After Effects Apprentice Video Tutorial #1

We’re just about to release the second edition of our book After Effects Apprentice through Focal Press. This book was designed for students looking to learn After Effects from scratch, as well as those who do not use AE full time (such as editors or web designers). It starts gently with an introduction to keyframing, and progresses through the important features (such as masks, mattes, effects, text, audio, 3D space, shape layers, expressions, parenting, and building advanced hierarchies of compositions) until you end up keying, stablizing, and compositing a shot in high def. The second edition has been fully revamped for After Effects CS4, and includes integration with Photoshop CS4 Extended and Flash Professional CS4.

The DVD-ROM that comes with the book includes an hour and a half of video tutorials that provide gentle introductions to major features inside After Effects, such as text and expressions. Here is the first video, which provides an overview of the After Effects user interface, including managing and rearranging it to best fit your needs. Included is an introduction to the new Composition Navigator and Mini Flowchart that were added in CS4. Click on the Play Video link below, and enjoy!

That Wasn’t In the Script…

First, the bad news: There are two ways you ensure After Effects CS4 will crash on exit:

• Boot AE CS4 with an add-on script open in a docked panel.
• Quit AE CS4 with an add-on script open in a docked panel.

Now, the good news: It’s a relatively benevolent crash; you won’t lose data or take down any other programs as well. Also, it’s fairly easy to work around this bug: Either open your scripts that have user interfaces in undocked (floating) panels, or make sure all scripts (such as Ease and Wizz, or TrackerViz) are closed when you quit - perhaps create a Workspace that has them all closed, and select that before quitting.

Yes, Adobe is well aware of the problem. No, it is not fixed in the AE 9.0.1 update. But at least now you know what’s going on, should you be suffering persistent and mysterious crashes on exit…

10 Most Innovative Concert Visuals ‘08

I have few regrets in life, but one is that I’m yet to have the opportunity to design visuals for live concerts (helping on a couple of videos for the Las Vegas Fremont Street Experience is as close as I’ve come so far). U2’s Zoo TV concert video
remains a transformative experience for me; while Ultravox’s gray set plus colored lighting was one of biggest influences on me on how to colorize motion graphics in 3D.

If you’re also into seeing motion graphics on the big stage (not just the big screen), then I suggest you take a trip over to Accent Feeds’ 10 Most Innovative Concert Visuals of ‘08, including the likes of Kraftwerk, Daft Punk, Massive Attack, Madonna, Tool, Nine Inch Nails, and the best act you’ve never heard of: Etienne de Crecy. All come with videos, although they are of varying quality, ranging from hand-held audience shakeycam for Daft Punk to the professionally multicam edit for de Crecy (have patience; it gets more amazing the longer you go). Even if you have no interest in concert videos, there’s some great ideas in there for creating motion graphics in virtual environments.

Props to Rich Young’s AE Portal News, which turned me onto this. BTW, he also has a good round-up on tilt-shift photography, which has become rather hot recently.

After Effects Tips - Installment 3

There’s a line in the movie “The Wedding Singer” that I often hear when teaching After Effects: “This is information that I could have used yesterday!” This is usually followed by: “How long has that feature been in the program?” (Usual answer: “About a decade..."). For some reason, there are little gems inside After Effects that escape the notice of even experienced After Effects animators.

So to celebrate the New Year, I’ve assembled a list of small but useful features inside After Effects that often go unnoticed. See how many have escaped you:

Getting Animated About Human Rights

I greatly admired this video when I first saw it during the past election season, but could never carve out time to write about it. Perhaps this will serve as a good way to finish off the holiday season and kick off the New Year, both creatively and spiritually.

What AE’s Still Missing…

We had an idea here on PVC that we would make lists of what has been most interesting this previous year, and what we anticipate in the new year ahead. Several of us planned to write these, but unfortunately few of us have so far. You know - we’ve been busy with work, the holidays, and such. After all, there’s only so much a person can do.

Well, it’s the same for many software tools as well, such as our main tool After Effects. AE CS3 was (in our opinion) one of the best updates ever for motion graphics artists, and AE CS4 has its charms (here is our roundup of the new features that caught our eye; here is Todd Kopriva’s more comprehensive list). Still, there are many features that remain unimplemented or underimplemented - because either resources weren’t available, a new feature caught a programmer’s eye, or not enough people have jumped up and down screaming for the feature we personally want.

Following are some of the features we’re still waiting for. As we have a personal policy of “you’re not allowed to complain about something unless you are also willing to offer a solution,” we’ll also mention some ideas for cheats and workarounds inside AE, from third parties, and in alternate applications such as Apple’s Motion. The first two pages will focus on issues in 3D space, and then we’ll move onto issues such as mask shapes and text.

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