SF Cutters: Tues July 21 at Delancey Street

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

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

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.

Update: DaveS clarifies, "IIRC, option-L (¬) has always been mac-only, ~ win-only, and () works on both."

Trapcode Particular 2 released + 6 tutorials

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 ... and later, Creating a Crowd Scene with Particular 2 with Harry Frank.

Update 2: These are the 6 tutorials... 3 by Peder Norrby, Aharon Rabinowitz at AENY, Maltaannon's Particular 2: Overview, and Creating a Crowd Scene with Particular 2 with Harry Frank.

Concentric Rings Projects

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

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

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.