Creative COW Forum Host, Web Writer, Contributing Editor
Dave LaRonde
Senior Promotion Producer, KCRG-TV Cedar Rapids, Iowa USA
Dave
LaRonde is the Senior Promotion Producer at KCRG-TV, an ABC network
affiliate in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Unlike most people in broadcasting he
has worked at only one station, and for a very long time. When Dave
moved to Iowa to take the job at KCRG, it turned out that he really
enjoyed the quality of life he found there.
Dave
started editing through a control room on 2-inch Quadruplex VTR's with
no timecode. Then he moved into edit suites containing a succession of
1-inch, 3/4-inch and Beta SP VTR's. Finally Dave progressed to a booth
containing a Macintosh, a couple of tape decks and a few monitors; this
seemingly-meager collection of equipment, costing a small fraction of
any one of his former editing systems, outperforms all of the old
equipment put together. He still regards it as a marvel.
In
addition to editing, Dave is also in charge of much of KCRG's on-air
promotion. He conceives ideas, writes, storyboards, selects music,
directs photography and digests volumes of consultant's research. About
the only thing Dave doesn't do in the creation of on-air promotion is
to create artwork and 3-D animation.
When
he isn't working, Dave has a lot of diversions. He enjoys reading,
taking care of his yard, bicycling, playing frisbee golf, avoiding
playing regular golf, visiting homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright,
cooking, brewing beer and savoring the fruit of those labors, assisting
with his kids' high school marching band and singing in his church
choir.
Dave
lives in a pleasant residential section of Cedar Rapids with his wife
(The Only Woman For Him), two teenaged daughters and a couple of really
strange cats.
Dave LaRonde shares his experiences with upgrading from AE 3.1 to AE 5.5, and the production bundle no less. What would he do first? He gave himself an assignment: A fictional client arrives with a starfield and two animations, both movies of a planet and a moon rotating on their axes. My task: the moon must revolve around the planet, and it must look CONVINCING, as if it were a time lapse from the Hubble Space Telescope. Armed only with the manual, he demonstrates both the old and the new: Masks, Transfer Modes, Track Mattes, Time Remapping for a little bit of fun, and as it turns out Expressions!
When Trapcode first introduced its Shine plugin, early practitioners marveled at its speed. Sure, Shine may be fast on a G4 or a Pentium IV machine, but what about a humble Powermac 9600/233? What if you're still using OS 8.6? What if you only have AE 4.1? How good is it working within those constraints? Dave LaRonde shares his experiences with using Trapcode Shine.
Learning to use track mattes can be a valuable weapon in your After Effects arsenal They're extremely versatile, and knowing how to use them can save you the time and expense of researching and buying yet another plug-in. A Creative Cow visitor wrote, 'I want to do a grid of small boxes that dissolve one row at a time, from bottom to top. What would be the fastest way to it?' A perfect opportunity to use track mattes! In this article, Dave LaRonde demonstrates the technique step by step.
In this article, broadcast editor Dave LaRonde looks at ways to use back to back graphics in Media 100 and explores ways to save valuable project disk space while using them. He quotes the oft quoted Law of Digital Media, which says: You can never have too much storage. It should also have a corollary: If you don't have lots of storage, anything you can do to save it is a good thing.
