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:

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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.

Deeper Modes of Expression, Part 3: Deeper Into Arrays

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. One of the more mystifying areas of expressions - especially for nonprogrammers - is dealing with arrays. Problems with arrays are the cause of a large bulk of the error messages you will encounter with expressions. Here we will recap the basics, dive into performing additional math operations on arrays, and end with a couple of nice expressions that can measure the distance between layers, or cause one layer to automatically face another.

On Artbeats.com: Color Matching

During a job, footage may come from a variety of sources: freshly-shot clips, archival elements, greenscreen, 3D renders, and stock footage. The trick is making all of them seem to have been shot under the same lighting conditions and with the same equipment, to avoid a visual disconnect as these shots are cut together.

There are several ways to solve this problem. In this article for Artbeats.com, we demonstrate how to study the color biases present in a guide clip, and color correct the other clips using an effect such as Color Balance or Color Finesse so that all the clips share the same biases in the shadows, midtones, and highlights.

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

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.

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