PAR for the Course

Over the years, I have seen a lot of folklore and bad math employed to determine how to work with non-square pixels, resulting in a plethora of incorrect working practices. Therefore, in this article I’m going to spend a lot of time laying out the historical and mathematical basis for where these numbers came from. Hopefully this will provide you with a solid foundation on which you can build a new set of working practices.

On Artbeats.com: Choosing a Color Palette

Over on Artbeats.com, they just published the second of a trio of articles we’re writing on the use of color. In this one, we give several ideas for how to develop an appropriate color palette for a specific job, including tips on using a client’s print colors, applying effects to key shots to create sample color swatches, and using Adobe’s Kuler utility to browse for or create your own color palettes.

Click here to download the PDF of “Choosing a Color Palette” from Artbeats.com.

(Click here to download the PDF of the previous article in the series, “Color Theory”)

In the next installment, we’ll suggest a few ideas that make it easier for you to re-use a color palette throughout a job, including using expressions in After Effects to link colors to a master swatch that you can then change to your client’s content.

After Effects Apprentice Video Tutorial #6

We’ve recently released After Effects Apprentice (2nd Edition). The DVD-ROM that comes with the book includes an hour and a half of video tutorials that provide gentle introductions to major features inside After Effects. We are releasing these videos one per month here on PVC; they are also available on Focal Press’ web site - make sure you visit their After Effects micro-site for more free chapters and tutorials.

In this sixth video, we provide a quick overview of how to use the 3D Axis Arrows to manipulate 3D layers in After Effects. We know that many After Effects users - especially those from print and video editing backgrounds - have probably not used a 3D program before; hopefully this will bring you one step closer to overcoming any apprehension you may have over diving into 3D. The next movie will cover how to use the 3D camera tool to manipulate both cameras and 3D viewports. In the meantime, click on the Play Video link below, and enjoy!

(Note: For those who are hearing-impaired, Lynda.com has added Closed Captioning to these tutorials. They are available here. If you do not have a Lynda.com subscription, click here for a free 7-day pass.)

After Effects Apprentice was designed for students looking to learn After Effects from scratch, as well as those who do not use AE full time (such as editors or web designers). It starts gently with an introduction to keyframing, and progresses through the important features (such as masks, mattes, effects, text, audio, 3D space, shape layers, expressions, parenting, and building advanced hierarchies of compositions) until you end up keying, stabilizing, and compositing a shot in high def. The second edition has been fully revamped for After Effects CS4, and includes integration with Photoshop CS4 Extended and Flash Professional CS4.

Click to PLAY VIDEO »

After Effects Tips 5: Going for a Scroll

It seems such a simple idea: a banner scrolls across the top or bottom of your comp, repeating the same few words over and over, and doing so seamlessly for as long as you need.

Here’s how to create such an animated banner in After Effects, using either the Offset (or Motion Tile) effect or the Autoscroll animation preset. If you have After Effects CS4 and would like to follow along, download the CS4 project file: AE-Tips-5_scrolling_CS4.zip

On Artbeats.com: Color Theory

Over on Artbeats.com, we’re starting a trio of articles on the use of color: basic color theory, ideas for how to select a workable color palette, and techniques for remembering and easily applying your chosen colors throughout a project. This month is the article on basic color theory, including some basics on picking colors including combinations that do or don’t work for text.

Click here to download the PDF of “Color Theory” from Artbeats.com.

If you’d like some additional creative examples for how to use color, we wrote a column over a decade ago called Getting Behind the Color Wheel which you might enjoy. As with most of our articles, it’s archived here on PVC.

After Effects Apprentice Video Tutorial #5

We’ve recently released After Effects Apprentice (2nd Edition). The DVD-ROM that comes with the book includes an hour and a half of video tutorials that provide gentle introductions to major features inside After Effects, such as text and expressions. We are releasing these videos one per month here on PVC; they are also available on Focal Press’ web site - make sure you visit their After Effects micro-site for more free chapters and tutorials.

In this fifth video, we provide a gentle introduction to expressions, showing how to use the pickwhip to easily link one property to another, modify that property using very simple math, plus recover from errors. We also show how to use two of the most useful expressions: “wiggle” (to randomize virtually any parameter), and “linear” (to easily convert between differing parameter ranges, such as degrees to percentage). Click on the Play Video link below, and enjoy!

(Note: For those who are hearing-impaired, Lynda.com has added Closed Captioning to these tutorials. They are available here. If you do not have a Lynda.com subscription, click here for a free 7-day pass.)

After Effects Apprentice was designed for students looking to learn After Effects from scratch, as well as those who do not use AE full time (such as editors or web designers). It starts gently with an introduction to keyframing, and progresses through the important features (such as masks, mattes, effects, text, audio, 3D space, shape layers, expressions, parenting, and building advanced hierarchies of compositions) until you end up keying, stabilizing, and compositing a shot in high def. The second edition has been fully revamped for After Effects CS4, and includes integration with Photoshop CS4 Extended and Flash Professional CS4.

Click to PLAY VIDEO »

The Missing Video: Sonicfire Pro + After Effects

A few years ago, SmartSound commissioned us to create video training on how an editor or motion graphics designer could start in their Sonicfire Pro intelligent stock music software to select a soundtrack for a commercial, edit the source clips in After Effects (or any NLE, for that matter) to match the music, and then go back into Sonicfire to massage the music to work better with the now-edited video and voiceover. This video is theoretically still available on SmartSound’s web site, but has become hard to find since they updated their site to tout their latest version (SFP5). As we think it still contains some very useful advice on how one can work more effectively with music and video, we got permission to re-post it here. Although it is specific to Sonicfire and After Effects, the concepts it contains have broad application (especially the middle section “Spotting and Editing to a Soundtrack"). Click the PLAY VIDEO link below to view it.

Click to PLAY VIDEO »

On Artbeats.com: Grayscale Shootout

There are many ways to convert color footage into a grayscale shot - and they are certainly not created equal. Perhaps most surprising is that the time-honored technique of removing all of the saturation from an image can produce unpleasant visual artifacts. In this article on Artbeats.com, we run through our favorite techniques in After Effects, Final Cut Pro, and Motion for deriving a pleasant grayscale image.

Click here to download the PDF of “Grayscale Shootout” from Artbeats.com.

By the way, this is the article I blogged about earlier which nearly drove me crazy: the same effect can have different names in these programs, while different effects can have the same name. It’s always worth taking the time to test and explore, rather than taking a result a face value.

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