Mark Christiansen

Mark Christiansen is the author of After Effects Studio Techniques (Adobe Press). He has created visual effects and animations for feature films including Pirates of the Caribbean 3, The Day After Tomorrow and films by Robert Rodriguez. Past corporate clients include Adobe, Cisco, Sun, Cadence, Seagate, Intel and Medtronic, and broadcast work has appeared on HBO and the History Channel. Mark's roles have included producing, directing, designing and effects supervision, and his solo work has appeared at film festivals including L.A. Shorts Fest.

Long a Contributing Editor at DV Magazine during its heyday, Mark has been contracted as a marketing and technical writer on numerous occasions for Adobe Systems Inc. as well as related companies such as Red Giant Software. He has taught at fxPhd.com and Academy of Art University. His career began at LucasArts Entertainment and he is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Pomona College.

GridIron Flow Ships with Surprise Additions
Tip: Force an After Effects Render to Fail (and Save!) on a Mac
Tip: Force an After Effects Render not to Fail
Convert RED Camera R3D Footage Losslessly, Painlessly, Confidently
NAB 2009 RED Reel Online
Tip: Use More than One Processor with Apple Compressor
Tip: Browse After Effects Scripts as if Looking for Plug-ins
Tip: Play Anything – YouTube included - in QuickTime Mac with Perian
NAB 2009 - The Foundry Demos 3 Upcoming Versions of Nuke
Tip: Preview a Chapter of After Effects Studio Techniques, Gratis
Tip: Measure Drive Performance for Video on a Mac with HD Speed Test
Tip: The Feature Most Missing Until After Effects CS4
Tip: Monkey Extract Painlessly Converts R3D to QuickTime or Sequences
Tip: Shift Habits, Control Energy Use, Eject Waste
Tip: Track a Mask in After Effects with TrackerViz
Tip: Display Timecode or Frames in QuickTime Pro
Tip: Warped Friday
Tip: CS4 Update Actually Gets You All the Way from FCP to After Effects
Incredible: Carousel
Tip: Render the Impossible via Proxies in After Effects
Tip: Double-click to Open R3D in REDAlert with RedPortal
Tip: Add “Missing” Finder Tools
Tip: Split a Layer into a Grid in After Effects
Tip: Get QuickTime Looking Right Without Re-Rendering
Tip: Linear Blending at Any Color Depth in After Effects
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Complete Archives

Monday, June 29, 2009

GridIron Flow Ships with Surprise Additions

Unique workflow software designed to help manage assets in a small studio makes big additions, ships.

image

GridIron Software this morning announced on a conference call that Flow, the one-of-a-kind visual file management, workflow and time tracking tool that has been in development for three years, is now available for purchase or 30 day demo from the GridIron site.

In addition to a demonstration of how the software can be used to recover otherwise lost versions of graphics files, to discover the use of an element – including even a font – in a given file, or to track time spent on a project, Steve Forde, CEO of GridIron, brought on John Nack, Product Manager at Adobe, to show how Flow has been integrated directly into CS4 via Flash Panels.

A Flow icon was shown right in the tool bar of Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign – and reportedly is available for all CS4 apps – that opens a Flash panel showing a miniature version of Flow and allowing capabilities such as coordinating fonts with a file from a different CS4 application that have never been possible.

Steve also announced a new feature added to Flow that did not appear in the public beta: the ability to see the same Flow map regardless of user or system. To support this, GridIron offers a multi-machine license, three systems for $100 more than the single system license.

(0) Comments • • Permalink


Thursday, April 30, 2009

Tip: Force an After Effects Render to Fail (and Save!) on a Mac

Trigger a segmentation fault, win a prize: your project back.

No doubt you already make liberal use of the After Effects Auto-Save feature, which incrementally stores sub-versions of your current saved project in set increments of time. By default, the last 5 20 minute increments are saved, with the oldest replaced by the newest, but you can freely change the interval and number of saves. Still, what happens when your session hangs up and you have valuable unsaved information?

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(2) Comments • Most recent comments by: Jim Hines, yostae, • Permalink


Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Tip: Force an After Effects Render not to Fail

Had it with Out of Memory errors? Here’s a hack to help in CS3 and CS4.

If you’ve ever tried rendering a composition made up of one or more large images - say, a single huge matte painting or several layers of 4k footage - you have probably encountered the dreaded Out of Memory error causing your render to fail. What to do about this?

more »


Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Convert RED Camera R3D Footage Losslessly, Painlessly, Confidently

Do it the way Autodesk recommends and don’t fret about lost data

If you’re a regular at this site you may recall 5 Tips to Maintain Sanity in RED Post.. The key point of that article was to assert that since you cannot write an R3D file, you must convert and it is best to do so early in order to save many wasted cycles processing full 4K (when the output is actually HD or less). Today’s tip tells how to convert an R3D losslessly to either 10-bit Cineon or 16-bit TIFF, and it’s backed up by a whitepaper from Autodesk.

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Post Production
Tips • (2) Comments • Most recent comments by: Mark Christiansen, Graeme Nattress, • Permalink



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Monday, April 27, 2009

NAB 2009 RED Reel Online

Not the same as 4K, but definitely entertaining and pleasing to the eye.

The RED reel that showed at NAB 2009 is now viewable online (right click to download it).

There are even a couple of shots on there from a shoot I was on as fx supervisor. It’s a gorgeous, cinematic reel and an entertaining viewing.


NAB 09 • (0) Comments • • Permalink


Monday, April 27, 2009

Tip: Use More than One Processor with Apple Compressor

If you’re rendering with the defaults, you’re doing it the slow way.

Today’s tip is prompted by a tweet that appeared last evening from Jim Geduldick of finalcutuser.com and AENY, the NYC After Effects user group, reminding the owner of a new 8-core Mac that Compressor works best when using fewer than all 8 cores. The thing about that tip is, by default, Compressor only uses a single core to render regardless of how many are on your computer, so first you must understand how to get past that limitation.

more »

Tips • (0) Comments • • Permalink


Sunday, April 26, 2009

Tip: Browse After Effects Scripts as if Looking for Plug-ins

Redefinery.com makes it easy to find what you need.

The point of scripts in After Effects is to reduce tedious tasks, although the best of them effectively add functionality because what they allow you to do would never be worth the trouble to do manually. Therefore if you find yourself faced with a tedious task, it’s not a bad idea to try and find a script that will help. Some sites do this better than others, and today I’m highlighting Jeff Almasol’s Redefinery as a site you can go visit right now and find the solution to one or many problems you’ve faced in the past, and are likely to re-encounter.

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Tips • (0) Comments • • Permalink


Saturday, April 25, 2009

Tip: Play Anything – YouTube included - in QuickTime Mac with Perian

Open-source tool makes QuickTime playback nearly universal – but only on a Mac.

The QuickTime file format can be the cause of trouble in a production pipeline, with its moving-target gamma and all-or-nothing file integrity (if there’s one corrupted frame in an .mov, forget about opening it and recovering the rest). QuickTime Player Pro, however, has many great features missing from other standalone players (including the fantastic VLC); it just requires that anything it opens be readable as a QuickTime movie. Although it seems at times to support other formats, they will often tend to open blank. Wouldn’t it be great to just be able to double click any moving image file and open it in QuickTime?

more »

Tips • (1) Comments • Most recent comments by: Ben Richardson, • Permalink


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