Motion Blur Musings

A fellow user recently asked about problems he was having with motion stutter when slowing down 24p (24 frame per second, progressive scan) footage. This led to a series of musings about using motion blur - including some new options in After Effects CS3 - that we thought would be good to share.

Adobe/MAXON Power Integration Tour

We have long been fans of Cinema 4D as a 3D package for motion graphics artists, both for its feature set (including the powerful MoGraph module) and its very tight integration with After Effects. We focused on this integration in Chapter 38 of Creating Motion Graphics 4th Edition (an excerpt from that chapter can be downloaded here ).

Last year Adobe and Maxon did a joint tour touting this integration. They had so much fun, they’’re doing it again this year. The first event was at the January 2008 DMA/LA meeting; the tour proper kicks off February 26 in San Francisco - see the full list of cities and dates below.

Welcome to Creating Motion Graphics

Welcome to the Creating Motion Graphics blog on ProVideo Coalition! We’re very happy to be here, and look forward to using this new forum to share with our fellow motion graphics artists tips and trends that we think might be useful or intriguing. We will also be posting an archive of many of our past articles and columns which contain a wealth of advice and techniques. And on occasion, we will be posting our musings on the state of the industry (such as in the rest of this entry, past the “more” jump).

After Effects 8.0.2 and gamma issues

Adobe has released an 8.0.2 update for After Effects CS3. Its headline new features are support for Mac OS 10.5, as well as for P2 media. There are also the expected array of bug fixes. What’s been getting less press than it deserves is a change in the way it handles color management with respect to QuickTime files.

Free 7-day Passes for Lynda.com

Sorry for the blatant plug, but there’s a payoff: A free week of as much online video training as you can watch!

We’ve been getting into creating online video training, focusing on specific topics and techniques rather than creating long-form courses (that’s what our books are for). Our current titles are available either pay-as-you-go through Toolfarm or to subscribers of the Lynda.com Online Training Library.

If you’re not currently a Lynda.com subscriber, and are curious to check them out before signing up, you can try them out for free for seven days by clicking here. Feel free to pass this link around. In addition to After Effects, they offer training on a variety of 3D, DVD authoring, NLE, and business applications - even tutorials on operating systems.

For those who are considering creating their own tutorials that they’d like to make money off of, we’ve been testing the waters for the past year trying out a couple pay-as-you-go services in addition to Lynda.com’s subscription model, and - with all due respect to the excellent folks at Toolfarm and other places - Lynda.com has been the hands-down winner from the content creator side. We’ve found them to be a great company to work with, and we plan to be doing a lot more with them in the future. We’ll keep you apprised as we release more titles, or if our opinion changes.

Working Around QuickTime 7.4 Errors in After Effects

As noted nearly everywhere motion graphics artists congregate on the web, QuickTime 7.4 and After Effects don’t play nicely together. Apparently Apple’s movie rental DRM scheme is the culprit. Any QuickTime render from After Effects that requires more than 10 minutes will generate a permissions error.

There are two obvious options to address the issue:

• Downgrade to QuickTime 7.3


• Render an image sequence and then piece that sequence together in either QuickTime Pro or After Effects.

I’m not a huge fan of downgrading because you just never know if you’re going to break something in the process. If 7.4 is working for you aside from this pesky After Effects error, you might want to try this work around. It adds an extra step in After Effects, but it works. Follow these steps:

1. When it comes time to render your After Effects composition, take that composition and nest it in another composition with the same settings by dragging the composition to the New Composition icon in the Project window.


2. Select the original composition in the project window.


3. Go to the Composition menu and select Pre-Render. The original composition has now been added to your Render Queue.


4. In the Render Queue, edit the Output Module settings so that you are creating an image sequence. (I like .psd files for this because the file sizes are reasonable and the files are written quickly.)


5. Now add the new sequence with the original sequence nested in it to your Render Queue. Set its Output Module to the desired QuickTime settings. Since this sequence will render in much less than 10 minutes, you should have no problem getting a valid QT movie out of After Effects without reverting to an earlier version of QuickTime.

This adds just a couple of minutes to your total render time, and you can leave After Effects to do its thing with a long render without having to manually piece the image sequence together in QuickTime Pro.

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