So I started drooling when I came across this little nugget of info on Designorati. If you’re a visual creative, you’ve probably heard that Adobe just released their new creative software suite, CS3.

Part of the CS3 suite is Premiere Pro, a video editing program, and After Effects, a great tool for doing post work and onlining your film.

They aren’t being released until the summer, unlike their print and web software. In the meantime, you can download a beta version for free and try it out!

I’ve got mine all downloaded, and I can’t wait to play around. I don’t know if there are any restrictions (watermarks, limited functionality, etc.) but it looks like you get the full power of these great, industry standard apps.

Enjoy!

Get Adobe Premiere Pro C3 Free Beta Version

Get Adobe After Effects Pro CS3 Free Beta Version

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If you do freelance work and wish you could be more efficient, go here. It’s filled with all sorts of tools that’ll help you keep track of your time, manage your projects, keep up on invoicing, get stock assets and many more things.

Now, are you going to ever use ALL these tools? No. Remember, you’ve got to set aside time for being creative and marketing yourself. I’ve always found a big danger in playing with the latest, greatest fun web widgets is that I spend too much time optimizing, and less time actually writing.

Pick through the list, find something useful and use it to save time. Many of the tools do the same thing.

101 Essential Freelancing Resources found on Lifehacker.

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Do you plot out your novels on notecards? I did too, until I stumbled across Google Notebook.

Some problems I ran into using paper notecards:

• Cards get scrambled out of order
• A pain to refer back to when I’m actually writing the book
• Don’t always have them on me in case inspiration strikes

So I decided to try out Google Notebook to plot out my current novel. It worked fantastically. Here are some tips and tricks you can use to not only plot out your own novel, but also to get the most out of Google Notebook.

Quickly Add Scenes

You can get the bare bones of your novel in place quickly by just clicking the blank space in your notebook. I rifled through all my ideas for scenes to get a rough idea for how the book would lay out.

Move Scenes Around

Once you get your first draft of an outline down, I always found it hard with notecards (and other electronic programs) to move scenes around without having to reread all the other scenes to make sure I knew where I was at.

With Google Notebook, you can drag and drop the individual notes you make. It ends up being very easy to scan your other scenes and play around with a different order.

Organize Your Chapters

You can add sections to your notebook and start grouping your scenes into chapters. The best part is you can still drag and drop individual scenes into whatever section you want.

Just click in the open space like you’re going to add a new note, then click “Add Section”. Drag any existing notes you want in there or start making new ones.

Use Google Notebook for Character Development Too

If you’re struggling to find a good way to keep all the notes on your characters in one place, Google Notebook has you covered there too. Just create a new notebook for all the different things you need to write a novel. Plot outline, character development, etc.

You can make each section a separate character. Now you can keep all your character notes and plot notes open while you’re writing your novel. Makes it pretty easy to keep track of everything if you can just tab back and forth through what you need.

Export an Outline to Google Docs

Once you have the outline done, it’s time to write the darn thing. Google Docs is a simple, web-based word processing tool that you can access from any computer with an internet connection.

Just click “Tools” in Google Notebook and you can export it to Google Docs. Then you’ve got everything laid out for you in a single sheet. You can use this as a guide as you write, or you can print it off as a handy outline to mark up.

Write or Get Critique From a Friend

Another great feature of Google Notebooks is that you can share your notebook as an editable document, or as a static HTML page.

So if you’ve got a writing partner and can’t sit together, you can collaborate online using the same notebook easily. You can even color code what you add so that you know who made what changes.

Or, you can send it to whoever you want as a HTML page and have them critique it for you.

Just click “Sharing Options” in the upper right corner.

Go to Google Notebook

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I’m a big advocate of carrying a notebook with you everywhere to jot down every single idea that pops into your head. Personally, I have 3 active at any one moment. One is always in my laptop bag, one is near my bed, and one is in the car. (It should go without saying that there is always a pen nearby too)

No matter how many notebooks you have, pretty soon they will start to fill up with gold nuggets just waiting to be mined. There will be plenty of turds in there that need to be flushed, too.

Every other week, I usually go back through what I’ve written in my notebooks. I often find myself expanding on ideas and writing more in there. If there’s something I want to explore, I add it to a “to-do” list. This is a very short list of ideas I actually think are worth exploring. Every day I set aside some time to do something on this list.

Sometimes, the idea gets killed after I explore it. The most important thing is to make yourself follow up on the ideas you write in your notebook. If you don’t periodically review it and bring the best things to the front of your mind, anything you write in a notebook is useless.

I’ve found making a short list that’s always changing is must easier to take action on because it doesn’t seem as intimidating as a huge notebook full of ideas that I have to surf through every time.

Every few months or so I’ll go through the whole thing just to see what is in there, but it’s usually the bi-weekly reviews of the newest material that adds the most to my to-do list.

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If you’re an aspiring filmmaker who wants to brush up on their technical knowledge, Cinematography: Image Making for Cinematographers, Directors, and Videographers is a decent resource for learning the hard facts about image making, lighting and film theory.

Unlike a book I wrote about earlier, this one is definitely not for a director or cinematographer making things on the cheap. At lots of points the author says things like “You need a minimum of four people working the camera except for the smallest of projects.”

Personally, I think that’s a load of bull. If you’re making films in the budget bloated world of Hollywood, yes, fine. But for most indies, advice like this doesn’t cut it.

What the book does do well is instruct you on the theory and the practical nature of cinematography. If you commit half of the knowledge in this book to memory, you should see a noticeable bump in the quality of your images.

Everything from exposing a scene properly to an analysis of what types of lights will produce the least flicker is in there.

That said, there’s very little discussion about how to use these theories and techniques to achieve a desired creative effect. But I don’t think the book set out achieve that, so we won’t knock them there.

One last minor detail that got me about the book was that a few of the images they showed as examples were pixelated and out of focus. It was a HUGE distraction in a book that’s supposed to be telling me how to create professional looking images.

Rated - 5 out of 10

Pick Up a Copy

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If you’re a working creative, the ideas you generate probably have to go through some type of approval process. Typically, you print something off, people scratch all over it, and you get it back to make changes. It’s hard enough having the committee redesign or rewrite your work, the least they could do is write legibly.

My co-workers and I have always tried to use some type of “electronic routing” solution, but it was always too complicated and non-digital people didn’t seem to “get it.” That’s why I’m optimistic about Review Basics, a piece of web-based software that lets you upload your work and have other people review it using an interface geared specifically towards providing feedback.

What I Like About ReviewBasics

• Uploading a .jpeg was easy and I can control who on the “design by committee team” has access to it
• Site design is slick and easy to use
• The walkthrough they provide up front is one of the best I’ve seen. Quickly shows you where to do things while your project is in there, not some generic template.
• All the functions are designed for one thing - feedback. Not too many extraneous actions here
• I was most impressed with the ability to comment on video. For people collaborating in this medium remotely, this completely eliminates the need for annoying video conference calls and WebEx
• As an author, it’s easy to sort through who made the comments and who hasn’t gotten back to me yet

What I Don’t Like About ReviewBasics

• When I created a user name and password, I was logged in as “anonymous” and had to log out and back in. Not a huge deal but when it comes to web apps, the little things count
• Since everything is done real-time, the interface got a little choppy at points
• The actual review interface has too much going on. I’d like to be able to collapse and expand things as I need to use them
• No version control. For me, this is huge. I’d like to be able to see where we’ve come from and what’s changed in a document if I need to.

All in all, ReviewBasics is mostly upside. If they tweak a few things as it gets out of Beta this should be a nice little app for working professionals.

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A lot of people use blogs to promote their creative work. But how do you get people to see what you’ve done?

We all know getting links and rss readers for your blog are keys to driving steady, reliable traffic. When I was first getting started, I knew that getting featured on digg, del.icio.us, technorati, and other blogs in my niche would be good things, but I had no idea how to do it.

So, here we go beginning bloggers. Here are some essential tools you can use to make it easy to get those links and get steady traffic.

• Comment on blogs within your niche and leave your blog url. I practice this regularly, and I get more traffic than if I just let my name above the comment be the sole link. The trade off is that this looks spammy.
• Set up a feed using FeedBurner. It’s very easy to set up and you let them do the work of adding an “Add to digg”, “Add to Del.icio.us” and “Email This” links to your feed. Plus the free tracking you get is excellent.
• Comment on blogs within your niche and leave your feed url. Rather than drive traffic to your site, drive your subscribers up. If the best reader is a loyal one, get in their reader as fast as you can
• Set up an email subscription on FeedBlitz. A great free email newsletter service that’s easy to set up and integrate on your blog. Plus, your email subscribers count towards your Feedburner subscription count. Not everyone uses RSS yet, so be sure to give options.
• Put your feed and email subscription buttons above the fold. Subscribing to your content should be easy and only one click away.
• Use AddThis to let people subscribe to your rss feed. You give AddThis your feed url, and they create a single button that lets your readers subscribe using their reader of choice.
• Tag your posts on Technorati. Their site shows you how, and there are plugins out there for Wordpress
• Add buttons for Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and many others using AddThis
• Link to other blogs. People watch the incoming links to their blogs, and will probably at least check you out, if not give you a reciprocal link.
• Consume LOTS of information. Fill up your own feed reader with stuff that’s similar to your niche. You’ll have a better idea of what’s going on, and be able to comment on more conversations and link out to more useful entries, which is ultimately good for your readers.
• Write posts that help people. While listed last, this is the most important. If you write posts that are useful or help your readers, they are more likely to want to share it with others.

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Alright, so I’m destined to have bad karma. I got a “Pay it Forward” link from Deborah Ng over at Freelance Writing Jobs. (You should check out her feed if you’re a freelance writer. It’ll save you a TON of time.) It’s this very nice thing where she links you up, sends you some traffic, and in return, you pass the link love on to someone else.

I didn’t see my link last week. And while I link out fairly often, I need to give out some extra link love.

What Blog Do I Want You to Know About?

It’s Logic + Emotion, the blog of David Armano, a creative VP at Digitas in chilly Chicago. He’s always got great posts about what it means to be a working creative in the Web 2.0 space. He uses simple graphics that illustrate his points fantastically, and he’ll point you in quite a few good directions when it comes to news or advice. Check him out!

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Got a book or a piece of writing that’s only in hard copy form? Submit it to the Google Books Partner Program and they’ll index it for you.

Google’s initiative to make printed copies of books search able is an old and a controversial one. With the appearance of a beta tool for authors and publishers to submit books, they’re probably hoping they can get the “wanna-be discovered” talents to build their content base, thus threatening the current powers that be. (See Napster and KaZaa as examples of how “controversial” technology drove the powers that be to come up with a way to beat them. iTunes? ahem…)

As an author, publisher or even an agent you can submit books by ISBN, title and author, and also include a link to buy the product.  You can also restrict how your book is displayed, making only portions of it searchable and viewable.

The cou de gras? Ads can appear next to your book results, earning you money just for having your book searched. Ahh, the Google contextual empire continues to grow.

It’ll be awhile until we see if book results can make it to the top of regular search results and blog results. But if you’re a self-published author and are looking for yet another way for people to view your content, here it is.

Check out Google Books 

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So you want to make an action movie?Be sure to pick up The DV Rebel’s Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap and take it with you through the whole process from storyboard to screen.

If you are a true beginner, this book might be a little to advanced for you. Some of the concepts and terms Stu Maschwitz goes over in the book are for people who have worked with a camera and effects programs before. He assumes a bit of prior knowledge, but he lets you know up front that this is the case.

I see this as being a great reference book for the intermediate filmmaker who knows a few of the ropes and is looking to give his action movies (or any movies) for that matter a more polished look. Everything from shot composition to final onlining is covered with step-by-step tutorials, color commentary and a practical, no nonsense approach that is geared towards having you produce a sweet looking flick for less than the price of a used car.

If you buy the book, you get a great accompanying DVD with more tutorials and advice, a sample project to practice on and effects templates you can use in your movie, like smoke and gun flashes. Sweet.

A drawback to this book is that the author gives pretty specific instructions and examples of tricks he’s done for certain effects. In some places he elaborates on the concepts to help you understand the “why” behind the effect, so if you need to create something similar but not identical to his shot you can figure it out. In other spots, the instructions are specific to his experience and he doesn’t elaborate on the concept, leaving you to figure it out for yourself.

Overall, well worth the thirty bucks.

Rated - 8 out of 10

Pick up a copy

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