On Artbeats.com: Article on Color Management in After Effects

Chris Meyer | 03/10- 06:31 PM

Every month, we write a Tips N Tricks article for our friends at Artbeats.com. This month we’ve written an introduction to using Color Management in After Effects CS3, covering input, output, monitoring, and the Project Working Space. It was written in the context of how to handle Artbeats stock footage in a job, but the basic principles apply to a wide variety of jobs. You can download the 884 kb PDF by clicking here.

By the way, 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. To see the full list of articles we (and others) have written for Artbeats, click here.

Staggering Mistakes: Reversing Field Order

Chris Meyer | 03/03- 12:23 PM

The two most-watched cable channels in our household are CNN and Speed (guess who watches which). Speed just started a new game show called “Pass Time” where several of the bumpers as well as in-show inserts exhibit the maddening two steps forward/one step back staggered motion of fields that have been reversed (maybe they thought it was a “look”...). CNN isn’t immune to this either; through the years some of their graphics have also exhibited this reversed-field judder.

This prompted us to upload an updated version of a classic column we wrote on interlacing, field rendering, and separating fields; you can find it here. But like any good motion graphics designer who tries to reverse-engineer any graphic they see on television, this has led us to speculate what might have been at the root of this particular problem.

Final Effects Complete version 5: Why?

Chris Meyer | 02/29- 07:00 AM

Final Effects was pretty much the original third-party plug-in set available for After Effects. It was created by a gang in Sweden now known as Cycore, who passed it on to MetaCreations, who passed it on to ICE, who passed it on to Media 100, who passed it on to Boris, who is now selling it for $895. Meanwhile, the Cycore gang exploited a loophole in their contract, rewrote and re-released it as Cycore FX, licensed it to Adobe to give away free as CC Effects with each copy of After Effects, and sell an upgrade to it for $299 - more on that below. (By the way, we’ve reposted an old column on CC Effects in the archives; read it here for more background.)

So when the press release first came around from Boris FX that they had updated Final Effects Complete, excuse us, but we laughed. However, once we thought about it, there are some reasons why you might consider it. Namely:

The Public Domain, Fair Use, and Other Bedtime Stories

Chris Meyer | 02/21- 10:13 PM

We’ve all been there before: We really need a particular source image to realize an idea. And we don’t have a copy of one ourselves. But look - there’s one on a web site! Or a client gives us one that they picked up “somewhere.” Or there’s a book lying around the office that we could scan. And if anyone involved feels a twinge of guilt, someone else tries to excuse it as “public domain” or “fair use.”

HPA Tech Retreat - Day 1

Adam Wilt | 02/20- 08:34 PM

On this, the first “real” day of the HPA Tech Retreat, we were treated to 3D cinema demos and discussions, a CES review, a phased-array mic for sports recording, and more.

Non-Square Strategies

Chris Meyer | 02/18- 02:00 PM

No matter which workflow you choose, always make sure your source footage has been tagged with its true pixel aspect ratio - this is the only way your software will know what to do with it in order to keep you out of trouble.

For a variety of arcane technical reasons (trying to record NTSC and PAL on the same tape, cutting corner on data throughput, being compromised by camera sensor technology of yesteryear, etc.), virtually all digital video formats have non-square pixels. This means they must be projected in a way that stretches or squashes them on playback to properly fill the television screen. Unfortunately, a side effect of this is that they will also look odd on a computer screen. When all you do is send the digital signal from camera to tape deck to switcher to monitor, this is neatly hidden from you. But when you start working with digital video inside a computer, you have to deal with these misshapen pixels.

As a result, a common question is what is the best way to work with these pixels: Stretch them back out to being square? Or leave them in their native format? The answer depends on what your primary goal is in life: preserving maximum image quality, or preserving your own sanity.

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