Creative Cow forum host: Dave LaRonde

Dave LaRonde Senior Promotion Producer, KCRG-TV Cedar Rapids, Iowa USA

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.

You can find Dave LaRonde hosting in Creative COW's and Broadcasting Forum.

Articles by Dave LaRonde

	Adobe After Effects Keeping Them Guessing For 22 years, Dave LaRonde created on-air promotion for KCRG-TV, the ABC affiliate in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Through the years, one thing has remained constant: Adobe After Effects has been in his video toolbox. Dave describes his introduction to After Effects and how it helped him turn an also-ran into the leader of the pack. Feature, People / Interview Dave LaRonde

	Adobe After Effects AE 5.5: Masks, Transfer Modes, Track Mattes, Time Remapping 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! Tutorial Dave LaRonde

	Trapcode Dave LaRonde takes a look at Trapcode Shine 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. Review Dave LaRonde

	Adobe After Effects Fun With Track Mattes: 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. Tutorial Dave LaRonde

	Media 100 | Media 100 HD Back-To-Back Graphics in Media 100 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. Tutorial Dave LaRonde