Visual Effects
by PVC Staff
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Just Added From The Vault: Combining Tracking and Cloning
Extending the Clone tool in After Effects using tracking and expressions.
The real power in using any compositing program comes in combining its tools to create something more powerful than any one hammer or screwdriver can give you. In this previous column, we show you how to combine the motion tracker in After Effects with the Clone brush in its Paint tools to help automate the removal of an unwanted, moving object in a shot. (And how do we combine those tools? Using Expressions, a third tool in After Effects.)
Click here to jump straight to “A Track of the Clones” (with apologies for the terrible pun in the name).
Motion Graphics • Post Production • Visual Effects • (0) Comments • • Permalink
Saturday, April 19, 2008
NAB 2008 Super Session: A Million Dollar Look on a Thousand Dollar Budget
At the show ruled by suits and dilberts, the rebels get their turn
With big exhibitions like The NAB Show falling out of favor, and some disappearing altogether in the 21st century, NAB struck back this year by offering more educational fare than in years past, featuring keynotes and panels of experts from the industry, as well as day-long classes. On Wednesday was “A Million Dollar Look on a Thousand Dollar Budget,” a keynote and panel on getting cinematic production values out of equipment you may already have sitting around your studio.
The session was kicked off with the Legend of Zelda fan trailer “linked” here (nerdy pun for gamers paying attention) which appeared on April Fool’s Day, followed by a keynote by Stu Maschwitz of The Orphanage (and author of a fantastic blog) and then a panel featuring Dave Basulto of Clarity Pictures, Alex Lindsay from Pixel Corps, D.P. Taylor Wigton (447 Productions) and moderated by Brian Valente from Redrock Micro.
Stu’s keynote was a nice riff on his book The DV Rebel’s Guide in which he focused on the concept, “Less is More,” that you achieve perfection when you remove everything unnecessary from a scene - but no more than is necessary. He cited examples, showing a scene from The Matrix using the old knife throw trick where the knife is thrown out of frame and then we cut to the result, to support his argument that the cheap and scrappy method of constructing shots often yields the best result (even in a… more »
Budgeting • Business • NAB 08 • Post Production • Pre-Production • Production • Visual Effects • (1) Comments • Most recent comments by: fredjones, • Permalink
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
NAB 2008: Plugged In
We came away with three themes buzzing in our head: plug-ins, training, and Nuke.
As expected, NAB 2008 did not reveal any major new software releases for motion graphic designers, but it did showcase a number of interesting new plug-ins. We’d like to give you a quick round-up of our favorites here; we’re arranging to give many of these more in-depth reviews up here on PVC over the next several months. We also were very interested in with what The Foundry has done with the high-end compositing application Nuke (which they acquired from Digital Domain), and came away with the impression that in this slow economy, training has become more important again.
more »Motion Graphics • NAB 08 • Training • Visual Effects • (0) Comments • • Permalink
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Animator vs. Animation
A fun animation that shows what can happen when you tease your art a little too much…
Steve Kilisky recently wrote a thought-provoking blog about how video (and now, the web) has traditionally been initially driven by technical folks, with the artists following along. To this day, there is still often a distinction between an “artist” and an “operator,” “animator” or “developer.”
In that light, Trish recently found (on a calligraphy list, of all things) a pointer to this excellent cartoon that shows what can happen when an animator provokes his animation to revolt. It’s well worth a few minutes from your day. (Be patient through the first minute; it keeps picking up pace from there...)
more »3D • Motion Graphics • Visual Effects • (0) Comments • • Permalink
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Power Windows: Coloring Correction with Training Wheels
If I’m not tweaking color I can’t screw up as badly
Like a lot of people with Final Cut Pro or After Effects, I’m trying to become a crack colorist in the privacy of my own home. It’s unlikely to happen anytime soon as I just don’t have the training or the time to take on a second full time career. But--that doesn’t mean I can’t do a little bit of damage to my own footage when I want to experiment. Or when I’m too cheap to hire someone else to do it.
There’s been much discussion on the Cinematography Mailing List about rookie colorists and why it’s a bad idea to try to do these things yourself on a wing and a prayer, but I figure the more I work on my footage the more I’ll learn about giving others the kinds of images that they can improve on my behalf in the future. I’ve done the same thing editing my own footage, and I’ve learned a hell of a lot not just about shooting for editors but also how to fix the kinds of mistakes that just happen on sets when we’re working against time and budget.
I don’t have a color critical monitor, and as much as I’ve tried to calibrate my Apple Cinema Displays to look something like what I might find on a badly tuned TV set in a third world nation, I can’t quite get close enough to feel comfortable. If I’m working with a piece of footage that’s been horribly screwed up in post by someone else (I once shot some jeans spots where the client decided the whole thing should have a blue cast because, well, jeans are blue, and isn’t that a good enough reason?) I can bring it back to normal, but creating rich sophisticated looks on a questionably-calibrated computer LCD is a little frustrating.
The one thing I can’t screw up too much is luminance, and the single most beneficial thing I can do to my 8-bit HD footage is to pop in a Power Window and reduce bright unclipped areas that I couldn’t control during shooting. This is super simple in a telecine… more »
Cameras • Post Production • Production • Visual Effects • (1) Comments • Most recent comments by: Laptoper, • Permalink
Monday, March 10, 2008
New Article on Color Management in After Effects
Over on Artbeats.com, we’ve written a gentle introduction to color management in AE.
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.
more »Motion Graphics • Post Production • Visual Effects • (0) Comments • • Permalink
