Yesterday was the first day of the Chicago Motion Graphics Festival, and I'll tell you, I haven't had that much fun in a long time. Here's the play-by-play.

I took the Amtrak into Chicago, which is a great way to travel... very comfortable.

First I headed to the Apple Store on N. Michigan Avenue which has a terrific presentation area. Mason Dixon was giving a presentation on Flash at that time. After that, the Ascend Training sponsored another Flash presentation. Mason gave a presentation about Illustrator's integration with After Effects and then I was up.

I did about 45 minutes of After Effects integration with Photoshop and overall it went fairly smoothly. I was very nervous for some reason. There were a lot of people there watching! I am going to give the same presentation at the West Michigan Animation and Effects User Group meeting on January 25th, and we're going to attempt to tape it and podcast it. We'll see how it turns out. Of course, I explained Toolfarm and our Plug-in Finder and Forum.

After the Apple Store training, Mason and I headed over to Bridges Media Group where there was a gallery-style screening of work from winners and local post-houses, such as Bridges and Digital Kitchen. I met Ted Schroder of Big Fat Ted's, Chicago, who was the winner of our Foundry Survey iPod. He's a really cool guy and had this amazing piece showing at Bridges. I met so many nice people. People in the Mid-west are so friendly.

At Bridges, Mason introduced me and I talked about Toolfarm some more, then Mason gave the presentation that everyone was waiting for... a live demo of After Effects 7.

The new interface improvements are stellar. It seems that I'm always fighting with the floating palettes. This redesign will change the speed and efficiency in working with AE. You can change the entire workspace with a pulldown menu. If you're working with masks, put it in mask mode. If you're working with type or paint, put it in type or paint mode.

There are loads of templates included with AE 7 to really help you get your projects kicked off in a hurry. These remind me of Apple Motion a bit. There are all sorts of new presets too and I know I'll be wasting a lot of time playing with them when I get my copy of AE 7.

The graph editor is the big thing that people are getting excited about. It will take me a while to really wrap my brain around how to really manipulate this graph editor, but Wow! It is very powerful. There's new Open GL accelleration in AE 7 too.

Mason also demo'd Premiere Pro and Audition, and both have some really great improvements. Adobe has really integrated the programs even more than before.

One of the coolest things at Bridges, though, was this video rug. It was a very thin screen taped to the floor with a camera and projector mounted to the ceiling. When you waved your arms over the video on the floor, ripples of water would form. Freakin' amazing. I want one.

So, I'm back to the Apple Store this morning for more training classes. Tonight there's another gallery-style showing tonight at Optimus. Stop by if you're in the area.