After Effects Apprentice Video Tutorial #7

We’ve recently released After Effects Apprentice (2nd Edition). The DVD-ROM that comes with the book includes an hour and a half of video tutorials that provide gentle introductions to major features inside After Effects. We are releasing these videos one per month here on PVC; they are also being made available on Focal Press’ web site - make sure you visit their After Effects micro-site for more related freebies.

Learning how to navigate 3D space can be one of the more daunting features to tackle in After Effects. In this seventh video, we demonstrate how to use the Camera Tools in After Effects both to move 3D cameras, and how they affect the Position versus Point of Interest parameters. We also show how these same tools allow you to customize the additional 3D views the user has access to, making it easier to view your scene from alternate perspectives. Tips include how to quickly switch between the different tools, plus how to use a 3-button mouse in conjunction with the new Unified Camera Tool introduced in After Effects CS4. And it will all take only 4 minutes of your time. Click on the Play Video link below, and enjoy!

(Note: For those who are hearing-impaired, Lynda.com has added Closed Captioning to these tutorials. They are available here. If you do not have a Lynda.com subscription, click here for a free 7-day pass.)

After Effects Apprentice was designed for students looking to learn After Effects from scratch, as well as those who do not use AE full time (such as editors or web designers). It starts gently with an introduction to keyframing, and progresses through the important features (such as masks, mattes, effects, text, audio, 3D space, shape layers, expressions, parenting, and building advanced hierarchies of compositions) until you end up keying, stabilizing, and compositing a shot in high def. The second edition has been fully revamped for After Effects CS4, and includes integration with Photoshop CS4 Extended and Flash Professional CS4.

Believable Hand-Held Motion Tracking with Mocha & After Effects CS4

Motion Tracking - After Effects CS4 with Mocha from Jeff Foster on Vimeo.

One of the best additions to After Effects CS4 is the inclusion of a stand-alone application called Mocha for AE from Imagineer Systems. This is a powerful planar motion tracker and stabilizer that does an amazing job of tracking all kinds of elements in motion or to stabilize a character or a scene with shaky footage. Many of the example movies you may have seen demonstrating Mocha with After Effects CS4 (including some of my own) have been inserting something into the screen of a portable device or a TV. But what if the object you are tracking goes off the screen? What if you want to track something in motion but want to retain the realism of the hand-held camera shake? Even though Mocha does a remarkable job of stabilizing footage I thought I’d put Mocha to the test with some hand-held footage from a compact DV cam and track the footage, shaking and all!

Seeing the Future - In Color

We’re still recovering from the HOW Design Conference in Austin last week, where temperatures hit 107. After the ice packs melt, we’ll post a summary of interesting things we heard there.

In the meantime, for those who have color-focused jobs (or color-fussy clients), you may be interested in the work of the Color Marketing Group: a global consortium that attempts to determine what the hot trends in color for various market segments will be in different parts of the world. Click here to see their predictions for 2009 (white for business, blue is the new green, etc.). They also have a free weekly newsletter of color trends and ideas.

50% off Artbeats Stock Footage

Stock footage prices have risen considerably over the past several years, making it less of a discretionary “that’s cool” purchase and more one where we may wait for a client who needs a particular shot. That’s why we were particularly happy to see a nice deal arrive in our mailbox from Artbeats: 50% off all footage collections, and 30% off of all single clips (excluding low-res and any other special offers), through midnight PST on July 4. Just use code 4017 when you check out.

(While you’re there, sign up for their newsletter; subscribers tend to get a free clip each month.)

Font Politics

These humorous videos on YouTube by the crazies at College Humor gives insight into the interpersonal politics of font families. 

Hands-On After Effects Masterclass in Dublin

As some of you know, Trish was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. Although we’ve spoken years ago at a conference in Sweden and Trish has given custom training to Sky TV in Italy, we’re yet to give an open-to-the-public hands-on After Effects class in Europe - until now.

July 17-19, we will be teaching at the Filmbase resource center on Curved Street in Dublin’s fun Temple Bar area. There is a maximum number of 8 students, and at least 5 need to be pre-registered for the class to come off - so if you are thinking about attending, don’t delay until the last minute to register! More details including an outline of the course are available on the Filmbase.ie web site. Hope to see you there…

For something closer to home, we’re also giving an introductory After Effects session aimed at print designers making the move to motion at the upcoming HOW conference in Austin, Texas. Austin is a fun city, and the HOW Design Conference is a great place to recharge your creative batteries, so we’re really looking forward to this conference as well.

On Artbeats.com: Choosing a Color Palette

Over on Artbeats.com, they just published the second of a trio of articles we’re writing on the use of color. In this one, we give several ideas for how to develop an appropriate color palette for a specific job, including tips on using a client’s print colors, applying effects to key shots to create sample color swatches, and using Adobe’s Kuler utility to browse for or create your own color palettes.

Click here to download the PDF of “Choosing a Color Palette” from Artbeats.com.

(Click here to download the PDF of the previous article in the series, “Color Theory”)

In the next installment, we’ll suggest a few ideas that make it easier for you to re-use a color palette throughout a job, including using expressions in After Effects to link colors to a master swatch that you can then change to your client’s content.

Feature Reminder: Content Aware Scaling in Photoshop CS4

Every now and then it’s nice to have a reminder of a cool new feature in a recent software update. That’s what I want to do with this reminder of content aware scaling that was added in Photoshop CS4. The other day I had been struggling for a little while trying to scale down an image to fit in the corner of the video screen while still maintaining a good focus on the subject, a car. I tried all of the usual ways of removing the car, adding it to another layer, blending the background and all sort of things. None of them produced an acceptable transformation. Just about the time the client walked in I had ventured under Photoshop’s Edit menu and there it was, a feature I had used in the past but completely forgotten about content aware scaling:

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