Review: After Effects Camera Training

Motion graphics artists used to animating in 2D in After Effects will find that working in 3D space takes a lot more patience. You need to consider how to set up the 3D views, move layers in 3D, and animate cameras and lights. Rob Birnholz’ training series tackles the camera portion of the equation (watch a free sample and the Table of Contents here). (If you’ve already purchased this training series, don’t go just yet; I promise to share some personal tips and advice as I go…)

Snow Leopard: Hopes, Misunderstandings, and Gotchas

Snow Leopard (aka OS 10.6) looks like a great system update for Mac users: better performance, smaller hard drive footprint, cheap price (if you’ve been keeping up with your OS updates). That said, we personally are always cautious about upgrading to the “x.x.0” version of anything: Call it old age, but quite often we prefer to let the serial early adopters (you know who you are) find where the gotchas are, while we get work done in the meantime with “old” technology. Here’s a brief collection of some of the issues (some real, some illusionary) that we’ve heard of so far; please feel free to add your own in the Comments below:

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:

That Wasn’t In the Script…

First, the bad news: There are two ways you can ensure After Effects CS4 will crash on exit:

1) Boot AE CS4 with an add-on script open in a docked panel.

2) Quit AE CS4 with an add-on script open in a docked panel.

Now, the good news: It’s a relatively benevolent crash; you won’t lose data or take down any other programs as well. Also, it’s fairly easy to work around this bug: Either open your scripts that have user interfaces in undocked (floating) panels, or make sure all scripts (such as Ease and Wizz, or TrackerViz) are closed when you quit - perhaps create a Workspace that has them all closed, and select that before quitting.

Yes, Adobe is well aware of the problem. No, it is not fixed in the AE 9.0.1 update. But at least now you know what’s going on, should you be suffering persistent and mysterious crashes on exit…

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

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.

Too Much of a Good Thing

I know - no one reads the manual, and no one uses the Help file. But in reality, Help has been undergoing a major overhaul in Adobe applications, and is now a very useful resource. The problem is, Adobe has gotten a bit overenthused in their attempts to broaden it, and as a result has made it less useful in some circumstances. But you can help turn that around.

Kensington Mice and After Effects CS4

After Effects CS4 has added a “Unified” camera tool to aid navigation in 3D space. Instead of having to scroll through three separate camera tools - Orbit, Track XY, and Track Z - to reposition an active camera or reframe an alternate view, users can now use a three-button mouse to quickly switch between these three tools.

All of our computers here have Kensington mice that include a clickable scroll wheel as the third (middle) mouse button. And lo and behold, they don’t work out of the box with AE CS4; the clickable scroll wheel defaults to toggling between horizontal and vertical scrolling. But a couple of settings tweaks will make your mouse behave the way you want:

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