Made with After Effects

In what is become an annual tradition, the good folks over at motion.tv run a Made with After Effects competition. We participate in critiquing the entries, including pointing out the strong points as well as sharing our years of experience in suggesting ways to improve the work even further. The resulting discussion - as well as viewing the winners - is something we think is educational for all users looking to raise their game.

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:

NVIDIA Optix

At this week’s SIGGRAPH convention in Vancouver, Adobe and NVIDIA are giving a technology presentation of ray-traced extruded text and shapes inside a “motion graphics environment” (you can read for yourself what the menu bar says; before getting too excited, note this is a technology prototype and not an announced or released product). Obviously, there are a lot of questions left unanswered at this point in time - but as we’ve seen in the past, a lot of other Adobe technology demos eventually become products; fingers crossed that this is the case here.

After Effects Apprentice: Expressions

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 Expressions: The ability to define how a parameter animates using instructions such as “wiggle” compared to explicitly keyframing every value.

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.

After Effects Apprentice: Type and Music

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 the lesson on Type and Music.

One of the cornerstones of motion graphics is creating and animating type. In this course, Trish will show you how to typeset titles professionally and create your own custom animations, as well as apply and modify the hundreds of text animation presets that After Effects ships with. Additionally, Chris will show you how to add audio to your projects, including spotting “hit points” to align your keyframes and video action.

Stereoscopic 3D in After Effects CS5.5

You may remember our blog post on the “inherent” problems with stereoscopic 3D that famed film editor Walter Murch pointed out in an open letter to film critic Roger Ebert. We took Murch’s comments as inspiration to explore workflows in the latest release of After Effects that might work around some of Murch’s concerns: Namely, getting the eyes and brain to converge and focus on the same object (preferably one the same distance from the viewer as the screen).

Updated: Adobe Warp Stabilizer (P)Review

As noted earlier this week, Adobe TV posted a video - attached to the top of this post - that previews a new technology called the Warp Stabilizer. I’ve had a chance to work with a pre-release version of the Warp Stabilizer, and Adobe kindly gave me permission to pass along some of my experiences.

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