CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 37B and 37C – Expressions and Scripting Bonus Chapters

We’re going through our book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects 5th Edition (CMG5) and pulling out a few “hidden gems” from each chapter. These will include essential advice for new users, plus timesaving tips that experienced users may not be aware of.

In addition to the book’s introductory chapter on expressions that we covered last week, the dual-layer DVD-ROM that comes with CMG5 includes bonus chapters on both expressions and scripting. Rather than try to boil down nearly 70 pages of PDFs into our customary handful of gems, this week we thought we’d share a set of resources on scripting and expressions - including Bonus Chapter 37C itself, written by Dan Ebberts of MotionScript.com.

Upgrading to After Effects CS5.5?

As Adobe and their various vendors have been offering a variety of discounts and incentives this year (as well as floating the idea that you’ll need to own at least CS5 to get discounted upgrade pricing on the next Creative Suite), we’re guessing a lot of After Effects users who have been getting by with older versions may be thinking about upgrading.

To help inform your potential upgrade decision and ease the subsequent transition, we thought it would be helpful to round up some resources - many free; some costing just a nominal sum - that explain what’s changed between versions. In addition to links to relevant articles and reviews, we’re including a selection of free videos from relevant courses on lynda.com (if you have trouble playing any of them, reload the page); if you don’t already have a subscription to watch the rest of the courses, click through this link to get a 7 day free pass to evaluate these courses and others as part of your potential new subscription.

We’re going to assume you have at least After Effects CS3, which was released in 2007. We’ll give an overview of major changes in CS4, CS5, and CS5.5 in each of these three pages.

CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 35 – The Puppet Tools

We’re going through our book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects 5th Edition (CMG5) and pulling out a few “hidden gems” from each chapter. These will include essential advice for new users, plus timesaving tips that experienced users may not be aware of.

One of the most fun areas to explore in After Effects is using the Puppet tools. These provide a new way to warp layers, including shape and text layers created inside After Effects. Applications include creating character animation or just imparting fun movement to otherwise inanimate objects.

CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 34 – Roto Brush

We’re going through our book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects 5th Edition (CMG5) and pulling out a few “hidden gems” from each chapter. These will include essential advice for new users, plus timesaving tips that experienced users may not be aware of.

The Roto Brush is a relatively new tool introduced in After Effects CS5 that helps automate creating a matte to separate a foreground from a background, such as isolating an actor from the room around him. To accomplish this, you draw brush strokes to teach After Effects the difference between the two. After Effects uses this information in conjunction with edge detection, motion tracking, and optical flow technologies to follow the changes in foreground and background over time.

Roto Brush is not perfect, but it’s a lot easier than hand drawing and animating precise mask shapes (plus you can use the Paint tools - the subject of the previous chapter - as well as masking to help clean up any problem areas that the automated Roto Brush may have misinterpreted). In this chapter in the Creating Motion Graphics book, we guide you through a preferred workflow for achieving good results with Roto Brush. Here are a few tips, hidden gems, and general advice from that chapter.

CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 33 – Paint and Clone

We’re going through our book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects 5th Edition (CMG5) and pulling out a few “hidden gems” from each chapter. These will include essential advice for new users, plus timesaving tips that experienced users may not be aware of.

After Effects offers a basic set of non-destructive vector-based paint tools for painting on, cloning, and erasing portions of layers. In this chapter in CMG, we explore using these Paint tools, covering the fundamentals of each operation by running through a series of easy exercises. We also explore the various methods for animating strokes, and walk you step by step through automating a repair task using motion tracking and expressions. Along the way we also present tips for incorporating other effects with Paint, as well as saving custom brushes and clone presets.

Although AE’s Paint tools are nowhere near as evolved as Photoshop’s, they are still useful for repair-oriented tasks such as cloning and fixing alpha channels, and their animation capabilities are fun. Here we’d like to share a few shortcuts, gotchas, and ideas to help improve you experience with this section of the program.

CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 31 – mocha and mocha shape

We’re going through our book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects 5th Edition (CMG5) and pulling out a few “hidden gems” from each chapter. These will include essential advice for new users, plus timesaving tips that experienced users may not be aware of.

In this final chapter on motion tracking, we explore using the planer tracking system mocha from Imagineer Systems, which is bundled free with After Effects. After walking through the steps required to perform a typical corner pin track, we turn our attention to creating “shapes” (mattes defined using spline tools) that are linked to tracks, and bring the result into After Effects to use for targeted processing.

As mocha is a stand-along application with its own very different user interface, those unfamiliar with mocha can find it intimidating. However, we feel working through the simple exercises we created for you in CMG5 will get you a good distance down the road to feeling more comfortable with it. Imagineer also has a lot of tutorials available on their web site.

CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 30 – Motion Tracking

We’re going through our book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects 5th Edition (CMG5) and pulling out a few “hidden gems” from each chapter. These will include essential advice for new users, plus timesaving tips that experienced users may not be aware of.

This is the second of three chapters in CMG5 focus on the tools available in After Effects CS5 for motion tracking and stabilization, including the bundled 3rd party tools mocha and mocha shape. As the built-in tracker and stabilizer share many of the same tools, in the previous chapter on Motion Stabilization we covered the concepts and user interface elements that were common to both of them. In this chapter, we discuss the additional features required to make one layer follow a feature in another layer.

CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 29 – Motion Stabilization

We’re going through our book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects 5th Edition (CMG5) and pulling out a few “hidden gems” from each chapter. These will include essential advice for new users, plus timesaving tips that experienced users may not be aware of.

The next three chapters in CMG5 focus on the tools available in After Effects CS5 for motion tracking and stabilization, including the bundled 3rd party tools mocha and mocha shape. As the built-in tracker and stabilizer share many of the same tools, in this first chapter on Motion Stabilization we also cover concepts that are common to both of them.

After Effects CS5.5 introduced a brand-new Warp Stabilizer which replaces the traditional motion stabilizer for many tasks. For those who have upgraded from CS5 to CS5.5, we give an overview of the Warp Stabilizer here, and then demonstrate how to put it to use here.

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