Production Values
Mark Christiansen is the author of After Effects Studio Techniques (Adobe Press). He has created visual effects and animations for feature films including Pirates of the Caribbean 3, The Day After Tomorrow and films by Robert Rodriguez. Past corporate clients include Adobe, Cisco, Sun, Cadence, Seagate, Intel and Medtronic, and broadcast work has appeared on HBO and the History Channel. Mark's roles have included producing, directing, designing and effects supervision, and his solo work has appeared at film festivals including L.A. Shorts Fest. Long a Contributing Editor at DV Magazine during its heyday, Mark has been contracted as a marketing and technical writer on numerous occasions for Adobe Systems Inc. as well as related companies such as Red Giant Software. He has taught at fxPhd.com and Academy of Art University. His career began at LucasArts Entertainment and he is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Pomona College.
Anarchy amid the abdication of Mac Pro
By Mark Christiansen | April 03, 2013
Yes, it literally caught fire.
This is the story of one man’s experience assembling and running a Hackintosh. For anyone unaware of this illicit, but not yet forbidden alternative to the Mac Pro and alterative systems from Apple, it is a custom-built computer - one which would...
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International Town Hall Meetings (and a sea of green)
By Mark Christiansen | March 13, 2013
After a dramatic few weeks that have seen Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings for VFX Oscar winner Rhythm & Hues, VFX protests at the ceremony, along with a sea of green avatars on Twitter and Facebook, what had been proposed as walk-out for "Pi Day" is now a town hall meeting that will take...
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How I found myself on the set of a Hollywood phenomenon
By Mark Christiansen | February 19, 2013
The text came in late one evening - who could be in New Orleans immediately for VFX supervision? The call was going around San Francisco, apparently because the film had received SF Film Commission backing which stipulated hiring local artisans, despite shooting along the Gulf of Mexico. The...
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Shot/Asset/Schedule tracking software moves to per-seat subscription pricing for suite of all three applications
By Mark Christiansen | February 12, 2013
Chances are that you have no first-hand experience with Shotgun, Tank or Revolver (although if you live in Texas you will no doubt initially claim to be familiar). With 400 customers worldwise, Shotgun may count as a runaway success in the VFX business while hundreds, thousands (even billions)...
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Digital Domain founder and former ILM boss runs it down in “very simple, real terms.”
By Mark Christiansen | February 07, 2013
Q. Let’s begin with the questions I posed earlier this week. Is what is happening in VFX in 2013 any different than what is happening to any number of industries in western economies as a whole?
One big difference is that visual effects facilities providing shots for Hollywood...
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"Visual effects is Art, created in a laboratory, at gunpoint." - Ben Grossmann, VFX Oscar winner, Hugo (2012)
By Mark Christiansen | February 05, 2013
In less than 3 weeks, something like a billion viewers worldwide will look on as Life of Pi wins the award for Best Visual Effects at the 85th edition of the Academy Awards. I don't mean to ruin the surprise for you, but you don't need The Predictanator to tell you this award is a...
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Is Less More, or is More, in fact, More?
By Mark Christiansen | January 04, 2013
There seems little doubt that display technology and the way we experience media today won't necessarily look the same throughout the 21st century, any more than Downton Abbey looks like Enter the Void, or a zoetrope resembles Call of Duty. There are, for example,...
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Editors on many Hollywood productions are more valuable with After Effects skills. What's stopping them?
By Mark Christiansen | December 13, 2012
An article published last month on the Adobe Press site has sparked much discussion and a little controversy, so I think it's worth following up, starting with a clarification.
The topic clearly strikes a nerve; the article became the site's most popular for the...
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After Effects scripts previously available only with copies of After Effects Studio Techniques are now available to all.
By Mark Christiansen | December 07, 2012
This week, Jeff Almasol (redefinery) released the set of After Effects Scripts that were previously available only as part of the content that ships with After Effects Studio Techniques. This was done not only with the author's blessing, but at my explicit suggestion. If theses scripts are...
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The book is now in its fifth (and finest) edition and available in print and as an e-book-downloadable excerpt available.
By Mark Christiansen | November 26, 2012
After Effects Studio Techniques is unique from other books on After Effects in a couple of specific ways.It is a VFX compositing book, designed to teach you the art of making a single shot believable although it is made up of disparate elements. It is also uniquely focused on intermediate and advanced usage; from Chapter 1 it is assumed that you don't need to learn the fundamentals of working in video or in After Effects that are best left to other resources, of which there are many. Professional peers have remarked that they learned useful new information right from the first chapter, and throughout the book.
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You already own an amazing tool to optimize all kinds of video output and streamline your workflow.
By Mark Christiansen | December 13, 2011
Suppose you wanted a perfectly useful workhorse of a video application to slip in completely under the radar and be as underutilized as possible. What would you do to kill its chances of being discovered? For starters, you would introduce an early version - the debut perhaps - that wasn't quite ready and was therefore unreliable, in terms of features and stability, in order to scare off the early adapters. You could then, if you were clever, make sure that any succeeding versions were not directly integrated with any popular applications sitting right next to it in the installation. You could make it look like it was designed primarily to create Flash videos. Finally, if you made it so fully featured that it was, in fact, challenging to easily understand - bingo, that tool would be almost forgotten!Adobe Media Encoder made an inauspicious debut with Adobe Production Premium CS4, only to be radically improved in terms of reliability, for CS5 and then radically improved again, including support for GPU acceleration and 64 bit memory handling, with its CS5.5 update.
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A simple script to do a simple thing, simply, and a good learner script to set your own variables.
By Mark Christiansen | October 31, 2011
Past (and future) scripts of the week involve custom UI's and detailed feature sets. We're a few months into this series and there are some huge ones I haven't even covered yet, because I also want to give weight to the ones that simply convert half a dozen steps into one.This week's SotW is a two-fer: Add Parented Null to Each Selected Layer, and Add Parented Null to Selected Layers. The former adds a null at the center of the comp to each layer that you select prior to running it directly from File > Scripts. The latter differs only in that it creates a single null for all selected layers.
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Editors can take advantage of advanced stabilization in Premiere Pro CS5.5
By Mark Christiansen | October 30, 2011
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.
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You can track a mask in After Effects.
By Mark Christiansen | October 21, 2011
Into every After Effects artist's life a little roto must fall. Although I was told there would be no roto when (name-drop alert!) I worked on Avatar, there came a point right at the end where I had to jump in on a several-hundred frame tracking shot in which foreground and background had to be separated. Tracker2Mask allowed me to leverage the tracker itself to complete this task.Tools to track a mask point are integral to compositing applications such as Discreet Flame, and the standard impression has been that no equivalent feature set exists in After Effects, despite the addition of the Shape effect that allows usage of a mask tracked in mocha for After Effects, albeit in a completely non-standard way. If the desire is simply to track a point or set of points on a mask, Shape is not the answer.
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Solves a simple organizational problem when dealing with multiple projects and a consistent folder structure
By Mark Christiansen | October 15, 2011
Wow, where did the week go? Before it's too late, I have a little gem to share, a script that I myself requested and Jeff Almasol built.If you do the right thing in After Effects of creating a folder structure in the Project panel to organize assets, you will find that you have a minimum of 3, and often more than a dozen individual folders. These might be as simple as Source, Solids and Pre-comps, or they might be further divided down to have folders specifying what kind of source, and in what order/priority of pre-comp.If you're keeping this structure specific, there's a situation that will come up that MergeProjects solves: namely, what to do if you ever need to incorporate another project into your existing one. When you import a new project, all of its duplicate (redundant) folders are nested into its own source Project panel folder.
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A boon to productivity hounds, or just a more crowded UI?
By Mark Christiansen | October 05, 2011
I'm into workflow efficiency. I've read David Allen's book and am a proponent of Things. My own book is filled with keyboard shortcuts and other workflow optimizations. I'm convinced that the lift you get by learning keyboard shortcuts and context menus more than pays off the effort required to learn them.That's why I was enthusiastic to check out Get Sh*t Done, which hadn't really been on my radar. What, I wondered, could be done to enhance my productivity in After Effects via a panel? Earlier in this series I reviewed Shortcut Key Reference, which is all about helping with the laborious process of learning all those hundreds of keystrokes. Would this one make that process simpler?
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Create a 2.5D background scene instantaneously
By Mark Christiansen | September 30, 2011
Thanks to Photoshop and the iPhone, creating a single, arbitrarily wide panoramic image made up of a series of still images, stitched together, has never been simpler. First you shoot the series of stills, being careful to leave overlap between each image as you pan in one direction. Then in Photoshop, the Photomerge operation, or on the iPhone, an app such as AutoStitch Panorama or 360 Panorama automatically detects the matching areas of frame and corrects for lens distortion in order to create a single, wide image.
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This script makes text changes, even on a large scale, almost straightforward.
By Mark Christiansen | September 21, 2011
Motion graphics involves strange things sometimes, and in particular, text can animate here, there, anywhere, sometimes en masse. Not only is there no limit to the volume of text you might use in an After Effects animation, many designs are based around a kind of theme and repetition. There might be a single word or phrase that is animated a certain way, and then that animation changes slightly over time, and as it is repeated.And when something fundamental like the phrasing, typeface, color or size changes, editing each instance can be a serious pain. Not only does this present a large volume of changes that demand that you attend to them one-by-one, but even selecting the text to replace what's in the field can be challenging if, for example, it is arrayed and rotated in 3D space. That piece of text might not even be displayed except at a particular time.pt TextEdit provides several features that you might expect to find in After Effects itself. It can search on a text string to locate all instances of a given word, phrase, or set of letters, limiting the search only to the current comp or any or all comps within a project. It can look for all text layers that use a particular font, for those pesky (and perennial) cases where the client hasn't supplied the correct font.
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Sometimes a small gem can be found right where your nose prevents you from seeing it.
By Mark Christiansen | September 13, 2011
Change Render Locations is included with the regular After Effects installation - go ahead, look under File > Scripts, there it is - and it solves one tedious After Effects workflow issue, that you can't reassign multiple items in the Render Queue to a new render location.Before selecting the script, make sure any render destined for a new location is checked, as that's how this scripts knows which render location to move. Now simply assign the new location, and you get confirmation of the new output path.Badabing, badaboom.
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Power-users, end your struggles with large sets of expressions.
By Mark Christiansen | September 09, 2011
Expressions are among the most powerful additions you can make to your After Effects game. They are also fragile; set up 4 dozen staggered dependency layers to create a pattern form and then somehow delete the layer they point to, even for a moment, and all of the expressions are reset. And making a fix that applies to each of those layers can be the very definition of tedious.There's the magic word - tedious. If it's an After Effects fask to which that description fits, it's an obvious candidate for a script, and pt ExpressEdit is the right tool for anyone who works with expressions a lot, or even a lot of expressions once in a while.
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DBA Createasphere