You may have seen a couple of video tips to show a couple of ninja tricks with RG Corner Pin, one of the three plug-ins that makes up Red Giant’s Warp plug-in set. If you encountered that post without knowing what Warp even does, today I present the top 5 ways this set beats the built-in tools, and a special deal just for today (and, well, for the tardy, tomorrow).

Here are 3 RG Corner Pin timesavers compared to the built-in After Effects Corner Pin tool:

• Perform 2 Pins Simultaneously – to and from: the built-in AE Corner Pin tool assumes that whatever is being corner pinned – that is, warped into a rectangle at some arbitrary 3D angle in your scene – is full-frame. But suppose you’re taking one frame from within a scene and pinning it to another, as I did in that first video linked above? RG has both and does them in a single operation to minimize artefacting.
• Offset, scale or rotate the pins – even grow bounds: have you ever had corner pin data not perfectly line up with the target corners? I know I have, and the AE Corner Pin has no offset (unless you count writing your own expression to do it). Furthermore, RG can not only merely offset but scale or rotate. Or you can even grow the boundaries of the source beyond its frame, like scaling with extra data.
• Add motion blur: Sure, version 2 of Mocha AE supports motion blur in corner pin tracks (by using transform data more), but the Corner Pin tool itself does not.

And to get to five, two time-savers from the two other plug-ins in the Warp set, RG Shadow and RG Reflection:

• Set the baseline interactively: One thing that makes adding shadows and reflections to a scene particularly painful is nailing down the bottom of the object being reflected. These plugs let you do click/drag and keyframe it.
• Get bent: is your shadow or reflection running across the floor and up a wall? Add a bend with a seam at the point where the floor plane ends and the wall or other impediment begins.

And the prize? Today and tomorrow only, The Mark Christiansen Birthday Special gets you 50% off Warp – online purchases only, today, April 17 and tomorrow April 18 2009 with Coupon Code MarksbdayWarp50

And… if you are looking to upgrade to MochaAE version 2.0 or any other Imagineer software, I happen to know their NAB promotion begins today: 25% off everything until April 30.

I’m not paid to say this stuff – it was my kooky idea to give extra gifts for my b-day. Enjoy.