Creating Motion Graphics

As expected, NAB 2008 did not reveal any major new software releases for motion graphic designers, but it did showcase a number of interesting new plug-ins. We’d like to give you a quick round-up of our favorites here; we’re arranging to give many of these more in-depth reviews up here on PVC over the next several months. We also were very interested in with what The Foundry has done with the high-end compositing application Nuke (which they acquired from Digital Domain), and came away with the impression that in this slow economy, training has become more important again.

Steve Kilisky recently wrote a thought-provoking blog about how video (and now, the web) has traditionally been initially driven by technical folks, with the artists following along. To this day, there is still often a distinction between an “artist” and an “operator,” “animator” or “developer.”

In that light, Trish recently found (on a calligraphy list, of all things) a pointer to this excellent cartoon that shows what can happen when an animator provokes his animation to revolt. It’s well worth a few minutes from your day. (Be patient through the first minute; it keeps picking up pace from there...)

As Imagineer is fond of one-word names that all start with “mo...”, it can be hard to know or remember which tool does what. Below is some text I lifted out of an email by Ross Shain (VP of Sales, Eastern Region) to an After Effects list explaining the differences, with links to a comparison chart. It is particularly relevant as Imagineer Systems has been offering some deep discounts on some of their highly-touted tracking and rotoscoping tools; I just posted a News item on them extending some of these discounts until the end of March (click here to view).

In short all our products use a unique 2.5D planar tracking technology that allows you to motion track objects with blur, noise and go offscreen. Simply, the planar tracking technology is hands down more powerful than any point tracking system out there. The technology is then implemented into the products in various ways.

• mokey - removal tool - automates complex compositing techniques to remove unwanted elements from screen. Great for rig, scratch removal, stabilization etc....
• monet - placement station - compositing tool to track and insert elements with luminance passes, mesh warper and lens distortion correction.
• mocha - tracking and roto utility. Motin track and roto. Export the data or mattes to almost any app including AE, Flame, Smoke, DS, Shake, Fusion (adding Nuke soon), etc.
• motor - same as mocha but limited to rotoscoping
• mocha-AE - not a plug-in but a stand alone tracking utility that exports tracking data as AE keyframes. Corner pin with perspective or transform, scale, rotation. Copy and paste to AE layers. Increases AE’s capability as a vfx compositor!

There is some overlap between products but many users have found that with mokey and mocha their bases are very covered. Here is a link to a product comparison chart.

For more questions, please contact us off the list.

US eastern region:  rosss @ imagineersystems.com
US western region: billyw @ imagineersystems.com
Europe/Asia and others: pjc @ imagineersystems.com

If you need more information, here is a link to tutorials on their products.

Final Effects was pretty much the original third-party plug-in set available for After Effects. It was created by a gang in Sweden now known as Cycore, who passed it on to MetaCreations, who passed it on to ICE, who passed it on to Media 100, who passed it on to Boris, who is now selling it for $895. Meanwhile, the Cycore gang exploited a loophole in their contract, rewrote and re-released it as Cycore FX, licensed it to Adobe to give away free as CC Effects with each copy of After Effects, and sell an upgrade to it for $299 - more on that below. (By the way, we’ve reposted an old column on CC Effects in the archives; read it here for more background.)

So when the press release first came around from Boris FX that they had updated Final Effects Complete, excuse us, but we laughed. However, once we thought about it, there are some reasons why you might consider it. Namely:

Normally, when you install a minor update to After Effects, it does a pretty good job at remembering your previously-installed plug-ins and the such. That said, there is an exception in the case of the 8.0.2 updater. This version writes a brand-new interpretation rules file that alters how it handles some YUV color space files. However, it does not merge in any changes you may have made to the previous interpretation rules file. Fortunately, it doesn’t delete your file; it just sets it aside.

Click here for an Adobe Tech Note on what’s going on, and how to work around it.

This isn’t new, but we just stumbled across it, and thought it would provide some comic relief going into the weekend. It’s a live, one-take, in-front-of-an-audience music video (for the song “zZz is playing: Grip") that is also a demonstration of common motion graphics techniques and video transitions, performed by folks on a trampoline. Ya gotta watch it more than once to pick up all the details, like the musicians on the left and right (the drummer on the left is also the singer), and the person painting the progress bar in real time underneath. Hang around until the end to see that it was indeed in front of an audience.