Friday, June 27, 2008

Two Pieces of Eye Candy

Chris Meyer | 06/27- 08:50 AM

They’re not videos; they’re art.

A frame from the short film “Tyger” by Guilherme Marcondes.

Links to a pair of lovely (for lack of a better term) “music videos” crossed my desk this week that I thought would be nice to share as you go into your weekend.

If you’re looking for something invigorating, then first view Tyger by Guilherme Marcondes. It contains a brilliant combination of physical animation (the tiger itself) along with 3D, a flat cartoon look, and glowing graphical elements. I had to view it twice: the first time, I was delighting in the sheer craft involved; the second time I got the story. I thought it was a particularly bold move to include the puppet handlers in the action, as it further broke down the walls of expectation; Trish would have liked to have seen a 3D tiger so that the surprise of seeing the handlers wouldn’t take away from enjoying the story. Guilherme has previously created videos for MTV, Microsoft, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Animal Planet; click here to read an interview with him by Computer Arts magazine.

To calm down after the excitement of watching a tiger stalk a city, you might want to next view the soothing abstract video drift by Richard Lainhart. Some of you may know Richard for the period he and Brian Maffitt (of Total Training) hosted the New York After Effects user group, but he is equally well known in the electronic music universe. This movie combines Richard’s After Effects skills with a soundtrack improvised on a lap steel guitar, processed the Kyma sound design workstation.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Distressing Text Edges - Photoshop for Video

Richard Harrington | 06/12- 04:50 AM

Instructor Richard Harrington shows you how to use a patterned image to degrade the edges of your text for a unique text effect in Photoshop. 

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Compression Artifacts & Pulldown

Chris Meyer | 06/11- 08:01 AM

A question about a ghost leads to discourses on 3:2 pulldown and the QuickTime codec dialog.

This started as a quick post about how to gain finer control over the compression settings in the QuickTime dialog. But before we can get there, we first need to talk talk about how 3:2 pulldown works. (Trust me; it all ties together; it was also a good little mystery.)

I recently gave a training session at a local studio, and at the end they were invited to trot out their Barney Stumpers (questions about why something went wrong, how something works, etc.). For one stumper, a user had some footage with 3:2 pulldown, and after pulldown was removed, he noticed that an after-image of the previous frame appeared in the next frame after an edit. Why?

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

On Artbeats.com: Article on Editing to Sound

Chris and Trish Meyer | 06/10- 07:46 PM

Over on Artbeats.com, we’ve written an introduction to editing audio.

Every month, we write a Tips N Tricks article for our friends at Artbeats.com. This month we wrote a piece about spotting hit points in music and dialog, plus a series of pointers on how to place edit points, transitions, and animation keyframes based on these hit points. We strongly believe the tight integration between audio and video is a secret weapon that can be used to raise your productions above the rest; we hope you find this introduction worthwhile.

Click here to download a 333 KB PDF of “Editing to Sound” from Artbeats.com.

While we’re talking about Artbeats, Steve Holmes (formerly of Total Training) also just created for Artbeats a new video tutorial that shows you how to “step through time with an innovative look at the evolution of energy.” You can download the 36+ minute tutorial from Artbeats.com by clicking here.

By the way, if you’d like to share one of your own projects with Artbeats and their customers, email them - if they choose yours, you’ll get $1000 worth of free Artbeats footage of your choice!

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.

Monday, June 09, 2008

Motion Quick Tip: Importing Illustrator and Photoshop Files

Mark Spencer | 06/09- 01:15 PM

Working With Fixed Resolution

When working with Motion, you’ll often import content that was created elsewhere. For example, Illustrator and Photoshop are two powerful applications for creating and manipulating images. They both work very well with Motion, but to get the best results, you need to know about setting in Motion that isn’t necessarily obvious or easy to find.

Saturday, June 07, 2008

Photoshop Disasters

Richard Harrington | 06/07- 08:12 AM

Laugh & Learn

One of my favorite sites that I like to check out on a regular basis is Photoshop Disasters. The site is a freakshow gallery of Photoshop gone wrong.  The site is driven by user submission and acts as both entertainment and education.  There mission:

“Have you seen a truly awful piece of Photoshop work? Clumsy manipulation, senseless comping, lazy cloning and thoughtless retouching are our bread and butter. And yes, deep down, we love Photoshop.”

Be sure to check the site out, it’ll make you look at things a little differently.

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