Creating Motion Graphics

Adobe has released an 8.0.2 update for After Effects CS3. Its headline new features are support for Mac OS 10.5, as well as for P2 media. There are also the expected array of bug fixes. What’s been getting less press than it deserves is a change in the way it handles color management with respect to QuickTime files.

While on the subject of external disk drives (see the previous post on LaCie power supply issues), problems with data corruption are also often caused by drive cables. There’s a few ways to cure them.

The most obvious problem is a bad cable. The free cables that come bundled with drives are often chosen because they’re the cheapest, not because they’re the best. For mission-critical applications, we like cables from Granite Digital. They were pioneers of higher-quality cable in the SCSI days, and we feel comfortable continuing to use them with FireWire.

Before you rush out and buy new cables though, there’s a chance they’re not bad - they just live in a bad neighborhood. Make sure you route all of your cables away from any power supplies. Those “wall warts” and “power lumps” create electromagnetic interference which can corrupt the data signal.

Also make sure your cables are passing along all the signal they possibly can. Applying a common audiophile technique to computers, we always apply contact cleaner to the connectors on drives or computer cards when we install them. Something as simple as “TV Tuner cleaner” from your local Radio Shack may help. We personally prefer the CAIG DeoxIT products, available from places such as Amazon and Markertek. These cured many a drive problem for us back in the bad old days of SCSI drives.

We own several of the LaCie Big Disk Extreme external hard drives (view on Amazon), which is part of their “d2” line. They provide RAID 0 speed in a very quiet enclosure, which is important to us. We use the FireWire 800 interface, which we find to be faster than internal SATA in many cases.

However, others have reported problems with these drives failing. One problem is no doubt heat. These drives are tightly packed with a small fan, so they’re going to need a little help to keep them cool. This means try to place them with good airflow all around, and not buried inside a hot enclosed space. We tend to place them on the back sides of our desk (again, to further buffer the noise, but also to get them away from the hot computer), and run their FireWire and power supply cables out under the desk to them.

Another problem has been pinpointed by fellow user Danny Grizzle. He has found that LaCie’s d2 and Big Disk drives can have an issue with their power supplies. They supply 12 volt and 5 volt lines to the drive. However, the 5 volt line may drop in voltage with age. If it drops too far, the drive will become increasingly unreliable until the drive eventually dies.

Sorry for the blatant plug, but there’s a payoff: A free week of as much online video training as you can watch!

We’ve been getting into creating online video training, focusing on specific topics and techniques rather than creating long-form courses (that’s what our books are for). Our current titles are available either pay-as-you-go through Toolfarm or to subscribers of the Lynda.com Online Training Library.

If you’re not currently a Lynda.com subscriber, and are curious to check them out before signing up, you can try them out for free for seven days by clicking here. Feel free to pass this link around. In addition to After Effects, they offer training on a variety of 3D, DVD authoring, NLE, and business applications - even tutorials on operating systems.

For those who are considering creating their own tutorials that they’d like to make money off of, we’ve been testing the waters for the past year trying out a couple pay-as-you-go services in addition to Lynda.com’s subscription model, and - with all due respect to the excellent folks at Toolfarm and other places - Lynda.com has been the hands-down winner from the content creator side. We’ve found them to be a great company to work with, and we plan to be doing a lot more with them in the future. We’ll keep you apprised as we release more titles, or if our opinion changes.