ProVideo Coalition.com: AE Portal by Rich Young

Back to the AE Portal »

(Page 1 of 1 pages for this article )

Monday, October 31, 2011

Filed under: GentryMedia Sister Sites •ProVideo Coalition •

Last week in After Effects

Rich Young | 10/31

... and related news

Here’s another week of some of the latest news on After Effects tutorials, plug-ins, and scripts. It was busy again last week, dominated by scripts and plug-ins, old and new.

Automatic Duck is now devoted to Adobe XML workflow, and has decided to make their EOLed tools available for free! It’s a classy ‘Thank You’ to the post-production community and a wave goodbye to the competition. There’s a page of support resources available for Pro Import AE for Adobe After Effects. Here’s cofounder Wes Plate on some of the products:

ObviousFX plug-ins for After Effects were updated for CS5.5 for Windows and Mac. These filters include Inverse Telecine, Erodilation (cheap but no longer free), and the free Copy Image. The Copy to Clipboard plug-in for AE is another free After Effects plug-in from Video Copilot, originally made to fill the gap left when AE went 64-bit.

Oliver Peters reviewed Tiffen Dfx Digital Filter Suite, which is an alternative to Magic Bullet Looks. Oliver tested in After Effects, but really sees it as a “must have” tool for Avid Media Composer editors. Here’s quiet look at the features:

Filip Kaczorek as EFX on AE Scripts released 2 plug-in packages with free subset packages. EFX Render Elements Plugin Suite (free subset EFX Render Elements Free) helps solve challenges using CG render passes. The EFX Keying-Alpha Plugin Suite (free subset EFX Keying-Alpha Free) solves small problems like softening an edge of a matte, and others that evolved into full blown keying solutions. Here the demo for the Keying-Alpha Suite:

A free update to fnord software ProEXR was released and includes AE plug-in optimizations, a Nuke Comp Builder script, Memory Mapping, and Render layered EXR files from After Effects (comp ayers render into a multi-channel OpenEXR sequence which can be reconstructed in Nuke, Photoshop, or AE). The free version of ProEXR is OpenEXR for After Effects. For context, see About 3D Channel effects, including ProEXR effects in AE Help. Here’s Chad Ashley on depth of field and motion blur using EXR G-Buffer channels from last year:

Sebastien Perier updated his Top 10 list of After Effects workflow enhancing script, ones that he uses the most on a project basis, at his redesigned website Yenaphe. All of the scripts in this Top Ten are available on Lloyd Alvarez’s AE Scripts.com, where Sebastien has several of his own scripts. By the way, Angie Taylor liked Paul Tuersley’s Shift Layers script when answering a question on auto align layers end-to-end.

For an ongoing survey of AE scripts, see Mark Christiansen’s series on PVC, After Effects Script of the Week. The latest of these reviews was just released: After Effects Script of the Week: Add Parented Null to Each Selected Layer (from Lloyd Alvarez).

William J. Meyer shows how to Use Real Lights To Motivate Simulated Lights in After Effects, a premium tutorial at AEtuts. Here’s the preview:

Here’s 5 tip articles for beginners…

Sebastien Perier shares tips on What will make you shine in Motion Design.
Angie Taylor reveals six routes to more creative animations for motion graphics in Tips: 6 animation tricks for After Effects, kinetic type and VFX. ;
After Effects terminology clarifications come from Todd Kopriva and Adam Everett Miller.
What Should I Look For In a UI Typeface? by designbyIZO.
FastCo Design lists The 8 Worst Fonts In The World, and Comic Sans isn’t among them. It also includes survey results from designers for used, visible, and least favorite fonts.

The After Effects team says, Please respond to this very brief survey by the Adobe After Effects team. It’s “an EXTREMELY short survey (2 questions!) to get your feedback on the value of After Effects CS5.5. This is a really important tool for us to measure your opinion on the value of After Effects.”

Todd Kopriva assembled resources for optimizing for performance with Adobe applications, and a bit earlier, FAQ lists, Help, and user-to-user forums for CS5 and CS5.5 applications.

Rig A Realistic Puppet, the cool series by Daniel Gies, finished up with the last of 16 tutorials. Mettle’s Freeform Pro was used to add impressive depth to character in After Effects, and numerous tips were shared including IK (inverse kinematics) with the free Duik Tools. Note that there’s no reason to limit the use of these techniques to character animation—the Ken Burns effect and 2.5D The Kid Stays in the Picture styles need extra dimension too. By the way, here’s the original preview:

Andrew Devis posted Creating & Using Masks in After Effects and finished his 3-part tutorial on AE Shapes with a module on the Text & The Pen Tools. For more ideas see Use Brainstorm to experiment and explore settings in AE Help and related resources at AE Portal archive, especially the mini-roundup Shape Layers in After Effects.

Rotoscoping with Mocha for AE by Andrew Devis is 3 tutorials on “the tools needed to work quickly and efficiently in Mocha to create shapes and output those shapes to AE. Andrew also discusses when and why at certain points it may be better to use masks in AE rather than shapes from Mocha. This is an introductory tutorial aimed at showing the basic functions of Mocha so that you can have more confidence when using this excellent product. In the second tutorial Andrew will go on to show how to do tracking in Mocha for AE and some of the issues that may arise with that. In the last tutorial Andrew goes on to show how to create the final shapes layers that represent the areas to be rotoscoped and then shows how to link and adjust those tracks and output the final shapes to After Effects.”

In The Loop - A Killer Expression Matthew Tompkins demonstrates the uses of the loop expression in After Effects, examining the loopOut(), loopIn(), loopInDuration(), loopOutDuration() commands and their “ping pong”, “cycle” and “continue” modes. See also Chris and Trish Meyer’s Deeper Modes of Expression, Part 8: Going for a Loop. For ease of use there’s also pt_AutoExpress by Paul Tuersley and The LoopMaker is an AE script by Lloyd Alvarez, which loops any layers, footage or comps with one click, added “cycle” and “Ping-Pong” loop types.

Cassidy Bisher posted 77 free color grades for AE if you like him on Facebook. Cassidy also has many After Effects tutorial videos available on Vimeo that support his AE templates at Dropdrop.com. Here’s an example of his work that was liked by Particular creator Peder Norrby:

John Dickinson shared a video tutorial, After Effects: Grungy Makeover.

Quba Michalski has a new tutorial on QubaHQ, UFO Trolling, which teaches “you how to create your own UFO troll video using After Effects and Mocha – a process that should take you no longer than 30 minutes from the moment you grab a camera, to the time you are ready for upload.” He put in tons of work for ambitious tutorials and work but the easy one got all the attention:

Question on the AE-List: Using Plexus, is there ‘a way to either get a z-depth pass from it, or to have it read a z-depth pass and use it for obscuration in the way that Particular does?’ Mylenium answers: ‘Plexus doesn’t do Z nor does it read an external buffer. Both limitations can be worked around, though. (Option A) To generate “depth”, simply use the coloring i.e. use the mask color or light color and let the plug-in generate the blending inbetween. Will not always work with massive self-intersections of the lines, but with enough depth separation it should be doable and if there are any wrong areas, a little bit of masking may take care of that as well. (Option B) As I always write on forums: depth buffers are just luma mattes. Should be perfectly possible to clip whatever you desire by using this approach and controlling the “depth plane” using effects like Levels or Threshold.’

In Red Giant QuickTip 52: Managing Front and Back Particle Visibility in Trapcode Form, Harry Frank shows how to easily manage front and back visibility (backface culling) with 3D null objects and some simple expressions inside Trapcode Form. It’s embedded below, but see also his What’s New in Trapcode Form 2:

Chris and Trish Meyer continued their series CMG Hidden Gems with Chapter 44 – Prerendering and Proxies.

Angie Taylor a new training series on using Wacom tablets. There are several free teases, including one that demos the draw-on kind of rotoscoping in After Effects.

Photographer Michael Orton created a soft, dreamy effect that has become popular, and you can use this tutorial to recreate the effect in AE. For presets and tutorials on other looks, see How To Give Your Photos a Dark Processed Lomo Effect and Bleach bypass, cross-process, and other looks for After Effects. Here’s 2 way make the Orton effect (and another):

Rob Garrott of Lynda.com has a new series, Introducing Design in Motion. The 1st installment on communicating emotion using color correction is free:

Film Riot explains how they Splatter Blood and Make a Head Go Boom! It’s Bloodtober! Here’s the headshot:

Premiere Pro

Adobe is sponsoring a free E-Seminar: Mastering the Adobe Premiere Pro Timeline Panel. It’s scheduled for Thursday, November 3rd, 10:00 am PT/1pm ET.

Missed amongst the noise, Avid Announces Restructuring, Lays off 10% of Workforce (200) according to SonicScoop and others. Seems like Adobe should introduce Walter Murch to Premiere with a CUDA card.

Tom Lowe share a 2-minute look of his 4K editing timeline in Premiere CS5.5, using 5K native Red Epic .R3D files and 4K DPX timelapse sequences. It seems that his gaming system price includes the $1000 Dell monitor: “Intel i7 980x overclocked to 4Ghz, 24GB 1600mhz RAM, 580 GTX card with 1.5GB RAM, single 2TB 7200rpm drive, with my operating system on an outdated SSD. No RAID.”

Karl Soule shows a new tool The Configurator, jointly developed by Adobe and Intel, that automatically specs out a high-performance workstation that fits your workflow. It even shows you how quickly you may recoup your investment:

Mark Christiansen shows how editors can take advantage of advanced stabilization in Use Dynamic Link to bring Warp Stabilizer to Premiere Pro CS5.5. Mark says that “this article not only walks you through how to achieve shot stabilization on clips in a Pr edit, but it opens the door to how to use Dynamic Link generally, for those who’ve wished they had a better handle on it.”

Todd Kopriva presented a breakdown and resources on an e-seminar by Robbie Carman on color grading and correction in Creative Suite Production Premium. See also Jeff Sengstack on Streamlined Primary Color Correction with Premiere Pro to do the bulk of color correction in Premiere Pro and Streamlining Color Correction in Premiere Pro also on PVC. Todd did a big roundup of resources a few months ago in Color correction and color grading tutorials. Here’s Color grading and finishing in Premiere Pro CS5.5 by Jarle Leirpoll:

Adobe Forum hero Ann Bens has a few good tips on Premiere Pro, including a technique to ripple delete multiple gaps:

Miscellaneous

Dave Marash at Columbia Journalism Review considers an odd trend in TV news in the US in Fade to Black: As a video revolution sweeps the world, US television news caps its lens.

Mark Hughes speaks with Legend3D Founder Dr. Barry Sandrew in The Science and Future of 3D Films. For more, see Fun in stereo 3D at AE Portal archive and the Art of Stereo conversion: 2D to 3D by Mike Seymour at Fxguide.

Farhad Manjoo discusses The Great Tech War Of 2012 in which Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon battle for the future of the innovation economy. He doesn’t mention the potential of Siri, a new UI technology in the iPhone 4S, though some consider Why Siri Is a Google Killer. Engadget recently compared Siri to its competition in an iPhone review:

Andy Kirk goes inside animated geo visualizations at O’Reilly Radar in Visualization deconstructed: Why animated geospatial data works. Here’s an example that he uses: