After Effects Apprentice Free Video: Creating an Orbit Camera Rig

As we mentioned earlier, we’ve been busy this year creating an extensive, multi-course video training series based on our popular beginner’s book After Effects Apprentice. Each course has two or more movies that are free for all to view; we’re re-posting those videos here on PVC to make sure you don’t miss them. This movie demonstrates how to build an orbit camera rig in After Effects, both manually and by using the new menu command added in AE CS5.5.

CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 45 – What’s Your Preference?

This is the final installment of us going through our book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects 5th Edition (CMG5) and pulling out a few “hidden gems” from each chapter. (Is a celebration in order?)

After Effects features a variety of settings that control importing files, opening multiple compositions, previewing audio, the appearance and interactivity of the program, plus numerous other details. In this final chapter of CMG5, we go through each of the 14 individual Preference panes, giving an overview of what these settings mean and what they do and highlighting those settings that we find aid our efficiency. Here are but a few of those tips.

CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 44 – Prerendering and Proxies

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 After Effects’ strengths is that you don’t have to prerender anything: All of your sources, layers, and manipulations are “live” all the time, allowing you to make unlimited changes. However, calculating everything all the time can slow down both your work and your final render.

In chapter 44 of CMG5, we explain how prerendering complex comps can speed up your workflow, and provide an example for you to work through. Here we’ll share both some background information and specific tips from that chapter.

CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 43 – Advanced Rendering

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.

Chapter 43 of CMG5 is not just about network and scripted rendering (subjects we leave to the book rather than this column here), but also about a set of very useful project management commands found under the File menu inside After Effects. These utilities can help clean up your project by removing duplicate or unused sources, strip out everything except what is needed for selected comps so you can pass a portion of your project onto another artist, collect all of your source footage to one folder for backup or transport, or even enlist the aid of multiple copies of After Effects to help you render a particularly intensive comp. We’ll share a few of those utilities here.

CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 42 – Render Queue

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.

To create a movie or still image from your animations and arrangements, you have to render a file. After Effects is very flexible in allowing you to set up and override certain parameters when you render, as well as to create multiple files with different aspect ratios and file formats from the same render pass. You can also create and save templates of these render and output settings. In Chapter 42 of CMG5 we reveal the internal render procedure as well as discuss each option in the Render Settings and Output Module dialogs; we’ll share a few of those gems here.

CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 41 – Video Issues

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.

There are a number of nonintuitive technical issues – including interlaced fields, frame rates, frame sizes, pixel aspect ratios, safe image areas, and color spaces – that differentiate video from images destined to be displayed on a computer. You can’t just ignore them; they must be handled properly to ensure your final work appears on television as you intended - otherwise your final image may be mangled (not to mention your relationship with your client). Chapter 41 of CMG5 contains an overview of many of those topic; we’ll share a few gems here.

CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 40B – 3D Channel Effects

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 includes a set of 3D Channel effects, which take advantage of additional information embedded in files rendered from certain 3D programs. Since relatively few users have occasion to employ these, we covered them in a Bonus Chapter on the DVD-ROM that comes with CMG5 - including some of the naming and file format conventions you need to follow to make sure After Effects can import all of the available information. As not all 3D programs embed this information in their render, where practical we also provided alternative workflows that replicate the end result of these effects with files you should be able to generate from almost any 3D program.

CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 40 – Integrating with 3D Applications

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.

Real 3D programs have several advantages over After Effects: For example, their objects have real depth, and the texturing and lighting options are far more advanced. However, After Effects is the better tool in which to refine the final look of your 3D renders, as well as composite other elements on top of them. Offloading portions of the work from your 3D program to After Effects will save time while giving you more power and flexibility - but it requires some planning to set up.

In this chapter in CMG, we give advice on how to successfully integrate your 3D program with After Effects. Unfortunately, there is no one universal file format to bring information from a 3D application into After Effects, so in the book we focus on using Maxon Cinema 4D as it currently has the tightest integration with After Effects, plus is the 3D program we personally use. However, many of the concepts we cover are universal and can be applied to other programs as well. A few of the more universal tips from that chapter are included here.

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