Seeing the Future - In Color

We’re still recovering from the HOW Design Conference in Austin last week, where temperatures hit 107. After the ice packs melt, we’ll post a summary of interesting things we heard there.

In the meantime, for those who have color-focused jobs (or color-fussy clients), you may be interested in the work of the Color Marketing Group: a global consortium that attempts to determine what the hot trends in color for various market segments will be in different parts of the world. Click here to see their predictions for 2009 (white for business, blue is the new green, etc.). They also have a free weekly newsletter of color trends and ideas.

50% off Artbeats Stock Footage

Stock footage prices have risen considerably over the past several years, making it less of a discretionary “that’s cool” purchase and more one where we may wait for a client who needs a particular shot. That’s why we were particularly happy to see a nice deal arrive in our mailbox from Artbeats: 50% off all footage collections, and 30% off of all single clips (excluding low-res and any other special offers), through midnight PST on July 4. Just use code 4017 when you check out.

(While you’re there, sign up for their newsletter; subscribers tend to get a free clip each month.)

The Case of the Two Licenses

A question came up recently about what sort of licenses are required when marrying music to motion graphics (or any imagery edited or animated in time with music). It so happens there are two, which you may or may not need to worry about:

Font Politics

These humorous videos on YouTube by the crazies at College Humor gives insight into the interpersonal politics of font families. 

Hands-On After Effects Masterclass in Dublin

As some of you know, Trish was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. Although we’ve spoken years ago at a conference in Sweden and Trish has given custom training to Sky TV in Italy, we’re yet to give an open-to-the-public hands-on After Effects class in Europe - until now.

July 17-19, we will be teaching at the Filmbase resource center on Curved Street in Dublin’s fun Temple Bar area. There is a maximum number of 8 students, and at least 5 need to be pre-registered for the class to come off - so if you are thinking about attending, don’t delay until the last minute to register! More details including an outline of the course are available on the Filmbase.ie web site. Hope to see you there…

For something closer to home, we’re also giving an introductory After Effects session aimed at print designers making the move to motion at the upcoming HOW conference in Austin, Texas. Austin is a fun city, and the HOW Design Conference is a great place to recharge your creative batteries, so we’re really looking forward to this conference as well.

Unsafe Areas

Two of the more intriguing new features in After Effects CS4 (and other members of the Adobe Creative Suite 4 family) are updated pixel aspect ratios, and the ability to display 4:3 “center cut” safe area guides inside 16:9 widescreen compositions. I applaud both. But as I work with them more, I realize there are some slight errors in where the safe area guides are being drawn, particularly in light of the new pixel aspect ratios. First I’ll cover the relatively minor 4:3 case, and then move on to the far more egregious 16:9 case. 

After Effects 9.0.2 Update

If you have disabled Adobe Updater - and I wouldn’t blame you if you had - you may not be aware that Adobe recently released a maintenance upgrade to After Effects CS4. Known as version 9.0.2, it contains a lot of bug fixes (including a cure for the crash-if-script-UI-open bug I reported earlier), plus a few new features:

FCP Overlay Issue

Quite often, our job is to take a client’s footage and make it look better. Over the years, we’ve developed a number of techniques to do this; most revolve around placing a second clip on top of the original clip, and compositing it using a blending mode of some kind. Unless this second clip is predominantly white or black, the first mode I usually reach for is Overlay. Below is an example of this general approach:

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