The Almost Perfect Font

The LoveLetter Typewriter font had a few characters that were difficult to read (top line) until they were modified (lower line).

When planning a new project, the font you choose can lift a design to a new level, or add an all-important attitude. So when you’ve spent hours picking a font that the client agrees is “just perfect,” panic can set in when they object to a couple of characters as being too weird or difficult to read. The more high profile the job, the fussier the client will be; after all, if they’ve paid millions to open their movie with the name “Zellweger,” the Z better look good! Rather than picking a different font and possibly disrupting the schedule, an hour spent editing the troublesome characters can save the day.

A Different Light: Gamma-Corrected Compositing

The image on the left is a normal computer crossfade; the image on the right uses linear blending - note how the bright areas are emphasized. Footage courtesy Artbeats.

Most of us have been navigating the waters of computer graphics with the assumption that the world is flat. And it’s remarkable how well we’ve done with this fundamentally flawed assumption. However, some of you may have heard whisperings that the world is actually round - often couched in terms of how important it is to understand the subject of gamma, and to composite within a “linear light” model.

Managing Moving Masks

In After Effects, each mask vertex (the yellow squares) interpolates in a straight line from old to new positions. The red lines illustrate some of these paths. The First Vertex is the largest box – in this case, the one in the upper left corner of the M and I.

Masking is one of the core features of After Effects. Most know how to create and edit Mask Shapes; fewer how to control the way these shapes animate – which is important, especially with the popularity of creating cel or Flash type animations these days.

After Effects can seem to have a twisted mind of its own when interpolating between two different Mask Shapes. In reality, it has a very narrow, simple mind. However, there are some tricks you can employ to coax it down a path closer to the one you want. When you need even more precise control, you can employ the Smart Mask Interpolation keyframe assistant, included in the Professional edition of After Effects (including CS3 Professional).

A Track of the Clones

One of the most significant but underused sections of After Effects has to be its vector-based painting engine, introduced back in version 6. One of the capabilities of this engine is the ability to clone one area of a piece of footage onto another area, including cloning from different points in time. As sexy as that sounds, in the real world cloning can quickly become tedious, especially when the object you are trying to replicate (or eliminate) is moving. Fortunately, other features in After Effects – including Expressions and its Motion Tracker - can greatly ease the pain. In this column, we’ll walk through such a task. These same general techniques can probably be applied to other compositing/motion graphics programs as well.

Between Dimensions: 3D Into AE

The logo was rendered in a 3D program; the walls were created in After Effects. Both use the same camera data, so their perspective shifts match as the camera moves.

Many 3D artists use After Effects as a finishing tool: tweaking colors, improving the composite, and blending other layers such as greenscreen footage into the final scene, with the goal of creating a realistic image. By contrast, our primary focus is creating abstract motion graphics, so for us the tables are turned: We use 3D programs (most often Maxon Cinema 4D plus Zaxwerks Invigorator and ProAnimator) almost as utilities, to create elements to integrate into our purely graphical worlds.

In the old days, this process was somewhat separated, limiting what we could do: For example, a dramatic camera move in 3D would often look silly composited over a stationary 2D scene unless you did a lot of work to approximate the shifts in perspective. However, ever since After Effects gained its own concept of 3D space back in version 5, it has become much easier to tie these two worlds together, keeping the same shifts in perspective for both 3D and After Effects elements. For example, we might create, texture, and animate a logo in 3D, and then composite other 2D elements around it in After Effects.

More Motion, Less Control

Most of you are probably familiar with the concept of using a camera to pan and zoom around still images. Popularized by Ken Burns in his documentary on the Civil War, it is a great trick for any occasion when you don’t have moving video for a scene. You can simulate this by simply animating the position of a still image in virtually any compositing or video editing program. However, there are a number of refinements that can make your life easier, and the end result more realistic.

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