The Heartbreaking Beauty of Pixar’s Films

In 1995 Pixar released their first feature film, Toy Story. Since then, this amazing group of creatives has led in visual innovation and unique stories. As we review the year 2010, it seems fitting to share this inspiring mashup of Pixar films from the past 15 years. Enjoy.

Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects Hidden Gems: Chapter 4 - Keyframe Velocity

As you are probably aware by now, we’re going to go through our book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects 5th Edition (“CMG5” for short) and pulling out a few “hidden gems” from each chapter. These will include both essential tips for new users, as well as timesaving gems that experienced users may not be aware existed.

Chapter 4 of CMG5 helps you to improve your animations by focusing on the timing and speed changes of your movements, including working efficiently with the Graph Editor as well as using Auto-Bezier, Hold and Roving keyframes:

Creating Motion Graphics Hidden Gems: Chapter 3 - Basic Animation

As you are probably aware by now, we’re going to go through our book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects 5th Edition (“CMG5” for short) and pulling out a few “hidden gems” from each chapter. These will include both essential tips for new users, as well as timesaving gems that experienced users may not be aware existed.

The third chapter in CMG5 shows how to animate a layer’s transformations, as well as mastering motion paths:

Creating Motion Graphics Hidden Gems: Chapter 2 - Creating a Composition

As we mentioned last week, we’re going to go through our book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects 5th Edition (“CMG5” for short) and pulling out a few “hidden gems” from each chapter. These will include both essential tips for new users, as well as timesaving gems that experienced users may not be aware existed.

The second chapter in CMG5 covers the layout of the Composition, Timeline and Layer panels, creating Solid layers, RAM Previewing, and shortcuts for navigating in time and space:

Creating Motion Graphics Hidden Gems: Chapter 1 - After Effects 101

Our book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects 5th Edition (“CMG5” for short) is not a quick read: It contains 768 printed pages, plus another 160 pages of bonus chapters on the accompanying disc. Although we put a lot of effort into the Table of Content and Index, there will inevitably be a few tips, tricks, gotchas, factoids, and shortcuts you might have missed. Therefore, we’re going to go through CMG5 and pull out a few quick-to-read “hidden gems” from each chapter. These will include both essential tips for new users, as well as timesaving gems that experienced users may not be aware existed.

The first chapter in CMG5 is an overview of After Effects itself, so this first batch of tips will be focused on the user interface and working with source files:

Deeper Modes of Expression: The Index

This year we’ve been taking the Bonus Chapter on Expressions from our book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects and serializing as a set of 12 articles. Now that all 12 parts have been posted, we though it would be useful to provide a central index to the whole series:

Deeper Modes of Expression, Part 12: Expressive Text

Finally, we’d like to demonstrate ways to use expressions to manipulate text created with the new Type tool. We’ll show how to display time and parameter values as text, both for diagnostic purposes and to create graphical elements. On the second page we’ll show to how to manipulate strings of text, including using the Buzz Words animation preset to cycle through words in a list. Then on the last page we’ll talk about the Expression Selector to animate text created with the Type tool.

Using RED Footage Proxies in After Effects

Many people like to shoot RED source footage these days, even if the final destination is lower-resolution video. I agree, it’s nice to have all of those extra pixels to play with - except when you have to actually read them off disk and process them in order to see a frame in a program like Adobe After Effects. Well, After Effects has a little-known feature called footage proxies that can speed up your workflow up until it’s time to render.

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