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Recently in After Effects

Here’s another summary of the last week or so of some news on After Effects tutorials, plug-ins, and scripts—with a new training section on AE Scripts, a new danger in the orange and teal saga, and much more. Please note that there are additional details, presets, and/or projects on the originating websites that are not included in these overviews.

‘Comic Sans Project’ Seeks to Save the Web’s Most Hated Font, by Matt Silverman (surprise) on Mashable, featured the After Effects splash screen reimagined with the Comics Sans font.

AE Scripts kicked off a new tutorial section with tutorials from Lloyd Alvarez on Create a Finger Tutting Remix using Plexus and Create a 3D Particle Stream using Plexus. Steve Kirby used Plexus in a similar way to design an intro for a Stephen Hawking thing. Here’s Lloyd on how:

Motionworks posted After Effects: Maintaining velocity, which shares a technique for extending an animation quickly and easily while maintaining the velocity. And in After Effects A-Z: Channel Blur, Maltaannon is back with another After Effects: Effects A-Z series tutorial, this one on the basics of the Channel Blur effect.

Mamoworld was back with 12 Linking Quick Tips for iExpressions, and with Animation to Music - Part 2, a quick way to create a volume meter by applying the Linear Link 1D iExpression to the opacity of some solids:

Antonio Cerri showed how to make a knockoff of the Thor movie titles, as part of the AEtuts Hollywood Movie Titles series:

Greyscale Gorilla posted Cinema 4D to After Effects Tutorial: Plasma TV,

Colin Smith of Adobe shows how to “power zoom”, combining a high resolution still image with video so the camera can zoom into macro levels without the image getting pixelated using After Effects motion reframes and color correction:

Shortformvideo returned with Tarmac Titles, which shows an “easy method of creating a tarmac / asphalt text using fractal noise (it’s amazing how useful that effect can be), with a street marking-style title”:

After Effects: Newton + puppet tutorial by Tercel demonstrates continuing experimentation, this time on how to expression link the AE Puppet Tool with Newton physic engine to make “soft body” kinds of things:

In Episode 65 of Red Giant TV, Warp Projection - 3D Environments from a 2D Image, “Harry Frank walks you through creating a 3D environment from a 2D image, all in After Effects. You’ll also learn some great compositing and color correction techniques to finish the job off right:”

Lake Keene posted some videos, How to build a lightwrap in After Effects and Keying in After Effects with Keylight + light wrapping. Comparable techniques were discussed in How to Light Wrap. Here’s the first one:

Fenix Studios discusses the basic in Removing Green Screen In After Effects. Recently, Jeff Foster posted Choosing the Right Green Screen Materials and Motion Tracking and Green Screen with After Effects & Mocha AE on PVC. For more on keying, see Green Screen Handbook by Jeff Foster (a summary by Todd Kopriva), Greenscreen Primer 1 + 2 by Alex Lindsay, and Greenscreen and keying resources (a linkfest on the AE Portal archive). Here’s Ryan Walker of Fenix:

Steve Forde, After Effects product manager, shares that Adobe is working on balancing costs and technology licensing in Render Engines and the Joy of LEGAL obligations – Part 2.

Eric Wise posted AE I Owe U: 10 Basic Ways ‘After Effects’ Saves Editor’s Lives pt. 1 at Splice Vine, which explains which features of AE outstrip NLEs. This is the third way, AE as a trusty editing utility, beyond both motion graphics and VFX. Eric points to an intro for editors, improved titling, and more.

Angie Taylor reminded us of Todd Kopriva’s free After Effects and Premiere Pro Performance Workshop to optimize tools and systems for maximum speed. Earlier resources by Todd and Mark Christiansen are still valuable—see Setting Up After Effects for Optimum Performance and Todd’s own outline of Adobe Help topics on the matter in optimizing for performance: Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects. To whet your appetite here’s Setting Up After Effects for Optimum Performance with 64-Bit Systems by Todd Kopriva from Adobe After Effects CS5: Learn by Video:

Rob Garrott discusses Using After Effects’ Graph Editor to control animation at the Lynda.com blog. See also After Effects Apprentice Free Video: Overshoot Animations by Chris and Trish Meyer, a freebie from their video training series on lynda.com that includes some Graph Editor tips you may not know. Here’s Rob:

Create 3d Camera Move with Photoshop and After Effects Tutorial at Vidmuze is another example of a common effect. Richard Harrington adds to it with a use the Refine Edge command and the content-aware fill option to quickly build your layers to pop out and move around in 3D camera in Photoshop and AE: Refine Edge Command and 3-D Motion Control.

A few years ago Eran Stern got specific in a Pen Tool tips video, and now Colin Smith looks at basics in Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About The Pen Tool at Adobe TV. There was also Bezier Selections (Pen Tool) in Photoshop from Color Trails:

Richard Harrington and Ian Robinson look at Timecode in After Effects. The future is still a brave new world though, as noted in a Creative Cow thread on timecode in AE (Todd Kopriva’s explanations). Here’s the REHD movie:

Nancy continued her series on Creating a 3D Pixelstorm with ShapeShifter AE – Part 2. Here’s Part 1:

In The Easy Guide to Color Grade & Correct Video, Tony Reale uses Red Giant’s Colorista Free to reinforce good practice for a filmic look:

“Style Eyes” is a Genarts Sapphire preset collection of 25 free presets from the Stylize category of the plug-ins for After Effects and other hosts from Angie Taylor. There also a free preset for Magic Bullet Looks 2 that’s influenced by the paintings of Lorrain; it adds gold and yellow, lifts the shadows, brightens the highlights and softens the image, especially for outdoor shots and landscapes. See also Bleach bypass, cross-process, and other looks for After Effects. Here’s Angie’s previews:

Premiere and Post

In Cinestyle on DaVinci Resolve Lite, Desktop Video Guy shows how to apply a LUT file to Canon DSLR footage for Technicolor’s Cinestyle picture style. FCP and After Effects users can use Red Giant Software’s LUT Buddy, but Resolve users need a special Cinestyle LUT. Here’s the video on the Cinestyle LUT:

As the switchers begin facing the details of Premiere, Scott Simmons discusses how to Clean those Adobe Media Cache Files (and reclaim some drive space in the process). These are the files created by “conforming” imported media, a process now much tamer in recent versions of this NLE. Of course there are still hiccups with conform files, like the hours of recreating new conform files if an internal link is lost, as when a drive isn’t plugged in. Joost van der Hoeven shares a tip on one problem by resetting computer clocks that are mismatched in Premiere Pro: Re-conforming: fixed.

Three ways to make a vignette in Premiere Pro by Bart Walczak discusses just that. Check out also the mini-roundup Vignettes in After Effects at AEtuts; here’s something from Andrew Devis mentioned in the roundup:

Last year there was Even better Dynamic Slide Shows in Premiere (and AE), and now there’s How to Create a Slideshow in Premiere Pro CS 5.5 by Mike Gentilini, Jr.:

KeyDisplayer from CreativeDojo “visualizes and displays your keystrokes live on the screen during your screencasts or presentations. KeyDisplayer was built from the ground up and aimed towards screencasters to better enhance the presentation and add ease for the viewer with convenient and clean HUD-like keystroke displays:”

The Top 60 Requests for Final Cut Pro X at FCPX.TV reveals why some don’t think that the new app is quite ready for prime time. Here’s a sample:

If Saul Bass Designed the Title Sequence… at FilmmakerIQ picks up on a playful meme. Here’s something more serious from Ian Albinson of The Art of the Title:

We’ve seen the preview but IEEE Spectrum now has an interview with a creator of Software Realistically Adds 3-D Objects to Old Photos, which says that, future users might quickly turn a photograph into a 3-D scene with lighting that makes synthetic objects look real.

Pantone says that Tangerine Tango orange (with ASE swatch) is the new Honeysuckle, and lurking behind that redder tone is tealish blue of course, as warned about in Hollywood’s Teal & Orange Abyss. Before heading off to Kuler for a fuller palette, here’s something on that tone and orange from the WSJ:

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