Layer Styles in After Effects

Adobe After Effects has long featured Drop Shadow, Bevel Alpha, and Glow effects, as well as various ways to fill layers with colors or gradients. However, they’re hardly the fanciest options available. Meanwhile, Adobe Photoshop has long featured a powerful Layer Styles module, which includes far fancier shadows, bevels, glows, and fills, which allow you to create more photorealistic effects such as the badge shown at left.

What not many users realize is that there has long been a back door to get some of those Photoshop layer effects into After Effects. And even fewer realize that After Effects CS3 includes support for virtually the entire Photoshop Layer Styles engine. We’d like to let you in on these well-kept secrets.

Why QuickTime is the US Dollar of Digital Video

How bad are things for the US Dollar these days? So bad that, as reported by the BBC and mentioned recently on This Week in Tech, Gisele Bundchen no longer accepts modeling pay in dollars, nor apparently do many high-end boutiques in the capital of U.S. commerce, New York City. European travel is effectively twice as expensive as it was just a few years ago simply because of the exchange rate. So it may come as a surprise how familiar the situation of the world economy in regards to the dollar is if you’re a video professional using QuickTime.

I’m not actually joking.

Leaving Los Angeles

Our former studio in Los Angeles, circa a few years ago.

The reason we haven’t been posting up here for the past couple of weeks is because we’ve been packing up our home/office/studio and putting it into storage while we buy a new home in the East Mountains section of Albuquerque, just down the Turquoise Trail from Santa Fe. There are many reasons we’re undergoing this major life change, several of which we’ll be elaborating upon in the upcoming weeks and months. If you’re curious, here’s a few of the reasons why:

Creating Panoramic Backdrops for Green Screen

Two Pieces of Eye Candy

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.

Distressing Text Edges - Photoshop for Video

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. 

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