Tip: Preview a Chapter of After Effects Studio Techniques, Gratis

After Effects CS4 Visual Effects & Compositing Studio Techniques is quite a mouthful for a book title, which may explain why I often use the shorthand above. The book stands out for a couple of reasons: one is that it deals explicitly with visual effects compositing, the process of fooling the eye into thinking disparate elements were shot together. Also, there is very little in the way of beginner information in this book; it is aimed at professionals who either have used After Effects and want to improve their compositing, or compositors who want to learn to use After Effects. But is it for you?

Tip: Measure Drive Performance for Video on a Mac with HD Speed Test

If you’ve ever searched for downloadable tools to benchmark drive performance on your Mac, you have probably ended up downloading free applications from Aja and Blackmagic. You may have realized that these applications don’t offer an accurate portrait of how your drive will perform with your editing software, but until now they were the only tools publicly available for this purpose. Now there is a freeware alternative that, while still in beta, may offer a much more accurate glimpse of what is going on.

Tip: The Feature Most Missing Until After Effects CS4

Here’s a tip that won’t be news to any hardcore After Effects CS4 users, but lately I’ve encountered artists working in CS4 who don’t know about it, and to me it’s like not knowing that you can switch apps on a Mac with command + tab, just like alt + tab on Windows. It’s possible someone out there even just received a bonus tip.

Tip: Monkey Extract Painlessly Converts R3D to QuickTime or Sequences

I have advocated that – in most cases - when working with R3D files you should convert them to another format instead of attempting to preserve the R3D as long as possible. How exactly to optimally adjust footage in REDAlert and output it is the subject for a longer article that will have to wait until later, but the practical question of how to take, say, a rough cut in Final Cut Pro and convert it from R3D to QuickTimes or TIFF or DPX sequences is much more easily solved with a shareware tool called Monkey Extract.

Tip: Shift Habits, Control Energy Use, Eject Waste

It’s unfortunate for those of us doing the processor-intensive work of video and computer graphics that we typically disable Energy Saver settings because they can thwart renders. You’d think that the system could tell the difference between an After Effects or Maya render that requires several minutes per frame and all the little pings of low level network activity, but it seems to be a hard problem to solve. It only takes one crucial failed render to make you set “Put the Computer to Sleep” to “Never.” Your displays, however, don’t present this level of difficulty.

Tip: Track a Mask in After Effects with TrackerViz

It’s Script Sunday, and today’s script is so useful it made the cut and was included in the latest edition of After Effects Studio Techniques. TrackerViz was written by Charles Bordenave, the guy behind NABscripts (no apparent relation to the conference beginning this weekend), based on requests and ideas from artist Sean Kennedy. Here’s an excerpt in which I describe it.

Tip: Display Timecode or Frames in QuickTime Pro

What if QuickTime Player Pro gave you other options than that counter in seconds? Think of the options – you could specify a particular frame for feedback instead of saying “it’s between 1:52 and 1:53.” Search source timecode of footage to look for logged clips right there instead of firing up Final Cut. Refer to frame count numbers instead of minutes and seconds.

Tip: Warped Friday

You may have seen a couple of video tips to show a couple of ninja tricks with RG Corner Pin, one of the three plug-ins that makes up Red Giant’s Warp plug-in set. If you encountered that post without knowing what Warp even does, today I present the top 5 ways this set beats the built-in tools, and a special deal just for today (and, well, for the tardy, tomorrow).

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