Making It Look Great 7 Review

Last summer I wrote an lengthy review of the Motionworks’ Making It Look Great 6 training series, where Tim Clapham did a great job covering the integration of Cinema 4D and After Effects. I mentioned my wish for Tim to do a full series on using Cinema’s MoGraph module, and little did I know that such a series was already in the works. Not wanting to wait, I offered to proof it as it was being developed (crafty, huh!), and now it’s arrived in a store near you as Making It Look Great 7.

MILG7 consists of six projects produced using a wide variety of MoGraph objects and effectors. Not only will you learn tons of MoGraph techniques as you create some fun animations, but sprinkled throughout are a great many solid Cinema working practices that will serve you well in any project.

Random Tips from a Professional Camera Operator

Teaching the craft of camera operating is extremely difficult to do well, so I’m going to do it half-assed and give you some random tips that may help you along in your career.

Avid to Apple Color - The Video

Late last year I posted a link and a step by step workflow to moving your RED edit from Avid Media Composer to Apple Color. You would think these applications, from two mortal enemies, wouldn’t really work well together. But apparently with this workflow they can. While the step-by-step form reduser.net was nice,this video from Avid Screencast (#15 Red Workflow iV - Conform from Avid to Apple’s Color) shows the process in a nice, concise 6 minute tutorial. See the embedded video after the jump.

Highlander: Uncut - Getting footage to edit before the Internet

I posted this piece back in June 2008 after I had cleaned out a closet and found my old Highlander: Uncut editing package. It was cutting edge at the time but unfortunately this package is no longer for sale.

Long before there was the opencut.org project, cheap digital camcorders and even Final Cut Pro there was always the question of where could you get footage for digital non-linear editing. An even bigger question was where could you get REAL footage to practice and hone your story telling and NLE skills. There was always the outdoor forest footage that I vaguely remember Avid providing or there was Highlander: Uncut

The Making of an Epic Media Project

Rambus is a company of big ideas, and they wanted their 20th anniversary celebration to include a theatrical production that accurately reflected who they are and where they came from. The resulting short film--shown in an Omnimax dome at the San Jose Tech Museum--moved Rambus founders and employees to tears.

On lynda.com & Cineversity: CINEMA 4D + After Effects

Maxon’s CINEMA 4D is our 3D application of choice because it integrates so well with our main tool, Adobe After Effects. Although we’ve written about it and demonstrated it in sessions and classes, we never got around to creating a comprehensive course on the subject - until now.

We’ve released an hour and a half course through both lynda.com and Cineversity. In addition to the traditional techniques of transferring camera and light information and creating hold-out mattes, we also discuss at length how to better blend new graphics created in After Effects into your already-rendered 3D world from CINEMA, including lighting effects and shadows. We also take a side trip into the wonders of multipass rendering, including the ability to alter 3D lighting, shadows, and reflections after the fact. Along the way, we also discuss other important issue such as frame rates and pixel aspect ratios. The course comes with exercise files (premium subscribers only at lynda.com; for Cineversity members, the files are connected to the second movie in the series).

If you’re not a member of either Cineversity or lynda.com and want to check it out, you can get a FREE 7-day all-access pass at lynda.com/go/chrisandtrish. A few of the movies are also available there for free preview.

Avid Media Composer 101 courseware translated/localized for Latin America/Spain

After many months of teamwork, the Avid Media Composer 101 courseware is now available in a translated and localized version for Latin America & Spain. As a result, many Avid MC101 students in those areas can now benefit from having this courseware in their own language. My friend Rubén Abruña of iLevel and I had the honor of receiving this contract from Avid in 2009. The first draft of our translation/localization was initially used in September 2009 at an Avid training event in Santiago, Chile, South America, both to teach a group of new students, as well as to generate feedback from certified Avid instructors from the region. In this article, you’ll see the behind the scenes of this project, which combined our knowledge of the techie video terms in each language, as well as that of the regionalisms and political debates that surround this type of a project.

Masters of Visual Effects - Online

Matt Silverman, Creative Director of Bonfire Labs, is a certifiable After Effects old-timer (although he also has experience in many different systems), particularly known “back in the day” as being a roto expert in addition to an all-around top-shelf motion graphics and visual effects artist. Several years ago, he took it upon himself to enlist some of the best users in the field to construct a set of timeless, concept-based, software-agnostic visual effects training videos. These VHS tapes are long out of print, so Matt has started to digitize them and place them online. The links for Series 2 (covering compositing, keying, tracking, paint, and rotoscoping presented by Ron Brinkmann, Stu Maschwitz, and Scott Stewart) are below; watch them while you can:

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