Sorry for the blatant plug, but there’s a payoff: A free week of as much online video training as you can watch!

We’ve been getting into creating online video training, focusing on specific topics and techniques rather than creating long-form courses (that’s what our books are for). Our current titles are available either pay-as-you-go through Toolfarm or to subscribers of the Lynda.com Online Training Library.

If you’re not currently a Lynda.com subscriber, and are curious to check them out before signing up, you can try them out for free for seven days by clicking here. Feel free to pass this link around. In addition to After Effects, they offer training on a variety of 3D, DVD authoring, NLE, and business applications - even tutorials on operating systems.

For those who are considering creating their own tutorials that they’d like to make money off of, we’ve been testing the waters for the past year trying out a couple pay-as-you-go services in addition to Lynda.com’s subscription model, and - with all due respect to the excellent folks at Toolfarm and other places - Lynda.com has been the hands-down winner from the content creator side. We’ve found them to be a great company to work with, and we plan to be doing a lot more with them in the future. We’ll keep you apprised as we release more titles, or if our opinion changes.

Motion 3 - part of Apple’s Final Cut Studio 2 suite - has experienced a major update, including the addition of motion tracking and stabilization, optical flow (smooth slow motion) technology, a gorgeous particle-based paint system, enhancements to their Keyframe Editor, and interesting new Audio Parameter and Retiming behaviors. But the big headliner is the addition of 3D space - including 3D animation for 2D layers, 3D cameras and lights, and 3D enhancements for their particle and text animation systems.

The first image (a digital photo originally saved with an sRGB color profile) has not been corrected; the second image has. Although the difference is subtle, the uncorrected image looks a bit washed out compared to how it should really appear.

In the last column, we discussed the time-honored headache of managing different video luminance ranges, and how After Effects 7 has made this a little easier to deal with. In this column, we cover an even more common problem with color space issues: working with digital photos or scans that have been saved in the sRGB color space. 

Footage that imports into After Effects with its internal “601” luminance levels intact (left) looks washed out compared to how it really should look (right). Footage courtesy Isuzu and Perception Communications.

Have you ever received washed-out images from a client - or even yourself? Did you just let it slide ("well, that’s the way they shot it"), or cursed them for making you lose more sleep as you tried to make it look better? Well, we have two bits of news for you. One, the fault may not be in the footage, but in the way you’ve been handling it. Two, in Adobe After Effects 7, it’s now easier to handle it the right way. In this column, we’ll talk about video and the infamous luminance range issue; in the next column, we’ll turn our attention to still images and sRGB color space.

We all love After Effects plug-ins that give exciting new looks. However, equal acclaim should be accorded those that simply give us more time. A promising new plug-in in this category is GridIron Software’s Nucleo Pro. It was in beta at the time we wrote this (August 2006), but we couldn’t wait to share it with you, and also give you a peek under the hood to understand how it works.

In the previous column, we discussed a handful of tricks and techniques which can be used in different situations to make it easier to animate the 3D camera in After Effects, including one node cameras, two node cameras, auto-orientation, and building a special orbiting camera rig using parenting and null objects. In this column we’ll show how to build a “dolly” rig for the camera in older versions of After Effects as well as the new version 7.0, plus give a quick introduction to the new Graph Editor also introduced in After Effects 7.0.

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