January 10, 2005

Free Total Training tidbits

Toolfarm.com has a searchable tutorial list, plus there is the great subset of TotalTraining.com content.

About AE Portal

an After Effect Portal is curated by Rich Young, who previously tracked After Effects resources at the aging AE Portal (now lost in the latest shuffle), which started in 1997 as a class guide and later specialized in plug-ins. An almost complete one-page overview of pre-CS5 AE plug-ins was AE Portal plug-in summary.

AE Portal has moved to ProVideo Coalition, but the archive should remain up for a while.

Please contact me at @aerich or aefilter at yahoo with AE-related news on filters, tutorials, and events. Retweets are easy! Note that pure product promotion isn't the goal of this blog, and that free or very interesting stuff is will garner broader interest.

January 9, 2005

DV and HD

You probably know about adamwilt.com, a "video geek's website" and home of the DV FAQ, tidbits, and ruminations on Panasonic's 24p DV cameras. Be sure to catch Adam's column in DV mag, especially the recent one on HD Numerology.

Another fun site is HD For Indies is a "High Definition Video for Independent Filmmakers, A How To Guide for indies on the cheap." It covers HD and HDV, with links to basic and advanced information.

January 7, 2005

Stu Maschwitz Blog

Stu Maschwitz, "filmmaker and accidental technologist," has a blog. Stu is a master of After Effects and helped create The Orphanage, Magic Bullet, and eLin. He also worked at ILM and was involved in aspects of products by Red Giant Software.

AV Gadget Blogs

There are a coupla nice blogs for gadgets that are useful for video and audio production: Broadcast Gadgets (Cool and Useful stuff for today's audio and video journalists) and Engadget.

January 6, 2005

5th Annual BAMG MacWorld

As always, this Bay Area Motion Graphic event will happen the Tuesday night of MacWorld.

That's January 11th at 6:45pm

Hotel Nikko
(Monterey Room)
222 Mason St
San Francisco, CA
(near Powell BART/cable cars; see map)

Discreet is bringing in Culley Bunker, a visual effects artist who will break down a variety of music video projects and explain his process for solving some tough visual effects challenges. Culley is a freelance visual effects artist currently working at Base2. Recent work incudes music videos including Gwen Stefani "What you waiting for", Black eyed peas "Lets get it started", Finger eleven "One Thing", FUSE #1 Video of the year, and the films The Aviator, Spiderman2, Minority Report, and Scooby Doo.

Matt Silverman breaking down some of his commercial work done in After Effects. In addition, he'll be talking a bit about using After Effects and Discreet's Flame together.

There may be one or two more presenters, so keep your eye open for emails Jim Tierney of Digital Anarchy.

Final Cut Macworld meeting


Join the FCPUG Network, The Los Angeles Final Cut Pro User Group and SF Cutters at MacWorld for "the largest gathering of FCP Gurus on the Planet."

Wednesday, January 12, 2005
7:00PM till 10:00PM (doors open 6:00PM)

at the Mezzanine Club
444 Jessie St
(near Powell BART, off 5th South of Market)
San Francisco CA


The guests include Brian Rothschild talking about the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus, a recording studio on wheels; Philip Hodgetts doing multicam FCP; glorious 24p footage from Christopher Jenkins' "el Fandi, A Day in the Life of a Matador" and local Iron Chef of Filmmaking, Jin Joo, talking about Cinemasports (Walter Murch is a
huge fan of Cinemasports). There will also be a sneak preview of the upcoming DVD of the Walter Murch preso at SFCutters.

Seating is first come first serve. Food is free and a cash bar will be available from 6:00PM.

There will be a $5.00 fee at door.

Update: here a boneyard for graphics, so please ignore below!












 
 

January 5, 2005

Update to AE filter summary list

There's an update to the AE filter summary list at:

http://msp.sfsu.edu/Instructors/rey/aepage/aeplugsummary.html.

Please let me know if there are mistakes or other irregularities. Filter News and OSX Compatibility is Dik Baskerville's project, so we'll have to wait for him to resurface for an update.

_________________________________

NOTE


January 4, 2005

Converting between PAL and NTSC in software

The quick and dirty way to convert between PAL and NTSC in AE is posted at Toolfarm.

There are a number of ways to improve upon AE scaling, field interpretation, and frame blending--if you have 3rd party AE plug-ins. Algolith, which sells weekly licenses, has a Format Convert pack for interlacing, scaling, anti-aliasing, noise reduction, and framerate conversion. Their categories indicate places where you could improve conversions if you had Magic Bullet Suite (artifacts, retiming and fields), Fields Kit, Retimer, DA Resizer, and Genarts filters, among others.

There are also a number of more dedicated software tools for standards conversion including: Pure Motion's DV NTSC-PAL Converter, FireStore DV Standards Converter, DVFilm's Atlantis, AVOne Video Converter, Canopus ProCoder, Soreson Squeeze, and others.

If you want to do this in Final Cut, you could use the Graeme Nattress Standards Conversion FCP filter.

Test:

Farhad Manjoo discusses The Great Tech War Of 2012 in which Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon battle for the future of the innovation economy. He doesn't mention the potential of Siri, a new UI technology in the iPhone 4S, though some consider Why Siri Is a Google Killer. Engadget recently compared Siri to its competition in an iPhone review: