-in uses GIS data to create maps in Illustrator. You first create an Illustrator file and import the GIS data (in popular data formats such as AutoCAD, ESRI, MapInfo, and USGS) to create maps up to 200″ square. After importing, you can manipulate the resulting map in a number of ways.

Last time I used MAPublisher, it was version 4; it’s come a long way since then. Exciting new features include the ability to export maps to an interactive Flash file (this alone could expand the user base); automate the labeling of map features (as an optional add-on); use stylesheets for consistent formatting; work with GPS data; crop maps without messing up the overall map coordinates; and use CS4’s multiple artboards. Some of these features take time to set up and use properly; however, most of the setup work can be saved for future use.

The only fault I found was not with the MAPublisher plug-in, but with the tutorials. They certainly showed how to work with the plug-in’s features well enough (and perhaps that’s all you might expect) but I’d have liked more information on how the data could be used after manipulating it with the tools. I suspect Avenza didn’t want to insult their more-experienced audience by telling them how to do their jobs because, as mentioned above, you need to be familiar with GIS and its use. But a section on “why you might need and how you can use this data” might be useful for beginners in the GIS arena.—David Creamer

Company: Avenza Systems Inc.
Price: $1,249 (Upgrade $549)
Web: www.avenza.com
Rating: 5

Hot: Creates maps from GIS data
Not: Cost

GridIron Software’s Flow cannot be fully explained in this amount of space—it’s too vast and too valuable. Instead, I’ll tell you what it does and what it’s good for. In my testing, it works as promised, and beyond.

Flow is a “visual workflow manager” that keeps track of the relationships between all the files you use and gives you access to that data whenever you need it. You need Flow because even though applications such as InDesign and Illustrator remember the locations of the pictures and other assets you place into each document, they can’t keep track of every document that uses an individual asset. For example, if you create a logo, image, animation, movie, sound, etc., and then use it in 245 documents, only Flow can tell you which documents use that asset—even if it was exported to a PDF or PowerPoint file, or rendered to a movie. Without Flow, how could you possibly update every document that uses a specific logo or image?

Flow keeps track of every file placed within every other file, and every exported file generated by a file. And every version. So, it can answer the question, “Where did we get the text that was placed into the InDesign document that created the PDF I’m looking at right now?” It can even show you all the other PDFs that were generated from that InDesign document, and all the assets within those PDFs. It also keeps copies of files every time you save, so you can recover files from several revisions back. Of course, you have control over how many older files it saves to prevent your hard drives from filling up.

Flow tracks the time you spend actually using each application. Because it also tracks the relationships between files, it knows how much time you’ve spent on an entire project—automatically. You can manually or automatically export this data to any database or spreadsheet for billing calculations.

It’s almost universal: Flow works with every common creative app, including the Adobe Creative Suite, video- and sound-editing applications from Adobe and Apple, Microsoft Office, 3D apps, AutoCAD, CorelDRAW, Painter, text files, and any other file you choose to associate with a project—just drag it onto another document in Flow’s map to connect them. Version 1 doesn’t track QuarkXPress or Adobe Photoshop Lightroom files, but GridIron promises to support them soon. It works on Mac OS X 10.5 and above, and Windows XP or Vista.

Given its complexity, Flow’s interface is as simple as I could imagine. The main Map window displays a flowchart that connects all the documents a file is related to. If you click a connected file, the map changes to show all the connections for that file. You can then click any file to open it.

There’s an optional floating Dashboard window that keeps track of files you move (or delete!) that are being used by other documents. This display updates in real time as you move files around on your hard drive. You can also display a similar window in any CS3 or CS4 application as you work on documents. This window shows all the assets that depend on the current file, all the versions of that file, time spent working on that file, etc.

Amazingly, workgroups can even share a Map so that everyone sees changes to all the files in a project as they’re made. For $133 per member of your workgroup, Flow will quickly repay you many times over.
—Jay Nelson

Company: GridIron Software
Price: $299
Web: www.gridironsoftware.com
Rating: 4

Hot: Completely new solution to a timeless problem
Not: Doesn’t yet support Lightroom or QuarkXPress

Director 11.5 will be familiar to users of previous versions but some additions improve productivity, for example: multiple undos/redos, stage docking, enhanced user interface, Sprite, channel naming, and a new Help System. But the hot addition in audio is 5.1-channel surround sound that, along with real-time mixing ability, means you can add a mixer to your movie to import audio files and cast members.

Of prime interest to game developers is the new, advanced-physics that’s based on the NVIDIA (registered) PhysX engine, so you can simulate gravity and other “real-life” effects. Other new features include H.264 support, which means that developers can now include HD content. Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) lets you stream audio or video in web-based applications. And now Director supports more than 40 video, audio, and image file formats—SWF, FLV, F4V, DVD-Video, bitmaps, vectors, 3D, and text, to name a few.

What’s user-friendly and pretty slick is when you open a project created in an earlier version of Director. You can select the encoding applied and choose to re-create the project in a subfolder of the original project folder or to a custom location. I sometimes run across multiple versions of a project created for what I thought was a good, “Oh, I’ll remember-that” reason. But then I don’t remember why I have two versions; so the option to save in the same folder is a terrific addition for me. I’ve upgraded several projects and both the upgrades and the originals do what they’re supposed to do.

Two issues for me are the lack of AS3 support as referenced in the Help file: “Flash 9 movies with AS3 or Flex components may not work as intended in Director.” And the price point for Director 11.5 is a little steep.
—Tamara Fry-Pietsch

Company: Adobe Systems Incorporated
Price: $999 (upgrade $299)
Web: www.adobe.com
Rating: 3

Hot: H.264, FLV, SWF, Surround Sound, Google SketchUp 3D support
Not: Lack of AS3 support; price

After Effects has had z-space for what seems like forever and you can do a lot with it, but it’s limited to the point that many people refer to it as 2.5D instead of real 3D. Digieffects has brought us closer to true 3D than ever before with their new plug-in, FreeForm AE.

Digieffects calls FreeForm AE a 3D mesh warping tool “that allows users to manipulate a flat object into almost any shape using a mesh in 3D space.” In other words, it’s a displacement map on steroids. You can take an image or solid and manipulate it with points on a scalable grid or, better yet, create a displacement map by using another layer and applying fractal noise.

To jump in and create a flag blowing, mountainous terrain, or a liquid effect is easy. Unfortunately, it’s going to take a lot more experimentation, patience, and processing power to build really advanced shapes. Also worth mentioning is that FreeForm functions in its own 3D world, not global 3D.

What’s the one thing that everyone wants to be able to accomplish in After Effects? 3D text, of course! Well, after a few hours of play, it came close but with detail maxed out, producing some rough edges—not worth the strain on processors. Digieffects didn’t tout this as a text-extrusion tool, but you can’t knock a guy for trying.

FreeForm is great at what it can do, but it isn’t going to be used every day, so the $299 price tag seems out of reach for freelancers and small production houses. Combine that with how much time is required for building more intricate shapes and things aren’t looking good. On the other hand, Digieffects has brought us so much closer to what we want—that’s worth something, right?—Jason Scrivner

Company: Digieffects
Price: $299
Web: www.digieffects.com
Rating: 2.5

Hot: Killer concept that pushes the boundaries of After Effects
Not: Price; limited usability

The best tools are the least sexy, and CoreMelt ImageFlow FX is a perfect example. It’s not the sort of tool that will wow you when you see it demonstrated at a conference or user-group meeting, but it’s the tool that may save you hours of toil. That’s better than sexy; that’s money in the bank.

Put simply, ImageFlow FX is a Mac-only plug-in for After Effects, Motion, and Final Cut Pro that generates slide shows from still images. You apply it to a solid and then, in the Effect Controls panel, point it to a folder that contains images. ImageFlow FX displays each image, one by one, with cool transitions between images. If you’ve ever tried to do this by hand, you know how boring and time-consuming it can be.

ImageFlow FX will display the images or videos in the folder in filename order or in a random order. That’s probably good enough for most purposes, though I wish it would let me order the images any way I want. To get around this, I name my images image01.png, image02.png, image03.png, etc. in the order I want them to appear (ImageFlow FX works with most standard image and video types, not just PNGs).

New to version 2 is the ability to pull images from “image wells,” which are layers in your Composition. You can pull images from up to eight wells.

ImageFlow FX isn’t a single effect—it’s a suite of 25 effects, each one containing a different transition. Some of the transitions are simple, such as fade-ins and drop-downs; others are more complex, such as 3D zooms, carousels, and image walls. Each effect has a default behavior that you can easily customize, changing timings and x, y, and z positions.

The effects allow you to add custom masks and frames to images. ImageFlow ships with many standard frames, but you can add your own. You can choose to display each image just once, or you can loop the images so that after the last one displays, the slide show begins again with the first image. The effects also support blend modes, so as various transitions cause images to overlap, they can interact with each other in interesting ways. If your images aren’t all the same size, you can tell ImageFlow FX to leave them as is or scale them to fit so they’re all the same. I’ve gotten best results when my images are all the same size, so if I have images of different dimensions, I usually animate them in groups, giving each group its own instance of an ImageFlow FX effect.

I’ve also been experimenting with using ImageFlow FX to create quick, funky backgrounds. I fill several folders full of random images and then layer random, looping slide shows on top of each other, mixing them together with blend modes.

As is my usual custom, I initially tried out ImageFlow FX by downloading the free, 15-day trial version. I was pleased to discover that CoreMelt let me keep four of the 25 effects permanently, with no obligation to buy the full product. The four free effects are Carousel, Continuous Random Pan, Multi Pop Forward, and Filmstrip. But it was a no-brainer choosing to buy the suite. I knew my $129 would repay itself almost immediately, giving me more time to focus on really creative work rather than sequencing dozens of still images on a timeline.—Marcus Geduld

Company: CoreMelt Pty Ltd
Price: $129
Web: www.coremelt.com
Rating: 4

Hot: Huge time saver; bargain: 25 effects for $129
Not: Mac only; lack of built-in image ordering

Vue 7.5 Infinite from e-on software is a standalone product used for creating natural 3D environments from the ground up. It was released with Vue 7.5 xStream, which is a more integrated solution for use in Autodesk 3ds Max, Maya and XSI, MAXON CINEMA 4D, and Newtek LightWave (and it costs a bit more as well). They offer several versions, so there’s sure to be one for every price and level of designer, from beginner to advanced.

If you’re not familiar with Vue Infinite, it’s an advanced application used for creating, animating, and rendering 3D environments. It’s been used by many studios for matte painting and special effects, and has been featured in movies such as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. So you can see this is a pretty amazing program that allows you create some great work with a level of detail that you’ll be very pleased with.

Vue 7.5 Infinite enables you to create scenes from scratch, beginning with the terrain, then clouds, water, plants, etc., until you have the landscape that you want. The amazing thing about how the terrain is created is that the scene is always very detailed, even when you zoom in. The overall quality and handling of the procedural terrains have been dramatically improved over the previous versions. Improvements began with version 7, which allowed you to choose from two groups of presets: ordinary procedural terrains and infinite terrains (which creates procedural terrains so large that they offer the option of using it to replace the ground plane). This carries over in 7.5, along with the new features of material mapping on terrains, planetary rendering, improved cloud technology, and animated EcoSystem population.

Not to be overlooked, Vue’s ability to create realistic 3D plants and trees is truly impressive. To create these, all you have to do is click on the Plant tool icon. Vue 7.5 has a more robust selection of species (more than 160) and includes categories such as grass, shrubs, trees, and more. But that’s not all. It’s not too often that you just want to put one tree or shrub into a scene, so that’s where Vue’s amazing EcoSystem technology comes in. This allows you to load a mixture of plants, rocks, and terrain to create a visually pleasing landscape. To top that off, the new animated EcoSystem populations feature enables you to create populations of elements that evolve over time to create effects that evolve, such as the growth of a forest.

This review only barely scratches the surface of what this program has to offer. I think this is definitely a program that you’ll want to check out if you’re creating landscapes of any kind for the digital world. I use Vue as one of the tools in my creative workflow because it works great with my other 3D applications and it’s my favorite tool to compose and render scenes.—Bruce Bicknell

Company: e-on software, inc.
Price: Download $895; Boxed $935
Web: www.e-onsoftware.com
Rating: 4.5

Hot: EcoSystem technology; clouds, water, and import options; rendering
Not: Expensive; powerful system required; steep learning curve

PDF2ID now comes in two versions: Professional and Standard. Professional includes all the Standard features, plus three unique features. For just the second version of the PDF2ID plug-in, it has a nice list of new features.

Two important new features are frames linking and the Typeface library. Frames linking does exactly what the name implies—it tries to intelligently link the frames based on similar type styles. It appears that the text linking is limited to single pages, as it didn’t link across spreads. The Typeface library is a repository of saved font substitutions, which can be referenced for future documents—a big time saver when dealing with standard Windows-to-Mac fonts or Type1-to-OpenType conversions. (InDesign could use this feature!)

Other useful features include the ability to save presets of the conversion settings, and the PDF inspector, which gives general information about the PDF before conversion. The Professional version adds the option of color spaces other than RGB, converting images to CMYK-TIFF, and multiple-processor conversion. It’s well worth the extra $100 for those in the printing business.

There are a couple of features I’d like to see in the next version (in addition to even more accurate translation): Paragraph and character styles named by the typeface and type size to help identify where the styles were used; and the ability to install the plug-in in different versions of InDesign on the same computer (currently, the plug-in removes any previous install, even of the same version).

While the PDF2ID plug-in works well overall, don’t expect seamless translations—even for simple PDFs. A great deal depends on how the PDF was created. This version did a better job converting graphics, but still had trouble with basic two-column text threads. If you need to convert a number of PDFs, this plug-in can save a lot of re-creation time.—David Creamer

Company: Recosoft Corporation
Price: $399 Pro; $299 Standard
Web: www.recosoft.com
Rating: 4

Hot: Easy-to-use conversion plug-in
Not: Text flow doesn’t extend across multiple pages; basic translation errors