Motion Tracking and Green Screen with After Effects & Mocha AE

Amazingly, a lot of people don’t even know that they already OWN Mocha AE… it ships along with After Effects CS4 and higher and is a stand-alone application for providing planar motion tracking. You’ve probably already seen the trick of using Mocha AE to track and insert an image or a video clip inside an iPhone, but how about dealing with fingers on the screen and reflections on the surface? Sure, you could root out the fingers with the RotoBrush tool in After Effects and get pretty decent results, but that’s a fairly time-consuming workflow if you can avoid it.

This tutorial will show you how to take a video clip of an iPhone or iPad or any other handheld touch device set to a solid green screen, and insert your video clips or animations into to it perfectly, while realistically retaining the bright reflections on the shiny glass surfaces.

*NOTE: You can follow along with this tutorial by downloading the free project folder with included source files (After Effects CS5.5) at this link from my web site HERE.

Use Dynamic Link to bring Warp Stabilizer to Premiere Pro CS5.5

The Dynamic Link process to stabilize a Pr clip in AE begins in the Pr timeline.

Warp Stabilizer was arguably the biggest addition to After Effects CS5.5. Once you understand how to use it, it’s a tool that can change the way you shoot; if you find yourself without a tripod or any kind of stabilization with a camera as notoriously unsteady as a DSLR, even on a moving shot, you can end up with footage that can look as if a dolly or SteadiCam were used to take it.

For editors and shooters who work more in Premiere Pro than in AE, this is clearly a case where Dynamic Link, the technology bridge between the two apps, is useful. Warp Stabilizer isn’t part of Pr, and it is relatively straightforward for basic usage even for the casual AE user. 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.

Adobe MAX 2011 Technology Sneak Peeks

Adobe’s big annual MAX conference finished a couple of weeks ago, and as part of it they included a series of technology sneak peeks. I’ve gone through the videos posted on AdobeTV and pulled out the ones of most interest to us video folks:

CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 40B – 3D Channel Effects

We’re going through our book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects 5th Edition (CMG5) and pulling out a few “hidden gems” from each chapter. These will include essential advice for new users, plus timesaving tips that experienced users may not be aware of.

After Effects includes a set of 3D Channel effects, which take advantage of additional information embedded in files rendered from certain 3D programs. Since relatively few users have occasion to employ these, we covered them in a Bonus Chapter on the DVD-ROM that comes with CMG5 - including some of the naming and file format conventions you need to follow to make sure After Effects can import all of the available information. As not all 3D programs embed this information in their render, where practical we also provided alternative workflows that replicate the end result of these effects with files you should be able to generate from almost any 3D program.

CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 37B and 37C – Expressions and Scripting Bonus Chapters

We’re going through our book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects 5th Edition (CMG5) and pulling out a few “hidden gems” from each chapter. These will include essential advice for new users, plus timesaving tips that experienced users may not be aware of.

In addition to the book’s introductory chapter on expressions that we covered last week, the dual-layer DVD-ROM that comes with CMG5 includes bonus chapters on both expressions and scripting. Rather than try to boil down nearly 70 pages of PDFs into our customary handful of gems, this week we thought we’d share a set of resources on scripting and expressions - including Bonus Chapter 37C itself, written by Dan Ebberts of MotionScript.com.

Upgrading to After Effects CS5.5?

As Adobe and their various vendors have been offering a variety of discounts and incentives this year (as well as floating the idea that you’ll need to own at least CS5 to get discounted upgrade pricing on the next Creative Suite), we’re guessing a lot of After Effects users who have been getting by with older versions may be thinking about upgrading.

To help inform your potential upgrade decision and ease the subsequent transition, we thought it would be helpful to round up some resources - many free; some costing just a nominal sum - that explain what’s changed between versions. In addition to links to relevant articles and reviews, we’re including a selection of free videos from relevant courses on lynda.com (if you have trouble playing any of them, reload the page); if you don’t already have a subscription to watch the rest of the courses, click through this link to get a 7 day free pass to evaluate these courses and others as part of your potential new subscription.

We’re going to assume you have at least After Effects CS3, which was released in 2007. We’ll give an overview of major changes in CS4, CS5, and CS5.5 in each of these three pages.

CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 35 – The Puppet Tools

We’re going through our book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects 5th Edition (CMG5) and pulling out a few “hidden gems” from each chapter. These will include essential advice for new users, plus timesaving tips that experienced users may not be aware of.

One of the most fun areas to explore in After Effects is using the Puppet tools. These provide a new way to warp layers, including shape and text layers created inside After Effects. Applications include creating character animation or just imparting fun movement to otherwise inanimate objects.

CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 34 – Roto Brush

We’re going through our book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects 5th Edition (CMG5) and pulling out a few “hidden gems” from each chapter. These will include essential advice for new users, plus timesaving tips that experienced users may not be aware of.

The Roto Brush is a relatively new tool introduced in After Effects CS5 that helps automate creating a matte to separate a foreground from a background, such as isolating an actor from the room around him. To accomplish this, you draw brush strokes to teach After Effects the difference between the two. After Effects uses this information in conjunction with edge detection, motion tracking, and optical flow technologies to follow the changes in foreground and background over time.

Roto Brush is not perfect, but it’s a lot easier than hand drawing and animating precise mask shapes (plus you can use the Paint tools - the subject of the previous chapter - as well as masking to help clean up any problem areas that the automated Roto Brush may have misinterpreted). In this chapter in the Creating Motion Graphics book, we guide you through a preferred workflow for achieving good results with Roto Brush. Here are a few tips, hidden gems, and general advice from that chapter.

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