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:

Coke Classic: Final Cut Studio is Back

As has been reported and confirmed by multiple sources, you can once again buy Final Cut Studio. You won’t find it (yet?) in the physical or online Apple stores; you have to call 1-800-MY-APPLE, ask for part number MB642Z/A, and pay $999 ($899 educational).

Great. So?

When FCP-X came out, some tried to placate the naysayers by reminding them that the new version wasn’t compulsory; they could just continue to use the previous version - it’s not like their licenses had been taken away. The reply was yeah, but we’ll eventually need updates and support as hardware and the OS change - why continue to invest effort into a dead product? And unless Apple is about the announce the biggest mea culpa since Avid said they were abandoning the Mac (or Coke quietly took New Coke off the shelves), that part hasn’t changed, regardless of whether you can buy additional copies or not. With Apple’s professional video division focused on the numerous fixes enhancements that have been requested and promised for FCP-X, I just don’t see them launching a parallel development effort to update FCS as well. (Let me know if you’ve seen job postings for Apple that indicates otherwise.)

What this move probably reflects was that some large customers weren’t going to switch to FCP-X just yet, and in the meantime needed additional licensed copies. And more importantly, it shows that Apple listened, and reacted.

And that’s something.

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.

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:

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.

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