Motion Tracking and Green Screen with After Effects & Mocha AE

Amazingly, a lot of people don’t even know that they already OWN Mocha AE… it ships along with After Effects CS4 and higher and is a stand-alone application for providing planar motion tracking. You’ve probably already seen the trick of using Mocha AE to track and insert an image or a video clip inside an iPhone, but how about dealing with fingers on the screen and reflections on the surface? Sure, you could root out the fingers with the RotoBrush tool in After Effects and get pretty decent results, but that’s a fairly time-consuming workflow if you can avoid it.

This tutorial will show you how to take a video clip of an iPhone or iPad or any other handheld touch device set to a solid green screen, and insert your video clips or animations into to it perfectly, while realistically retaining the bright reflections on the shiny glass surfaces.

*NOTE: You can follow along with this tutorial by downloading the free project folder with included source files (After Effects CS5.5) at this link from my web site HERE.

Sharing Assets: Adobe CS Production Premium’s Unique Workflow

When you look at Adobe CS Production Premium’s video production tools - Premiere Pro, After Effects, Encore, Audition, and Photoshop - many if not all could be considered industry leaders in their own right. But it’s how they share assets that makes the suite such a powerful performer.

Applications in Adobe CS Production Premium share assets in several ways. The goal? To save you time, reduce your work load, and ensure your assets retain their original quality throughout the video production process.

Adobe MAX 2011 Technology Sneak Peeks

Adobe’s big annual MAX conference finished a couple of weeks ago, and as part of it they included a series of technology sneak peeks. I’ve gone through the videos posted on AdobeTV and pulled out the ones of most interest to us video folks:

CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 40B – 3D Channel Effects

We’re going through our book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects 5th Edition (CMG5) and pulling out a few “hidden gems” from each chapter. These will include essential advice for new users, plus timesaving tips that experienced users may not be aware of.

After Effects includes a set of 3D Channel effects, which take advantage of additional information embedded in files rendered from certain 3D programs. Since relatively few users have occasion to employ these, we covered them in a Bonus Chapter on the DVD-ROM that comes with CMG5 - including some of the naming and file format conventions you need to follow to make sure After Effects can import all of the available information. As not all 3D programs embed this information in their render, where practical we also provided alternative workflows that replicate the end result of these effects with files you should be able to generate from almost any 3D program.

Redrock Micro Brings Order To Unruly Cables

Your cat may like them.  If you have a touch of OCD you might enjoy unraveling a nice ball of wires to calm your nerves.   However, disconnect a power cable on a light or your HDMI cable during a shoot and it could cost you a shot, which could cost you a job. Especially for the HDSLR shooters, the myriad of wired accessories continues to grow, and so do the chances of you getting tied up knots. Electric tape or grip tape work, but they aren’t very dependable, and they make your cables and rig sticky. There’s the velcro ties, but they’re like socks that some how vanish without a trace. So what’s the solution? Enter Redrock Micro’s microTies.

After Effects Apprentice Free Video: Multiple Playback Speeds

As we mentioned earlier, we’ve been busy this year creating an extensive, multi-course video training series based on our popular beginner’s book After Effects Apprentice. Each course has two or more movies that are free for all to view; we’re re-posting those videos here on PVC to make sure you don’t miss them. This particular movie demonstrates how to use the well-hidden Stretch parameter for a layer to create multiple variations of a common element inside the same final composition.

CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 37B and 37C – Expressions and Scripting Bonus Chapters

We’re going through our book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects 5th Edition (CMG5) and pulling out a few “hidden gems” from each chapter. These will include essential advice for new users, plus timesaving tips that experienced users may not be aware of.

In addition to the book’s introductory chapter on expressions that we covered last week, the dual-layer DVD-ROM that comes with CMG5 includes bonus chapters on both expressions and scripting. Rather than try to boil down nearly 70 pages of PDFs into our customary handful of gems, this week we thought we’d share a set of resources on scripting and expressions - including Bonus Chapter 37C itself, written by Dan Ebberts of MotionScript.com.

NVIDIA Optix

At this week’s SIGGRAPH convention in Vancouver, Adobe and NVIDIA are giving a technology presentation of ray-traced extruded text and shapes inside a “motion graphics environment” (you can read for yourself what the menu bar says; before getting too excited, note this is a technology prototype and not an announced or released product). Obviously, there are a lot of questions left unanswered at this point in time - but as we’ve seen in the past, a lot of other Adobe technology demos eventually become products; fingers crossed that this is the case here.

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