After Effects Tips Installment 4 at PVC

Trish & Chris Meyer posted another installment of AE Tips, Installment 4, at PVC. Topics covered include: Expand active panel to fill screen, Floating Panels, Replace Layer Source, Rename and Revert Name, Update Markers from Nested Comp Source.

Other recent tip collections were mentioned earlier in Even more AE quick tips.

Red Giant Warp "3D Tools" project

The inscrutable Mylenium has posted several possibly useful After Effects project files lately, and the latest is Red Giant Warp 3D Tools. He says:

"Since this feature is not implemented yet in Red Giant Warp, some expressions to tie in the Reflection and Shadow effects with After Effects 3D layers might come in handy. Fancy photo frame included."

Update: Mylenium may ponder about donations for "free" stuff but downloading something doesn't mean it's used. A little explanation might help, and maybe even opening posts to commenting for feedback. Or expand the explanations into tutorials -- they'd be good -- and blog on PVC or follow the lead of other 2nd generation AE tutorial authors.

Christiansen on Mocha with RGS Warp

At PVC, Mark Christiansen takes a brief look at After Effects tracking and Corner Pin in Red Giant Warp: Get more out of MochaAE. He notes that today is a 50% off sale on RGS Warp.

This follows previous posts Motion blur for Mocha corner pin data and Mocha for After Effects +Corner Pin thread. Other Mocha tutorials were mentioned here.

Ecosystem for news video supports the experimental

,Beet.TV notes a recent event hosted by YouTube, "Broadcasting the World: The New Ecosystem for News Online," and a panel video from the event embedded below, "Reeling Them In: Building an Audience for News Video." Google may be picky on some level in choosing employees, but they sure fall flat in communications on the handling of video tech (note the aspect ratio on their own stuff).


Beet.TV also posted a nice discussion, along with back story, of Left Behind, an atmospheric five-minute documentary of sorts about poverty in Mumbai by Dai Sugano, a multimedia editor at the San Jose Mercury News.


Update: Cab Drollery adds fun to the already fun comments on an LA Times opinion column asking for an antitrust exemption for an extremely concentrated industry that wants to charge for the Web content that it's now giving away. They can charge if they want without government assistance. Since news staff has been cut for decades now (to keep profits at around 20% until recently), are most newspapers really producing good content or alerting society of problems? Even the "papers of record" need independent bloggers as watchdogs to unknot the spin. In calmer waters, Walter Isaacson has an idea for a standardized micropayment system (a la iTunes) over at The Huffington Post and Time magazine.

Update: Slate notes that iTunes really just sells iPods and 95% of us want free songs in Micro Economics: Why Steve Jobs and micropayments won't save the media.

YouTube's January Fair Use Massacre

Watching TV Online notes YouTube's January Fair Use Massacre from Electronic Frontier Foundation, which notes that YouTube's automated copyright filtering system ("Content ID tool") even censors teenagers singing "Winter Wonderland."

Also, from the cloud, the Wall Street Journal talks about "transformative" vs. "just stealing" in Color This Area of the Law Gray. Other recent news items in copyright and fair use were posted here.

Turbulence 2D: a filter for After Effects

Turbulence.2D, from Jawset Visual Computing, brings fluid dynamics to After Effects, with 7 channels of video input, one texture coordinate channel, and numerous other controls to help create organic textures, animations and typographic effects. You can find samples in their gallery, more about features, and a demo version at Jawset.

A similar filter in public alpha testing from the same company was mentioned last year in AE smoke filter(s) in alpha.

Update: BTW, there was similar filter Fluid Dynamics filter from Electrocolor that was released for AE 7.0/CS3. And Kevin Goldsmith noted that David Lenaerts has created a smoke/fluids simulation in Pixel Bender utilizing 49 Pixel Bender kernels per frame; he's giving out the source code.

'Capitu' titles on Motionographer

Motionographer has a nice piece on the Dada decollage title sequence for a Brazilian TV miniseries called Capitu. It might be best to view the the title sequence to Capitu first, then watch the nice narration-less ‘making of’ video, and then look at a write-up from the creator about the conceptual and aesthetic rationale behind it. They used After Effects but not exactly in the way some may expect.