Motion Graphics
by PVC Staff
Sunday, June 01, 2008
PSV#78 Making Selections: Alpha Channels
Photoshop for Video training podcast
Instructor Richard Harrington explains how to use the color detail in an image to quickly make a great alpha channel.
Motion Graphics • Post Production • (0) Comments • • Permalink
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Get Photos from Aperture to Final Cut Pro
Free Plug-in Saves Time and Effort
Sometimes third-party plug-ins fill obvious holes… this is truly the case here. Wouldn’t it make sense to be able to quickly send photos from Apple Aperture to Final Cut Pro? You’d think that sort of thing would be built right in (its not). Fortunately the fine folks over at Connected Flow over an elegant (and free) solution.
“The Aperture to Final Cut Pro plugin lets you take your images stored in Apple’s professional photo management application and send them directly to a video sequence in Final Cut Pro. From within Aperture, you can select photos, set their order and duration and select transitions between frames.”
The Aperture to Final Cut Pro plugin is a free download and is provided on an as-is basis. I find it works great.
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Sunday, June 01, 2008
Motion Templates in Final Cut Pro
How to make your own Motion templates to use in FCP
For the past few years Apple has been pushing Motion as a tool that should be in every editor’s toolbox. The problem has been, not every editor has had the time or patience to learn Motion. In Final Cut Pro 6, Apple recognized this and has integrated Motion templates directly inside of FCP.
To launch a Motion template in Final Cut Pro you have three options:
1 Choose the Effects tab in the Browser > Master Templates.
2 Choose the Generators pulldown in the Viewer > Master Templates.
3 Choose the Sequence menu > Add Master Template.
Choose the template that you want and load it into the Viewer. Once the template has been loaded in the Viewer, clicking on the controls tab will let you change various parameters of the template. There is only one catch:
Not every parameter of a template is editable in Final Cut Pro. Text entry, size, tracking and populating drop zones with footage are the only parameters you can adjust inside Final Cut Pro.
If you need to edit a template to, for example, change the text color, or swap out a background, you need to edit the template in Motion. Here’s how.
1 Edit the template from the Viewer into your sequence.
2 Right-click on the template and notice at the top of the contextual menu you have two options: Open in Editor and Open Copy in Editor. Since the template is a prebuilt one from Apple, you can’t save over it (it’s locked) so you need to choose Open Copy in Editor.
3 Make your changes in Motion and save the file. Your changes will update in FCP.
Like this tip? It comes from the book
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Saturday, May 31, 2008
mocha AE to CC Power Pin
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.
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Monday, May 19, 2008
PSV#77 Making Selections: Channels - Photoshop for Video
Instructor Richard Harrington shows you how to make great selections using channels in Photoshop.
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Thursday, May 15, 2008
On Artbeats.com: Article on Frame Rates
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.
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