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.

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: Creating Transparency

We’re often asked: What’s the difference between editing and motion graphics?

Although there’s always exceptions to every rule, one way to distinguish between them is the way a project is built: Editing projects tend to be arranged horizontally, cutting between different scenes over time; motion graphics projects quite often are arranged vertically, with multiple elements - including footage, text, and other graphics - appearing on screen at the same time.

The logical next question is: How do you see through one layer to the other elements underneath? This is something we’ve written a lot of articles and recorded a lot of videos about, including our most recently released courses on lynda.com. Sounds like a good time for a quick reference to them all.

Expert Tips on Final Cut Pro

Ever watch someone use (or even worse, demonstrate) a piece of software, and think to yourself “wait a minute - that’s not how you should do that…”? Then Rob Imbs of Lovely Junkie has a video for you. Rob has compiled what is no doubt years of hard-won Final Cut experience and “knowledge” into one tip-laden video of just about everything a beginner can do wrong. With a straight face. (Until the very end.) Watch it and weep. Then pass it along to an unsuspecting Final Cut Friend.

Your Daily After Effects Fix

I’ve mentioned previously that Todd Kopriva’s Region of Interest blog is one of the best sources of essential After Effects information. And it still is. But a few additional sources have really blossomed as constant fountains of After Effects goodness:

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Greenscreen Resources

As much as we like to keep up with the newest products and latest trends, some information is timeless - such as advice on shooting greenscreen. The After Effects Facebook feed forwarded a link to a very useful article by Jonas Hummelstrand of General Specialist posted back in 2006 that everyone should read before setting up a keying shoot. If I had to add one amplification, it would be to try to hire a stage that has some depth to it, so that the screen - and lighting for the screen - can be some distance behind the action; this will further blur it out, and reduce spill.

Here’s a few more links of note:

• We recorded a quick video tutorial on using Keylight in After Effects with lynda.com for Adobe
• Rosco and Composite Components sell paint, tape, fabrics, and lights for keying
• Alex Lindsay of Pixel Corps wrote a two-part Greenscreen Primer for PVC, broken down into the set and the camera

(By the way, we also overhauled the keying chapter in Creating Motion Graphics 5th Edition, including high-def sources to practice with courtesy of Hollywood Camera Work.)

If you have any other favorite resources, please feel free to post them in the Comments below!

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:

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