On Artbeats.com: Light Wrap

A common visual effect is to place a person originally shot on greenscreen or bluescreen over a new background. But after you get an acceptable key, you may find that the two just don’t seem to fit together. The same applies for objects created in a 3D program.

When confronted with this problem, one of our favorite techniques to employ is “light wrap” where the background scene subtly wraps around the edges of the foreground action, helping the two merge together just as they would in the real world. In this article on Artbeats.com, we show how to manually create this effect in Adobe After Effects, and then briefly discuss the Light Wrap plug-in in Key Correct Pro.

Click here to download the PDF of “Light Wrap” from Arbeats.com.

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

Luma Processing

We’ve been working on a series for lynda.com on how to get the most out of effects in After Effects. As much as you may think you already know, nothing sharpens one’s understanding of a subject than preparing to teach it. One of the subjects we’ve had a chance to study is the usefulness in applying some effects to just the luma (grayscale) or just the color information in an image. Unfortunately, many effects (not to mention After Effects itself) operate on red, green, and blue color channels, rather than luma and color separately. But with a little channel manipulation, you can focus your processing to just the luma or just the color, sometimes with visible benefits.

After Effects Apprentice Video Tutorial #8

Earlier this year we 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 being made available on Focal Press’ web site - make sure you visit their After Effects micro-site for more related freebies.

This tutorial will help you get started with setting up the motion tracker and stabilizer built into After Effects. Although this video uses AE CS4, the tracker’s controls have been largely unchanged over the last several versions, so this will also be of use to those using other recent vintages of AE. The tracker in AE is much-maligned (and AE CS4 now comes bundled with mocha for After Effects as an alternative), but once you know the secrets of how the track points work and how to set its options, it works fine for a large variety of shots.

(Note: For those who are hearing-impaired, lynda.com has added Closed Captioning to these tutorials. They are available here. We are also in the process of creating video training for all of the After Effects Apprentice lessons; they will also appear on lynda.com. 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.

The content contained in After Effects Apprentice - as well as the CMG Blogs and CMG Keyframes posts on ProVideoCoalition - are copyright Crish Design, except where otherwise attributed.

On Artbeats.com: Reusing Colors

Over on Artbeats.com, they recently published the third of a trio of articles we wrote on the use of color. In this final installment, we discuss a few approaches for sharing a color palette across shots, compositions, and even projects using the swatch storage in the system color pickers (particularly in OS-X), Adobe’s kuler and its associated import widgets, and expressions in Adobe After Effects.
Click here to download the PDF of “Reusing Colors” from Artbeats.com.

(Click here to download the PDF of the first article in the series - “Color Theory” - and here to download the PDF of the second article, “Choosing a Color Palette.”)

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

Page 1 of 1 pages