Adobe MAX 2011 Technology Sneak Peeks

Adobe’s big annual MAX conference finished a couple of weeks ago, and as part of it they included a series of technology sneak peeks. I’ve gone through the videos posted on AdobeTV and pulled out the ones of most interest to us video folks:

After Effects Apprentice: Parenting

As we mentioned earlier, we’re in the process of recording our book After Effects Apprentice as a series of training videos, where you get to look over our shoulders and hear what we’re thinking as we work through each lesson. Our latest installment is on the subject of Parenting.

Parenting is a way to group multiple layers within the same composition inside After Effects. In this lesson, Chris shows how to set up a parenting chain, discusses what makes a good parent, and demonstrates several techniques using Parenting such as creating a title animation with a minimum number of keyframes, building a geometric construct, and bringing an anthropomorphic robot arm to life. Sidebar topics include avoiding a scaling gotcha with parenting, and creating abstract backgrounds using the Fractal Noise effect.

Using Audition with After Effects

As you can see from recent articles on PVC, Adobe is anxious to make you aware that they have made their audio editing application Audition available for the Mac as well as Windows, and bundled it into the Production Premium and Master Collection suites.

While their focus is on showing editors how to take advantage of Audition, our orientation is motion graphics and visual effects - therefore, we’re personally more interested in integration with After Effects. Although nowhere near as robust as Audition’s integration with Premiere Pro, there are still some nice synergies to be had. That’s why as part of our New Creative Techniques videos we created for After Effects CS5.5, we included two on using Audition with After Effects - both for absolute newbies looking to add some audio special effects to those wanting to dive a little deeper and improve their voiceovers. In case you missed them as part of our After Effects CS5.5 review, here they are again for your viewing pleasure:

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:

10 Most Innovative Concert Visuals ‘08

I have few regrets in life, but one is that I’m yet to have the opportunity to design visuals for live concerts (helping on a couple of videos for the Las Vegas Fremont Street Experience is as close as I’ve come so far). U2’s Zoo TV concert video
remains a transformative experience for me; while Ultravox’s gray set plus colored lighting was one of biggest influences on me on how to colorize motion graphics in 3D.

If you’re also into seeing motion graphics on the big stage (not just the big screen), then I suggest you take a trip over to Accent Feeds’ 10 Most Innovative Concert Visuals of ‘08, including the likes of Kraftwerk, Daft Punk, Massive Attack, Madonna, Tool, Nine Inch Nails, and the best act you’ve never heard of: Etienne de Crecy. All come with videos, although they are of varying quality, ranging from hand-held audience shakeycam for Daft Punk to the professionally multicam edit for de Crecy (have patience; it gets more amazing the longer you go). Even if you have no interest in concert videos, there’s some great ideas in there for creating motion graphics in virtual environments.

Props to Rich Young’s AE Portal News, which turned me onto this. BTW, he also has a good round-up on tilt-shift photography, which has become rather hot recently.

TED Talk: The Truly Soft Side of Software

The annual TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) conference is a place where Big Thinkers gather annually to inspire and be inspired. I’ve been going through their online archive of talks for my own amusement and education, and sharing with you ones I found to be particularly interesting.

Back in June, I highlighted Jakob Trollback’s talk on Rethinking the Music Video. This time around, I want to highlight a “music video” that’s considerably in the more abstract domain. In this presentation, Golan Levin discusses the custom performance software he writes which allows him to improvise music with accompanying visuals. We’re strictly in the experimental realm here (the soundtrack is 60s-era avant-garde electronic music - listen with your speakers on to annoy your cubemates), but sometimes, great inspiration comes from the very fringes of an art. Note: The visuals are initially very simplistic (the piece is titled “Scribble”), but become much more complex about 4:40 into the video.

Aside from Levin’s TED Talk, I strongly recommend you check out the Flong Interactive Art site (pictured above) which contains a number of interesting audiovisual works by Levin and his friends - there’s lots of cool interactive visual pieces on there.

Spotlight: Promos for FOX’s “Fringe”

As mentioned earlier, we will be discussing motion graphics projects executed by other studios. This time around, it’s Buster Design and the on-air promos they created for Fringe, a new series premiering this September on FOX - click here to view movies of the final animations. I had the chance to chat with Brandon Pleus of Buster about what went into this project.

Music Isn’t Free

Both Trish and I come from the music industry originally; as a result, music greatly informs our animations - we strongly prefer to pick out the music before we start working on a job. We also are both deeply interested in intellectual property issues (indeed, I’ve served as an expert witness on several music sampling cases); as a result, we care a lot about where that music comes from. And the sad truth is, a lot of people are using music illegally in their videos. But you can cure that.

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