Adobe this morning announced immediate availability of Acrobat 9 (press relaease)

Some of the key new features are
- Insert video (FLV or H.264) into PDF. Video can be marked up.
- Content management via PDF Portfolio feature
- Professionally designed templates
- Enhanced review tracker
- Electronic Form importer from Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, or scanned documents

Question from a student I had in my After Effects training class in Hartford, Connecticut:
"Hey Damon,
You showed me how to get a lens flare with nothing else (no backgrounds/alpha keyed) on the screen using a luma matte...I think! Do you remember the actions necessary to produce such an effect? I keep ending up with a black lens flare! Help!
Thanks again,
Bryan"

Duplicating the solid with the lens flare and using the top one as a track matte can accomplish this. Here are the steps; you can download an example of this as well.

Step one: Create a solid and add the lens Flare filter to it, get the lens flare just how you would like it and duplicate the solid.
Step two: on the top solid added the Hue/Saturation filter and take the master saturation down to -100, Also add the Levels filter and slide the white point slider till it just touches the beginning of the levels histogram.
Step three: Set the bottom solid to use the top solid as a track matte (Luma Matte)

That's it transparent lens flare.

Adobe has been had at work and now we get to preview some of the fruits of their labor. Today we are getting a peak at what is coming down the pipe. Adobe has released public betas of Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Soundbooth on labs.

Download Dreamweaver beta / read what's new
Download Fireworks beta / read what's new
Download Soundbooth beta / read what's new

A few months ago we got invited to join Google's new training program. Thursday afternoon I was able to pass the Google Earth Pro trainer certification. I have learned a ton about Google Earth pro in the last few weeks; it is a very impressive little program. From importing GIS data to create graphs, creating 3D building in Sketchup, or adding photos on Panoramio. If you have not checked it out it is well worth a download, as I learned you can do a lot more than just look at your house from above. We will begin training Google Earth Pro and Google Sketchup very soon. You can download our outline for Google Earth pro or visit us at ledet.com.

Adobe this morning released Flash player 10 Beta "Astro" on labs.

Macintosh download / Windows download

[More]

Had a great time this evening Segwaying around downtown Atlanta. About a week ago in an effort to find something different to do, I was poking around Holiday inn's Ultimate Experiences section. I discovered Atlanta Segway tours. Decided to give it a try, this was my second time on a segway, rode one for less than 15 minutes at a company I was doing training for a few years back. Like Lisa (our tour guide) it is a lot like riding a bike. In less than 5 minutes I was up and going again. The video they make you watch ahead of time is a little unnerving, but in my opinion it is pretty easy and just takes a little common sense to ride. The weather was beautiful, and the price to play ($60 bucks) is well worth it. In truth it really could not have been a bad experience seeing as I had the best company in the world to enjoy this with ;-) I will put up a few pictures I snapped later, I am off to bed - work in the morning.

NASA is allowing anyone to send their name to the moon aboard the next lunar mission. A little geeky I know but kind of cool as well. Check it out at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/main/index.html

Sent my name:

Adobe announced Adobe TV (http://tv.adobe.com) No matter what your adobe vice is, you should be able to find something of interest. I poked around a little pretty cool stuff. Surely worth a visit.

Adobe released Coldfusion 8.0.1. I am a little late on this one as I was flying back from Chicago on the day it was released and missed it. I just updated my box and it seems to be working great. If you are going to run this update make sure you get the new extensions for Dreamweaver or Eclipse, as they have introduced a lot of new tag attributes, like an alt attribute for cfimage.

Adobe Lightroom 2.0 beta is now available on labs. Read the release notes for details on whats new.

Adobe launched Photoshop Express public beta. I have not checked it out much yet, but it looks very interesting.

From time to time I get questions from former students or people that just so happen to stumble upon my website. I decided to start logging these questions on my blog in a new category called questions.

Earlier today Dan worte: "HI I’m in the process of creating a new web site, my template contains different colors in different areas on the page. Some of my links are located on a blue background and some are on a white background. I set the page properties links to FFFFFF (link color and visited links to FFFFFF); the problem I’m having is that the links on the white background are not showing. Is there any way to change specific link color? Thanks for your help. E.D"

Check out http://www.damonledet.com/tutorial/index.cfm/name/CSS_Links the code is below. Instead of color: blue you can use hexadecimal colors like #FFFFFF When you create the link make sure you add a class="linkset2" in the < a href > tag of course you can change the "linkset2" name, if you would like but be sure you also change it in the a.linkset2:link and so on. Using this trick will allow you to have as many link colors as you would like ie a.linkset3:link, a.linkset4:link ... If you really want to use best practices you should attach an external css file so all the pages in your site can use your linkset. The way I did it below is page specific.

Link 1

Link 2

Adobe announced Director 11 today. It should be available soon it currently is still preorder. I have always been a Director fan, and have enjoyed training it in the past. It will be interesting to see the update that has been almost 4 years in the making. [More]

I have successfully got coldfusion talking to a Filemaker 9 database. It turned out to be pretty simple really. I enabled ODBC/JDBC in Filemaker server. Installed the latest SequeLink on the coldfusion server. Setup a System DNS and pointed to it in the coldfusion admin. The only odd thing I ran into is in Filemaker field names can have spaces so when I do an insert into a field I have to put double quotes on the field name.

Apple released a new update for Leopard 10.5.2. This update is a heavy one weighing in at 384 megs. 10.5.2 download.