After Effects CS5.5

Just one year after the release of After Effects CS5, the AE team has cooked up a very nice update with some significant new and updated features (plus a lot of nice small ones as well) that will be of interest to both motion graphics and visual effects artists. To share our take on these with you, we’ve worked with AdobeTV who is hosting a series of videos we created on how to take advantage of our favorites among the new features. These are embedded over the next few pages, along with some quick comments about the new features. These movies include:

Deeper Modes of Expression, Part 9: Wiggly World

Nothing is more boring that having to keyframe supposedly random movements. Fortunately, there’s a simple, powerful expression that can add randomization to virtually any parameter for you: wiggle. Here we’ll explain how to apply the basic wiggle expression, and then add finer degrees of control to it.

Deeper Modes of Expression, Part 8: Going for a Loop

Our previous installment was about decision-making loops (if/then and while/do statements). This installemnt is about a different kind of loop: repeating an animation without having to loop footage or places copies of an animation end-to-end.

Deeper Modes of Expression, Part 7: Making Decisions

As your expressions become more complex, you will want to start making decisions in the middle of them – for example, if the current value is less than a certain number, do one thing; if it is greater than that number, do something different. Other decisions include “wait until the current time is past the next marker – then do this animation” or even “don’t freak out and give me an error message if you can’t find the marker, keyframe, or other layer you’re looking for.”

These sorts of decisions are often referred to as conditional statements, and expressions in After Effects supports them. The most common type of conditional is know it as an if/then or if/then/else statement. If you are not familiar with JavaScript, their format may be a bit different from what you expect, but they are easy to learn.

A variation on this theme is a do/while loop, which is an essential tool for overcoming expressions’ inability to remember what happened beforehand: You can use these loops to walk through every frame of the animation – accumulating information – until you get to the current frame.

Deeper Modes of Expression, Part 6: Managing Time, Layer Numbers, Speed, and Velocity

By default, expressions assume you are interested in values at the current time. If you need to know the current time, just use the keyword time in an expression, and After Effects will return the current time in seconds (not frames, as we discussed in the previous section).

However, expressions allow you to access values at different points in time. They also let you find out what time keyframes and markers are located at so you can have animations change as they approach or cross one of these keys, as well as reference what other layers are doing. In this installment, we’ll explore a couple of ways to exploit time.

Deeper Modes of Expression, Part 5: Comp, Footage, and Layer Attributes

If you can keyframe it, chances are you can control it with an expression, or use it as part of another property’s expression – usually by dragging the pick whip to it. However, there are additional properties you have access to – including those you can’t access with a pick whip, such as whether a layer’s audio or video switches are on, or its current in or out point. You’ll need to either manually type in code to access these, or get some help from the expression language menu. To give you a taste for what’s possible, let’s discuss a couple of comp and footage attributes of interest.

After Effects CS5

Adobe has officially launched Creative Suite 5, which includes major updates to virtually all of their applications. Adobe has seeded us with preliminary versions, and hired us to help create some documentation on the new release; we wanted to share with you our own impressions plus insights into the new features in After Effects CS5.
In addition to this preview, we also have a 2.5 hour course we’ve created for lynda.com on AE CS5 called After Effects CS5 New Creative Techniques. (If you don’t have a subscription, click here for a free 7-day all-access pass.) Finally, we have completed on the fifth edition of our book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects (“CMG5” for short), which covers the major new features in both CS4 and CS5. Meanwhile, here’s some of the significant new features in After Effects CS5:

more »

Deeper Modes of Expression, Part 4: Space Conversions

We’re in the process of serializing the Deeper Modes of Expression bonus chapter from our book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects into a set of 12 posts here on PVC. As you work with Position values and expressions, you will run into the problem of what the Position value really means: Is it a position relative to the layer (such as an effect point), is it a position relative to a parent layer, or is it a position relative to the overall comp (sometimes referred to as “world space”)?

Fortunately, After Effects has a number of layer space transform methods designed to help you move between these different definitions of Position. These are described in the online Help (press F1 to open). Most are straightforward, but there are a few useful transformations that need some extra thought.

Page 1 of 5 pages  1 2 3 >  Last »