AE Portal News

More Pixel Bender: RGB Distortion, Spill Replacer, Fractal Explorer

2009-07-15T22:18:00.000-07:00

Some more possibly useful Pixel Bender filters popped up. RGB Sine Distortion from Synja Dev Blog reminds one of Wave Warp-like features that could be rolled into the recent the free Pixel Bender filters from Satya Meka, Separate RGB, and RGB Splitter PBK, from Maltaannon.

RGB Sine Distortion "basically diffracts the R G and B channels from an image and then runs them through a simple sine wave transposition. The end result is a cool effect that reminds me of an old school analog TV with bad reception and bad guns."

On another front, Cinegobs released his new Pixel Bender plug-in, CineGobs Spill Replacer Pixel Bender v. 1.0. It's more user friendly than his earlier CineGobs Spill Suppression. Instead of just updating the spill suppressor, features were added that you select another layer that you want to replace the spill with.

Also, via gutsblow, Tom Beddard's subblue of Droste Effect filter fame has released 2 Fractal Explorer plug-ins that will take you further faster than AE's built-in Fractal filter. Fractal Explorer "is a couple of Pixel Bender filters that will generate Mandelbrot and Julia set fractals to any power in real-time. The first filter is for standard fractal colouring whereas the second is optimised to use a technique called ‘orbit trapping’ to map an image into fractal space."

subblue also has a good page on Fractals and generative art resources, as well as other cool pattern generators for Flash. The Guilloché Pattern Generator would make a nice Pixel Bender filter too. Here's renderings from his Pixel Bender plug-ins:

Julia flower orbit trap from subBlue on Vimeo.

Escher's Droste Effect train comparison from subBlue on Vimeo.

Noise Reduction Workflow For Vocal & Voice-Over

2009-07-15T13:19:00.000-07:00

Adobe's Jason Levine talks about Noise Reduction Workflow For Vocal & Voice-Over in part of an episode of Short and Suite, the Adobe.tv series that shows users how to use Production Premium with real post-production examples. Unfortunately this and other demos were done Adobe Audition 3, one of Adobe's elite apps, superior to the similar but hobbled app now included in the Adobe video suite.

Noise/Hum Removal in Adobe Audition 3 from Jason Levine on Vimeo.

Seeking participants for workflow studies

2009-07-15T13:10:00.000-07:00

The AE team is seeking participants for some workflow observation studies. Todd Kopriva lists the requirements as no experience animating text or rotoscoping in After Effects, which counts out most people reading blogs on AE.

Other teams are doing the same; the Photoshop team is looking for a beginning Photoshop user who has version CS4 for a study in Converting to black & white in Photoshop.

Restore file association for ZIP files in Windows

2009-07-15T12:37:00.000-07:00

This is a minor annoyance to Vista users -- less vexing than the now-blackened and disabled QuickTime controller bar which makes QT Movie NoteTaker useless.

If the file association for ZIP files in Windows Vista get changed, it's not straightword how to change them back to the built-in Microsoft functionality. This will restore .zip files to their original Windows Explorer associations, courtesy of VistaHeads:

Go to the Start Menu
Type "command" in the Search box
Then right click on "Command Prompt" shown on top
Select "Run as Administrator"
In the Command window, type (or right-click and paste):

assoc .zip=CompressedFolder

You could also use an automatic technique from Winhelponline in File association fixes for Windows Vista.

Palettes and Reusing Colors

2009-07-14T18:12:00.000-07:00

Artbeats has a couple of new free tutorials on color in a continuing series by Chris & Trish Meyer. Color Palette shares "tips on how to get inspiration when choosing a color palette for any project."

Reusing Colors discusses how to reuse "the same colors multiple times within a project even when you are using different programs." This involves several tips, including some downloadable scripts and expressions for After Effects.

For more on color see Color memes and schemes and other posts tagged as color. Other related recent tutorials include Maschwitz on a Blockbuster Film Look and Maltaannon’s Kuler Workflow for AE.

'Droidmaker' free & other curios

2009-07-14T11:52:00.000-07:00

Via Adam Wilt is a free (for now) PDF version of Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution, a history of early computer graphics and nonlinear editing. Droidmaker author Michael Rubin's presentations around the Bay Area upon the book's release were entertaining, and the book got the nod from Alvy Ray Smith, who with Ed Catmull co-founded Pixar.

Rubin has more on the same line, including early home movies of ILM from former ILMer and SFSU/MSP AE instructor Dave Berry (catch his life-affirming video Laugh if you can). Rubin also noted a web version of George Lucas: Maker of Films, a 1971 PBS piece with an interview of Lucas by film theorist Gene Youngblood, author of Expanded Cinema. There's additional background from source Binary Bonsai, who also noted the Raiders 125-page story conference transcript.

Youngblood's book itself is also available as a PDF download, if you're interested in expanded or synaesthetic cinema, an idea that includes visual music, experimental animation, and motion graphics. For more see the AEP post Visual music and motion graphics, which includes a 'making of' on Larry Cuba's computer graphics in the first Star Wars movie.

ChromAbberation: AE filters and video

2009-07-13T20:59:00.000-07:00

On the heels of Separate RGB, the free Pixel Bender AE filter from Satya Meka, is Maltaannon's long promised RGB Splitter PBK for After Effects CS4; see his post Chrom Abberation.

Maltaannon also offers a 23-minute video tutorial and low-cost filters based on his own Custom Effects, CE RGB Splitter for CS3 and CE RGB Playground for CS4. (Names and other details may be changed; check with Maltaannon.)

A few months ago this topic became an After Effects meme cluster which was summarized in Chromatic aberrations, seperating RGB.

Update: Maltaannon wants to give you more free stuff at Get free stuff.

Meme tracking and the News Cycle

2009-07-13T12:25:00.000-07:00

A new Cornell study, Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle, is discussed by the New York Times in Study Measures the Chatter of the News Cycle. This study is interesting on a few levels, since the Cornell project tracks "the quotes and phrases that appear most frequently over time across this entire online news spectrum. This makes it possible to see how different stories compete for news and blog coverage each day, and how certain stories persist while others fade quickly."

But so far the effort seems to be targeted to prove that blogs lag slightly behind mainstream media and other details which can safely be concluded from casual looks at Google Hot Trends, and aggregators like Techmeme, PopURLs, and Original Signal. Social problems and political hot potatoes are safely avoided, as are steps toward improved decision-making. For a neglected perspective, see the recent AEP post on Anthony Downs' "Issue-Attention Cycle."

The problem with news is that celebrity, impulse twit-ches, and emotion rules -- "if it bleeds, it leads" still applies. News mostly feeds us lurid filler. Recognized on a basic level since at least the time of Edward Bernays is that advertising and politics are propaganda. This can be seen in behavioral targeting, web tracking, and the careers of people like consultant Frank Luntz. For some background on "framing" for the social mind, see Douglas Rushkoff's PBS docs Merchants of Cool and The Persuaders. Right now the pitchman has a foot in the door, but there's more coming, like "social-networking TV," an electronic panopticon where you can "participate in your own manipulation," as EBN mused.

Still the Cornell study is worth a look, and we can expect more visualizations because you can download MemeTracker data. There's also a beginning of a discussion by Zachary M. Seward of the Neiman Journalism Lab, Chris Anderson, and Scott Rosenberg.

Here's an excerpt of the NYT article:

'The paper, “Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle,” was also written by Jure Leskovec, a postgraduate researcher at Cornell, who this summer will become an assistant professor at Stanford, and Lars Backstrom, a Ph.D. student at Cornell, who is going to work for Facebook. The team has set up interactive displays of their findings at memetracker.org.

Social scientists and media analysts have long examined news cycles, though focusing mainly on case studies instead of working with large Web data sets. And computer scientists have developed tools for clustering and tracking articles and blog posts, typically by subject or political leaning.

But the Cornell research, experts say, goes further in trying to track the phenomenon of news ideas rising and falling. “This is a landmark piece of work on the flow of news through the world,” said Eric Horvitz, a researcher at Microsoft and president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. “And the study shows how Web-scale analytics can serve as powerful sociological laboratories.”

Sreenath Sreenivasan, a professor specializing in new media at the Columbia Journalism School, said the research was an ambitious effort to measure a social phenomenon that is not easily quantified. “To the extent this kind of approach could open the door to a new understanding of the news cycle, that is very interesting,” he said.'

New Pixel Bender plug-in: Separate RGB

2009-07-12T17:17:00.000-07:00

Satya Meka has a new free filter for After Effects, Separate RGB, which lets you spatially offset RGB channels in a layer without having it to do it on separate layers for each channel, as with the built-in AE Shift Channels filter. This filter is homespun in Pixel Bender, so there may be some minor quirks.

For an earlier AEP look at a cluster of similar ideas, see Chromatic aberrations, seperating RGB.

Update: Satya has another tutorial on AETuts, Create Procedurally Animated Rhythmic Dancing Marbles.

Photoshop nuggets

2009-07-12T11:41:00.000-07:00

John Nack has some cool re-Tweeted tips for PS, AI, etc. The zoomed-in rezoom is pretty fun:

Photoshop tip: Cmd-click the New Layer button to create layer behind current one. [Via Cristen Gillespie.]
Photoshop CS4 tip: While zoomed in, hold down H while clicking anywhere. Move the square elsewhere & release. Kapow! [Via @gpenston]
"Does CS4 strip lens metadata like CS3?" No. Save for Web now gives you choices. Select "All" to preserve lens data.

Also good for Photoshop tips is Julieanne Kost who has near daily quick tips and a large collection of video tutorials. Lately the Crop Tool Canvas reSize has been helpful.

Of course if there's time one might consult Russell Brown's very seriously professional tips and Deke McClelland, for example his The Essential Approach to Masking at Scott Kelby's "Guest Blog Wednesday."

A 3D Radio Waves plug-in for After Effects

2009-07-10T11:24:00.000-07:00

Satya Meka has been rehabilitating the Radio Waves, a favorite old filter built into After Effects, with projects discussed earlier in The Secret Menu of Radio Waves in After Effects. Now he's working on 3D Radio Waves Plug-in for After Effects.

3D Radio Waves Plugin For After Effects from Satya Meka on Vimeo.

The filter will produce radio waves in 3D space with its own camera controls (see comments). The short demo video above is a raw demonstration. Mask and Image contour support is in development; it also has opacity and width settings like that of original radio waves. Each wave can rotate in XYZ with respect to the origin or any point and can produce polygons up to 20,000 sides compared to 128 sides of the original effect. And it's GPU-accelerated.

The downside is that it's Mac only! That's because it's a Core Image filter created in Quartz Composer and compiled using the Pixlock Effect Builder AE. Satya Meka is planning to release a private beta soon.

It's unfortunate that only Mac users have access to Apple Quartz Composer, FxFactory, Pixlock Effect Builder AE, and QC Integration FX, while Windows users have only disjointed features available in Pixel Bender, Conduit for Flash Pixel Bender, and other sundry image processing geekery end user tools. But who knows what will pop up.

SF Cutters: Tues July 21 at Delancey Street

2009-07-10T08:26:00.000-07:00

The next SF Cutters meeting is Tuesday July 21 at the Delancey Street Screening Room in San Francisco, conveniently located near Brannan stop of the MUNI N and T lines, with free and paid parking along the street.

Due to increased costs the meeting is $15, and includes light refreshments, presentations, and a raffle ticket. Everyone has a fair chance of going home with a cool prize. The Raffle list is on the Eventbrite page and is being updated; signup online at july21.eventbrite.com.

Via Claudia Crask, speakers include:

Jesse Spencer FCP editor, on Multiple format edits in FCP - Working with Exotic Media
This is the second of lecture on Multiformat editing techniques... it will recap some info from the first lecture "Developing Strategies for Multiformat Editing" and will continue on to show easy diagnostic tricks you can use to evaluate Conversion options for multiformat editing.

Casey Bishop of Roland Systems, on field audio recording systems by Edirol
Casey will bring and demo some of the products in this line: R-4Pro, R-44, F-1, VC-50. Please take a look at Roland video products at www.edirol.com/video. Roland is co-sponsoring the Delancey St. Screening Room rental and refreshments.

Jason Hernandez the inventor of Eazydolly -- as mentioned by Stu Maschwitz on Twitter. It's a modified original version of a camera dolly and the movement reminds me of rails shots. You have to check this out. Highly portable, affordable and useful. And they will be giving one away!

Take a survey or two, for the team

2009-07-09T22:48:00.000-07:00

Todd Kopriva of AE Help is asking AE users to Please take a survey or two. Pretty please?

These short surveys ask about tasks that video editors might do in After Effects to help Adobe to learn what people are having trouble with and how to make it better: survey 1 TextAnimation and survey 2 Rotoscoping.

Prevent AE filters or Presets from loading

2009-07-09T08:00:00.000-07:00

If you're trying out After Effects filter demos or troubleshooting problems, you might have copies of plug-ins that conflict when loading. To prevent Presets or filters (or folders of them) from loading, you can add “~” or use parentheses () on both Mac & Windows. The downside is that it's easy to forget which things are turned off when you disable a filter this way, so you may just pull filters out of the Plug-ins or Common Files folders.

This actually is in AE Help, in Remove an effect or animation preset, though it's hard to find with some keyword searches. Also, it does seem that Command+period (Mac) or ESC to stop filters loading during a launch of AE is no longer a feature.

Trapcode Particular 2 is released

2009-07-08T14:00:00.000-07:00

The popular filter Particular is now updated to version 2, and there's a long list of new features and enhancements.

You can browse the substantial details of Particular and look at some tutorial walkthroughs by creator Peder Norrby himself at Red Giant (except v2 tutorial 3 is only at Trapcode).

Details on this new release were also mentioned in several AEP posts on recent news and tutorials, including Particular 2 Presentation & Tutorial from Aharon Rabinowitz & AENY, More on Particular & ToonIt, and See Particular 2 in action with Fxguide at NAB +ToonIt 2.

Update: Maltaannon has a tutorial video with project file at Particular 2: Overview.

Concentric Rings Projects

2009-07-08T11:39:00.000-07:00

Mark Coleran has a blog full of project demos and interview links, and has posted a version of his Concentric Rings Project:

"Recently Satya Meka created a tutorial for AETuts based on a sequence that was done for The Island. The sequence involved the creation of a concentric ring animation that was stepped off using expressions to delay the motion and create an unusual rhythmic effect."

Note: Responding to readers requests, Satya recreated the effect in Cinema 4D and has created a bonus addendum tutorial full of XPresso goodness at AETuts.

The Secret Menu of Radio Waves in After Effects

2009-07-08T11:24:00.000-07:00

A few months ago Satya Meka posted a cool method to Create an Ethereal Morphing Letter Canvas over at AETuts.com. He cleverly used the Radio Waves filter built into After Effects to control Autotraced text masks.

He shared more thoughts in The Secret Menu of Radio Waves in After Effects at his blog Gutsblow. Here's an excerpt:

"So, where exactly is the secret menu? It is right in front of you, in the main Radio Waves Effects Panel, but it is hidden in the form of Frequency, Opacity, Fade-in and Fade-outs. Yes, with proper tweaking you can produce some amazing results using the Radio Waves plug-in. Let me give you some brief tips so that you can utilize, the plug-in much better. Remember, this is not a tutorial, but just a brief guide which helps you to create better organic forms using Radio Waves plug-in.

The more the frequency is, the more continuous your form looks. Also, your frequency depends on the size of your composition and also the Expansion(Distance Between Consecutive waves).
- For general NTSC DV Compositions with SD resolutions, the frequency is almost equal to the wiggle amount if your form is moving. Otherwise, it is just a quarter of the width.
- For HD Resolutions, the frequency should be atleast a quarter of the width of the composition. Also, if you are seeing bands/random deformations, make sure you increase the opacity and reduce the spin. I generally don’t recommend animating the spin at HD resolutions.

Wave Type, while animating masks, make sure you get the mask transformations(if any) right before increasing the frequency. Also remember, the more number of mask transformations you have, the more complex organic shapes you get.

Quick Animations , if you are planning to do some really quick transform animations, try to avoid keyframing any orientation/spin properties as it leads to rapid jagged movements and your form looks so chopped!

Don’t forget, most of these organic shapes are forms can be achieved only if you insert wiggle() expression in the producer point of radio waves."

There's more at Gutsblow.

The Tutorial Gap

2009-07-08T07:37:00.000-07:00

Why feel guilty about not covering every tutorial -- it's Topher Welsh's job to fill the gaps! Here's his latest collection of AE and 3D tutorials: 74 Tutorials To Keep You Busy While I Am On Vacation.

Update: Topher has a similar collection at AEtuts, 22 Killer After Effects Tutorials from Elsewhere.

Free Texture Tuesday

2009-07-08T07:24:00.000-07:00

Fallen behind on the accelerating treadmill that is modern technology, here's some free textures from the Bittbox series Free Texture Tuesdays. This series is by Caleb Kimbrough, who authors the texture blog Lost and Taken and co-authors PatternWall.com, a new site with all kinds of free seamless patterns.

Other resources like CGtextures can be found in previous posts on textures.

Yenaphe's free timelapse footage

2009-07-08T07:05:00.000-07:00

In addition to unique posts on his blog, Sébastien Périer is adding a section for free Scripts & Stock Footage, and recently posted 2 free HD clips (clouds and melting ice) in a variety of formats.

GenArts Sapphire Rental Program

2009-07-07T12:33:00.001-07:00

The GenArts Sapphire Rental Program hopes that you'll expand your digital toolbox with Sapphire's package of more than 200 industry-standard video effects plug-ins at a new lower monthly rate available to After Effects and Final Cut Pro users.

There's free trial downloads too, so the Sapphire Rental Program seems good for those working project-to-project or just wanting to get up to speed with technology that ILM has recently chosen to standardize in shop. The differences between packages are not great, so the learning curve shouldn't be long if you know another package.

By the way, GenArts founder Karl Sims made a variety of inspirational videos early on, as did the Bay Area Raster Masters.

Convert AE project from CS4 to CS3

2009-07-07T07:28:00.000-07:00

Maltaannon has a short video tutorial demonstrating how to convert an After Effects project from CS4 down to CS3.

Jonas at General Specialist discussed the same topic in 2007 in Opening After Effects Projects in an Earlier Version.

Maltaannon uses his Trapcode Form oriented tutorial DNA Chain as the example. Jerzy adds:

"The trick is that you can copy-and-paste some elements from CS4 to CS3. It’s easier with After Effects’ native plugins like Fast Blur or Ramp, but it also works with 3rd party plugins as well to some extent. The main limitation I’ve stumbled upon is that you have to copy each section (or Group) of parameters separately. The easiest way to do this is to select a layer, press UU to reveal all modified properties and then copy paste them in groups. For example: Trapcode Form has several groups like Particles, Layer Maps, Visibility and so on and so on. You have to copy each group on it’s own. That also goes for the sub-groups.

As a side note I am working on a ready-to-use solution for this problem that will allow you to simply import your CS4 projects to CS3 or even earlier versions of After Effects. But until that day comes all you can do is follow the tips in this tutorial."

See the video at Maltaannon.

More on pixel aspect ratios + color sampler expression

2009-07-07T07:16:00.000-07:00

Todd Kopriva reviews resources in pixel aspect ratios in After Effects CS4 and other applications in Creative Suite 4 Production Premium, including the previously mentioned PAR for the Course: Working with the new pixel aspect ratios in CS4 by Chris Meyer.

See also AEP's Customizing pixel aspect ratios in AE CS4 for 3 undocumented and unsupported workarounds of CS4 PAR settings.

Note: Todd also posted, color sampler using sampleImage expression method to help you "get a readout of color values for one or more points that would update as you tweaked color correction settings."

Is Nuke the new Shake?

2009-07-06T18:30:00.000-07:00

Via Final Cut User's The Foundry’s Nuke gaining ground fast (with extra tidbits), is Mark Christiansen take Is Nuke the new Shake?

Nuke isn't cheap but The Foundry provides a free Personal Learning Edition of Nuke plus training, including basic training videos from FxPhD which itself has tons more training and free VPN use of Nuke and other software while registered. There's often Nuke info and resources available on Fx Mogul, and more are cited in the VideoHive article Weta and ILM Got It… Wanna Learn Nuke?

Mentioned previously on AEP, along with The Foundry’s 2009 Nuke Roadmap, CreativeCow looked at the bottom line in an interesting article, Nuke - An Introduction for After Effects Users.

Particular 2 Presentation & Tutorial

2009-07-06T18:22:00.000-07:00

Aharon Rabinowitz and friends posted his AENY presentation that introduced new features of Trapcode Particular 2: Particular 2 Presentation + Tutorial. Also posted below, the video includes a 20-minute overview of some of the new features and a 20-minute tutorial on compositing Particular particles in 3D space with camera motion.

AENY Aharon Rabinowitz introduces the new features of Trapcode Particular 2 from AENY on Vimeo.