glmtblog

The New Media department of Great Lakes Media was honored to create a digital highlight reel for high school athlete, Lewis Smith. Lewis is the Nephew of Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer extraordinaire, Chad Smith.

The digital highlight reel is a great way for high school athletes to capture the attention of college recruiters. The video is a simple 2-3 minute piece, highlighting the athlete’s abilities and stats. It can be uploaded to youtube, a website, or put to DVD.

The video can be seen here, and is part of our New Media March promotion. We are offering 20% off digital media services. We are now also offering new services, like the digital highlight reel, and encoding for portable media devices.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13845_3-10285229-58.html

GLMT Discs: Made in the USA

I’ll just come right out and say it: this recession sucks. There’s really no way around it. How did we get to this point? Well, one could go on forever with a million different explanations (I’ll spare you my personal opinion). Instead, I prefer to focus on something more positive – the things I have control over. This includes how I spend the few precious extra dollars I have. One thing I have been more conscious of is buying local products; using the power of the free market to help those closest to me. I’ve been taking the extra moment at the store to look for the sticker that tells me where a product was made. If I see “Made in the USA,” I find myself just a little more likely to put that thing in my cart.

With that, I am proud to say that GLMT replicates discs right here in the United States. No outsourcing to China here; the machines are right here in Mequon, Wisconsin, with American workers cranking out the product. Discs go straight from the replication machine, to the printing press, to the packaging line, without ever leaving the building! We don’t slap a big “made in the USA” sticker on the back (we’d rather make sure your drive can read the data), but we want you to know that when you buy from us, you’re keeping jobs right at home.

For example, I have a photo I would like to fit on a disc.

I really like the tree on the left but I also want to keep all the boats on the right. Before CS4 I would have had to place the image in a disc template and leave white space around it or attempt to fill it in with whatever struck my fancy at the time. I hate white space. I do not like to try and balance an image on a disc with white space. So I now use the Content-Aware Scale to fit all the objects I want on a disc.

The disc on the left shows how I would need to fit the photo to get all of it to print. The disc on the right fills the whole surface with a modified image. Some of the objects are distorted, but in my opinion not so much that you would be able to tell unless you were familiar with the original photo.

This next photo shows how much of an image can be compressed while leaving the objects virtually untouched. It compacts mostly the blue sky and clouds and leaves the trees alone. The first, again, shows the original image. The second shows my “fixed” image.

While I do love this feature, it cannot be used for every photo. There has to be some empty space in the photo for the feature to compact. I have tried this with very busy photographs and the result is a confusing jumble of pixels. If you would like to try this feature, it can be found in Edit>Content-Aware Scale when you have an editable file open (see below).

If you would like to find other new features in your Adobe CS4 suite go to Windows>Workspace>What’s New in CS4. This will highlight all the new features in the pull-down menus.

All this and more I learned at a fantastic seminar at the 2008 Graph Expo in Chicago. The seminar was given by Sandee Cohen, a well-known expert in various Adobe products. Beyond her seminars and speaking engagements, she has written numerous books including her latest, InDesign CS4 for Macintosh and Windows: Visual Quickstart Guide.