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Mark ChristiansenMark 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. 
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Thursday, January 31, 2008Adobe Hacker EffectsMagnum and other great improvements growing through the cracks in After Effects
The After Effects development team is surprisingly small, especially given how much innovation has gone into each revision in the app’s 15 year lifespan (as of this past month - Happy Birthday, After Effects!). Like a Hollywood feature executive they can only greenlight a handful of great ideas each year. That’s what makes a tool like Magnum part of what could be a sea change, if Adobe can figure out how to harness the energy of thousands of passionate and smart After Effects users. You may have heard about Magnum already: give it a single layer in a comp that has cuts and it figures out where they are, and splits that one layer into many. I used it this week to break down a client rough cut for shot organization prior to receiving their actual edit. The thing is, cut detection is a supposed to be hard - Final Cut Pro has it, but unless I’m mistaken it’s restricted it only to captured miniDV footage. But Magnum’s author, Lloyd Alvarez, made use of what I knew would be a major addition to scripting once someone figured out how to do something useful with it: the sampleImage() method, which is the first expression command that can actually get pixel data. Magnum cleverly performs a series of Classic Difference operations between adjoining frames to analyze if the data change between frames is significant enough to indicate a cut. Since Magnum is a script, I can open it, and when I did, I was stunned to find helpful comments on each line explaining exactly how the script works. Not only is Lloyd giving this thing away, he’s encouraging others to learn from his example, hiding nothing. Now if that’s not an example of the gift economy replacing the economics of scarcity, I don’t know what is. Lloyd gets to be considered among the smartest AE artist/developers on the planet, and Adobe’s community gets a new feature for free. So the question is, what can the next version of After Effects do to remove more of the obstacles between people like Lloyd and great ideas like Magnum? Compositing • Software • (0) Comments • • Permalink Page 1 of 1 pages |
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Adobe Hacker EffectsMagnum and other great improvements growing through the cracks in After Effects The After Effects development team is surprisingly small, especially given how… Advertisements |
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