Final Cut Help - Animating Text with Keyframes

Join Apple Certified Trainer Mason Dixon as he shows you how to animate text with keyframes in Motion.

Awesome Adobe Motion Graphics Research Project

An Adobe engineer posted a demonstration of a sweet little research project recently. It’s a simple, consumer-oriented method of accomplishing complex motion graphics tasks. Here’s hoping we’ll see it soon in their products! Video below…

Animating a Sky Part 2 - Photoshop for Video

Instructor Richard Harrington shows you how to add an animated sky to your still photos using Photoshop and After Effects. Part 2 of 2.

Beautiful CG work in a Porsche Spec Spot

Porsche Speed from Daan Pol on Vimeo.

This spec spot by I ran across on Vimeo simply has to be seen. It took 4 months to render out the final composite…

Animating a Sky Part 1 - Photoshop for Video

Instructor Richard Harrington shows you how to add an animated sky to your still photos using Photoshop and After Effects. Part 1 of 2.

Kensington Mice and After Effects CS4

After Effects CS4 has added a “Unified” camera tool to aid navigation in 3D space. Instead of having to scroll through three separate camera tools - Orbit, Track XY, and Track Z - to reposition an active camera or reframe an alternate view, users can now use a three-button mouse to quickly switch between these three tools.

All of our computers here have Kensington mice that include a clickable scroll wheel as the third (middle) mouse button. And lo and behold, they don’t work out of the box with AE CS4; the clickable scroll wheel defaults to toggling between horizontal and vertical scrolling. But a couple of settings tweaks will make your mouse behave the way you want:

Processing

After you master shooting footage, applying effects, and keyframing animation, what’s next? Some like to explore having animations driven by sound and music, using tools such as Trapcode’s Sound Keys and Form for After Effects, or the Audio Behaviors in Motion 3. Others have mastered Expressions in After Effects to create code-driven animations. And a few hard-core After Effects user lament the passing of Useful Things. But if you really want to take it to the next level, you might want to explore the open source Processing programming language.

Processing, to quote the official web site, is “for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool.” It is free (running on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows) and is supported by an active user and developer community. There are a large number of books available on Processing. There’s even a mobile version of Processing for Java-powered devices. And to feed the other side of your brain, there is an online exhibition gallery showing what others are doing with Processing (the image at the top of this blog entry is from that site). Check it out.

(A tip of the hat to fellow PVC poster Mark Spencer for turning me onto Processing.)

After Effects Error Codes

Occasionally, After Effects has a hiccup. When it does, it often displays a dialog box with occasionally clear, occasionally cryptic text, as well as a series of numbers. Understanding exactly what these are telling you can help you diagnose the problem and at least work around it, if not cure it.

Lutz Albrecht (aka Mylenium) has created a useful page that goes through the logic behind these codes to help you narrow down where the underlying error may be. He is actively trying to expand and refine the list, so if you encounter an error in After Effects, email him the information so he can fold it in.

(By the way, Lutz also wrote one of the best overviews of the new features in After Effects CS4 that I’ve seen - you can read it here.)

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