What AE’s Still Missing…

We had an idea here on PVC that we would make lists of what has been most interesting this previous year, and what we anticipate in the new year ahead. Several of us planned to write these, but unfortunately few of us have so far. You know - we’ve been busy with work, the holidays, and such. After all, there’s only so much a person can do.

Well, it’s the same for many software tools as well, such as our main tool After Effects. AE CS3 was (in our opinion) one of the best updates ever for motion graphics artists, and AE CS4 has its charms (here is our roundup of the new features that caught our eye; here is Todd Kopriva’s more comprehensive list). Still, there are many features that remain unimplemented or underimplemented - because either resources weren’t available, a new feature caught a programmer’s eye, or not enough people have jumped up and down screaming for the feature we personally want.

Following are some of the features we’re still waiting for. As we have a personal policy of “you’re not allowed to complain about something unless you are also willing to offer a solution,” we’ll also mention some ideas for cheats and workarounds inside AE, from third parties, and in alternate applications such as Apple’s Motion. The first two pages will focus on issues in 3D space, and then we’ll move onto issues such as mask shapes and text.

Automated Video Production

We’ve all been there: A client asks for a job that requires complex editing and effects, and they say (as part of the negotiation over price): “Don’t you have software where you press a button and it does it automatically?”

OpenEXR Support in After Effects CS4

After Effects CS4 now comes with the ProEXR plug-in set from fnord software (available free for CS3 from fnordware.com). This offers enhanced support of the OpenEXR format commonly used by high-end effects houses. ProEXR’s benefits include:

• Support for all the OpenEXR compression options, including B44 compression.
• Output as RGB or Luminance/Chroma channels.
• Retention of EXR color space information.
• Support for both 32-bit and 16-bit floating point.
• Full control over alpha channel processing.

The ProEXR package contains the EXtractoR and IDentifier plug-ins, which allows access to the additional non-image channels in an OpenEXR file – including Object and Material IDs. This will be of particular interest to hardcore 3D users who have been looking for more sophisticated ways to further manipulate their renders inside After Effects. Lutz Albrecht has written a pair of articles for Adobe Developer Connection that goes into more detail on this procedure.

For more information, download the ProEXR manual and jump to the ProEXR in After Effects section, which starts about halfway in.

The content contained in our books, videos, blogs, and articles for other sites are all copyright Crish Design, except where otherwise attributed.

Make It Go Away!

After Effects CS4 has introduced two subtle but important changes in the way it deals with many common video formats:

1) There are new PARs (Pixel Aspect Ratios) for NTSC and PAL standard definition 4:3 and 16:9 content. (Actually, they’re not new; they’re the correct, original ones that no virtually one actually used - until now.)

2) Color management now makes a distinction between scene-referred (how you shot it on the set) and output-referred (how it will be displayed at home or in the theater) profiles, and will adjust the former to look like the latter on your normal computer display.

In the long run, you really want to embrace these two changes. And we’re in the process of working up a pair of articles for PVC on these subjects (they will appear in the CMG Keyframes channel, hopefully in the next couple of weeks). But in the near term, these two changes are causing some users headaches, especially as they update projects from earlier versions of After Effects to CS4: however subtly, colors are switching and shapes are squishing. This is causing users to cry out “please - make it go away!”

Okay - here’s how:

After Effects 9.0.1 Update

If you have After Effects CS4 (aka version 9.0), and if you haven’t already gotten into the reflexive habit of dismissing the dreaded Adobe Updater every time it appears, then you might like to know that an update - 9.0.1 - is now available. You can trigger an update from inside After Effects CS4 by selecting Help > Updates. (It will try to update all CS4 applications as a default; if you are in a hurry, you can disable some updates in its options.)

Here is the list of bugs that were addressed according to the release notes:

Ultimate Insider Gifts

Shopping for holiday gifts? For a peer or co-worker who already has every book, video, and plug-in imaginable? And don’t want to go broke in the process? Here are a couple of gift ideas guaranteed to impress (or at the very least, puzzle) that favorite nerd in your life:

Ease and Wizz

Virtually all After Effects users take advantage of the Easy Ease keyframe assistants. Applying them makes your animations elegantly speed up and slow down. But there are alternatives, right?

There are. Switching a keyframe’s interpolation to Auto Bezier, for example, will give half the ease of Easy Ease. You can also edit the keyframe interpolation handles in the Graph Editor, or Option (Alt) + double-click a keyframe outside of the Graph Editor to open the Keyframe Velocity dialog, where you can numerically dial in the ease amount.

Beyond these Bezier interpolations are a set of interpolation behaviors originally written by Robert Penner for Flash users, based on other mathematical formula such as sine or exponential curves. Ian Haigh has adapted these for use inside After Effects by writing a series of scripts that apply the equivalent expressions to After Effects keyframes. The package is called Ease and Wizz, and is available for free (although donations are appreciated).

Brightness Issues with H.264 QuickTime Movies

If you haven’t encountered this problem yet, you will: QuickTime movies re-exported from applications such has QuickTime Player Pro using the H.264 codec (a common format for web content) appear brighter than the original in some contexts - such as inside QuickTime Player on the Mac, or on a web page viewed by Safari - but not in other contexts such as QuickTime Player on Windows, or the stripped-down QT Player inside After Effects.

Many attribute this to a bug introduced by use of a hidden, optional “gamma” tag (which is different than a full-blown color profile tag) inside QuickTime movies that is supposed to aid in cross-platform compatibility. Unfortunately, this tag is not exposed for the user to edit, and may be interpreted differently by different programs. It has been the cause of much grief among After Effects users employing color management, and has spread into the realm of web video.

I was recently bitten by this myself when I went to encode a batch of introductory video training movies going onto the DVD for the second edition of our book After Effects Apprentice. Everything worked fine two years ago when we did the first edition, but something has changed since then, and now the same settings produce unsatisfactory results:

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