Adobe Media Encoder - another hidden gem?

Suppose you wanted a perfectly useful workhorse of a video application to slip in completely under the radar and be as underutilized as possible. What would you do to kill its chances of being discovered? For starters, you would introduce an early version - the debut perhaps – that wasn’t quite ready and was therefore unreliable, in terms of features and stability, in order to scare off the early adapters. You could then, if you were clever, make sure that any succeeding versions were not directly integrated with any popular applications sitting right next to it in the installation. You could make it look like it was designed primarily to create Flash videos. Finally, if you made it so fully featured that it was, in fact, challenging to easily understand – bingo, that tool would be almost forgotten!

Adobe Media Encoder made an inauspicious debut with Adobe Production Premium CS4, only to be radically improved in terms of reliability, for CS5 and then radically improved again, including support for GPU acceleration and 64 bit memory handling, with its CS5.5 update.

After Effects Script of the Week: Add Parented Null to Each Selected Layer

Past (and future) scripts of the week involve custom UI’s and detailed feature sets. We’re a few months into this series and there are some huge ones I haven’t even covered yet, because I also want to give weight to the ones that simply convert half a dozen steps into one.

This week’s SotW is a two-fer: Add Parented Null to Each Selected Layer, and Add Parented Null to Selected Layers. The former adds a null at the center of the comp to each layer that you select prior to running it directly from File > Scripts. The latter differs only in that it creates a single null for all selected layers.

Use Dynamic Link to bring Warp Stabilizer to Premiere Pro CS5.5

Warp Stabilizer was arguably the biggest addition to After Effects CS5.5. Once you understand how to use it, it’s a tool that can change the way you shoot; if you find yourself without a tripod or any kind of stabilization with a camera as notoriously unsteady as a DSLR, even on a moving shot, you can end up with footage that can look as if a dolly or SteadiCam were used to take it.

For editors and shooters who work more in Premiere Pro than in AE, this is clearly a case where Dynamic Link, the technology bridge between the two apps, is useful. Warp Stabilizer isn’t part of Pr, and it is relatively straightforward for basic usage even for the casual AE user. This article not only walks you through how to achieve shot stabilization on clips in a Pr edit, but it opens the door to how to use Dynamic Link generally, for those who’ve wished they had a better handle on it.

After Effects Script of the Week: Tracker2Mask

Into every After Effects artist’s life a little roto must fall. Although I was told there would be no roto when (name-drop alert!) I worked on Avatar, there came a point right at the end where I had to jump in on a several-hundred frame tracking shot in which foreground and background had to be separated. Tracker2Mask allowed me to leverage the tracker itself to complete this task.

Tools to track a mask point are integral to compositing applications such as Discreet Flame, and the standard impression has been that no equivalent feature set exists in After Effects, despite the addition of the Shape effect that allows usage of a mask tracked in mocha for After Effects, albeit in a completely non-standard way. If the desire is simply to track a point or set of points on a mask, Shape is not the answer.

After Effects Script of the Week: rd_MergeProjects

Wow, where did the week go? Before it’s too late, I have a little gem to share, a script that I myself requested and Jeff Almasol built.

If you do the right thing in After Effects of creating a folder structure in the Project panel to organize assets, you will find that you have a minimum of 3, and often more than a dozen individual folders. These might be as simple as Source, Solids and Pre-comps, or they might be further divided down to have folders specifying what kind of source, and in what order/priority of pre-comp.

If you’re keeping this structure specific, there’s a situation that will come up that MergeProjects solves: namely, what to do if you ever need to incorporate another project into your existing one. When you import a new project, all of its duplicate (redundant) folders are nested into its own source Project panel folder.

After Effects Script of the Week: Get Sh*t Done

I’m into workflow efficiency. I’ve read Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” title=“GTD on Amazon”>David Allen’s book and am a proponent of Things. My own book is filled with keyboard shortcuts and other workflow optimizations. I’m convinced that the lift you get by learning keyboard shortcuts and context menus more than pays off the effort required to learn them.

That’s why I was enthusiastic to check out Get Sh*t Done, which hadn’t really been on my radar. What, I wondered, could be done to enhance my productivity in After Effects via a panel? Earlier in this series I reviewed Shortcut Key Reference, which is all about helping with the laborious process of learning all those hundreds of keystrokes. Would this one make that process simpler?

After Effects Script of the Week: pt Panorama

Thanks to Photoshop and the iPhone, creating a single, arbitrarily wide panoramic image made up of a series of still images, stitched together, has never been simpler. First you shoot the series of stills, being careful to leave overlap between each image as you pan in one direction. Then in Photoshop, the Photomerge operation, or on the iPhone, an app such as AutoStitch Panorama or 360 Panorama automatically detects the matching areas of frame and corrects for lens distortion in order to create a single, wide image.

After Effects Script of the Week: pt TextEdit

Motion graphics involves strange things sometimes, and in particular, text can animate here, there, anywhere, sometimes en masse. Not only is there no limit to the volume of text you might use in an After Effects animation, many designs are based around a kind of theme and repetition. There might be a single word or phrase that is animated a certain way, and then that animation changes slightly over time, and as it is repeated.

And when something fundamental like the phrasing, typeface, color or size changes, editing each instance can be a serious pain. Not only does this present a large volume of changes that demand that you attend to them one-by-one, but even selecting the text to replace what’s in the field can be challenging if, for example, it is arrayed and rotated in 3D space. That piece of text might not even be displayed except at a particular time.

pt TextEdit provides several features that you might expect to find in After Effects itself. It can search on a text string to locate all instances of a given word, phrase, or set of letters, limiting the search only to the current comp or any or all comps within a project. It can look for all text layers that use a particular font, for those pesky (and perennial) cases where the client hasn’t supplied the correct font.

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