Saturday, May 31, 2008

mocha AE to CC Power Pin

Chris Meyer | 05/31- 10:08 AM

Using Animation Presets and Expressions to simplify using CC Power Pin instead of Corner Pin with mocha AE.

Imagineer Systems’ mocha AE is a stand-alone planer motion tracking application that creates keyframe date which you can in turn use in After Effects. If you are performing a perspective-style track, you will paste the resulting data into a Corner Pin effect already applied to the to-be-pinned layer in After Effects.

However, some prefer using the CC Power Pin effect that comes with Cycore Effects (bundled free with After Effects) over the stock Adobe Corner Pin effect: It is more flexible, and some feel it resamples the layer with higher quality. As a result, a number of workarounds have appeared to apply mocha’s Corner Pin data to CC Power Pin. I’d like to share a couple, and add my own.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Rendering Motion Projects in Final Cut Pro

Mark Spencer | 05/20- 08:01 AM

The key to dramatically faster render times

If you have begun to explore Final Cut Studio’s application integration by embedding your Motion project files into your Final Cut Pro sequence, you may have noticed a rather large increase in render time for that sequence.

Part of the cause of the increased render time is due to the level of complexity of your Motion project, but there’s a setting in Final Cut Pro that can dramatically reduce render times with little to no impact on the quality of your Motion project—except for certain types of projects.

In Final Cut Pro, select the sequence, press Command-0 (zero) to bring up the Sequence Settings, and select the Render Control tab . By default, the Quality setting for Master Templates and Motion Projects is set to Best.

If you change it to Normal, you should see a significant reduction in render time. If you uncheck “Always Use Best Quality When Rendering Movies” you will reduce render times even further.

The only projects that require the Best setting are ones involving vector objects like shapes and text that are increased in size over 100% - for example, flying a camera through some text. Do a test render of a section of your .motn clip in your FCP sequence by setting In and Out points with both the Best and the Normal settings to determine if you need the Best settings - for most situations, Normal will probably be just fine, and will give you much faster renders.

To make all new sequences use the Normal setting by default, press Option-Q to bring up User Preferences, then go to the Render Control tab and change the setting there.

Monday, May 19, 2008

PSV#77 Making Selections: Channels - Photoshop for Video

Richard Harrington | 05/19- 06:59 PM

Instructor Richard Harrington shows you how to make great selections using channels in Photoshop.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

On Artbeats.com: Article on Frame Rates

Chris and Trish Meyer | 05/15- 02:08 PM

Over on Artbeats.com, we’ve written a treatise on frame rates.

Every month, we write a Tips N Tricks article for our friends at Artbeats.com. This month we’ve written a brain dump on where those funky frame rates came from, and issues to watch out for as you get assets from 3D artists, stock footage libraries, film composers, and even well-meaning camera or tape operators that have frame rates that might be just slightly off from what you expect - and how to correct them.

Click here to download a 212 KB PDF of “Frame Rate Follies” from Artbeats.com.

Fellow PVC writer Mark Christiansen also recently wrote a piece for Artbeats’ NAB 2008 Show Guide on creating ramping speed effects in After Effects; click here to download the 1.1 MB PDF. In a similar vein, we also wrote an article for Artbeats on using the same underlying technique to bend the time of a clip to match a soundtrack; click here to download the 2.3 MB PDF of it.

By the way, Artbeats has a monthly email newsletter which contains links to each of our articles for them as they are released, plus a link for registered users to download a free full-size clip every month. Click here to register.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Sweet Music Videos from Photos

Richard Harrington | 05/10- 06:54 AM

Turn a folder of images into a music video

Looking for something different? I discovered Animoto at this year’s SXSW conference… Load up your photos, pick a song, and within a few minutes you have a rocking music video. You can use their cleared music or load up your own. Thirty-second movies are free, full-length videos cost $3. You can get a full year’s access for $30. Here is a discount for $5 off.

The whole process is a piece of cake. Be sure to check them out – here. You can post the videos to a website, download them for an iPod, or even use YouTube to share. 

Here are a two more of mine that you can check out.

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Spot Color Grading - Photoshop for Video

Richard Harrington | 05/08- 07:09 PM

Instructor Richard Harrington explains how you can create a spot color effect by working with your video clips in Photoshop CS3.

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