Graphic layouts ala photo shop and Final Cut Pro and video editing

IS anyone here skilled at audio as well as graphics/video? I've always been curious about doing print layout work as well as video editing/filming.


As far as graphics, I know I'd need to learn photoshop and maybe quark or some other layout program (ex girlfriend did graphics), but I know nothing about what to read to learn

Also,

How much harder is video than audio?

I know NOTHING about video and would like to learn. Where should I look first? I know that most of the macs that we run audio on today are powerful enough to handle video

I'd like to try my hand at doing music videos or maybe a budget movies (just for myself not necessarily on a PRO basis (though I'd hope to be good at it ))

Does this make sense?

[proxy]

Must... go... to... bed... soon... but... one... quick... post...

Been cutting vocals all day and I'm mentally fried, but here goes:

Todays macs are certainly powerful enough to get you started. On the cheap you could get FC Express and have enough functionality to edit DV to see if you like it. I run Avid Xpress Pro (~1250) on a G4 (dual 1gig) and it works really well. Interface wise it's as close to a full blown Avid system as PT LE is to HD.

I think if you're interested, go for it. I find that applying skills from one discepline that you know well to a new one has surprising similarities sometimes. Video editing is like an abstract musical intrument, it's about rhythm and color and flow and composition, and most importantly, telling a story. A friend of mine who's a full time editor was saying "I've lost track of the number of times I see a fellow video guy pick up a guitar and dangit the b#stard can play..."

Plus you'd have the subliminal helper... understand how to make sound not crap, as a lot of those guys do audio prep.

Gotta sleep, but I hope that's a help.

- Justin

[Scinx]

After a long hiatus, here goes...

You are gonna want to learn either Adobe Illustrator or Quark or equivalent. Photoshop is useful, but for things like CD Artwork and whatnot (if thats what you are interested in) you are better served with an Illustrator type product...using vectors instead of Bitmaps...not to say you shouldnt learn Photoshop - cause that comes in very useful too...

As far as books...it depends how you learn...you can get a book on Illustrator from the "Teach Me Visually" line...which does everything with pictures pretty much...or you can use Virtual Classroom or Illustrator Shop Manual...(as you can tell, I'm on the Illustrator path and not Quark)...

In any case...what I'd recommend is, after picking which program you prefer, to goto Amazon or something and read reviews on the various instruction books. Then, fool around a bunch with the book at your disposal. One warning - Photoshop and Illustrator are two different animals.

As far as how hard it is...its just a different skillset...I like tooling around with graphics stuff when Im not in the mood for music stuff...or if Im resting my voice, or trying to be quiet at nighttime, etc. Definately a cool thing to know. In my case, however, Im quite aware that Id be better served by a professional than my own skills - although I havent delved in really deep.

Best of luck
Tak

Would I not be better off using Adobe In Design than illustrator?

[max cooper]

On the subject of graphics, what kind of end product are you thinking of?

I made my living as a photographer for many years, mostly doing album packaging. At a certain point, I started getting into designing the whole package and got pretty deep into Photoshop and Illustrator.

Which one you use has everything to do with whether or not you're working with photographs.

Illustrator is a very powerful illustration tool, and has pretty much taken over the market from Corel Draw these days, but it's also great for working with type.

The fact (as mentioned above) that Illustrator is vector-generated means that graphics are redrawn to the current resolution when a change is made. This makes things smoother.

Illustrator is more of a tool for creating graphics, and there's more that you can do as far as tweaking, bending, warping, etc.

In Design is more of a 'magazine editor' tool, as I see it. You can have multiple pages that repeat elements like backgrounds, headers, etc.

For example, if you were going to make a newspaper that had the same title bar and background, you might create those elements in Illustrator and import them into In Design.

There is crossover between the two, though. But Illustrator is the more powerful tool as far as creating a single graphic element.

If you were setting up a CD cover with a photo, you would probably get the photo tweaked in Photoshop and use Illustrator to set the type, although you could set the type within Photoshop, but in Photoshop, there are greater limits on what you can actually do to the type.

Here are a couple of characters that I zoomed in on, one in Photoshop and the other in Illustrator, if that helps explain things.