Kinetic type in After Effects @ PVC

Kinetic type may have reached it peak a few years ago, but there are many handy resources for After Effects users if the need arises.

Read the rest in Kinetic type in After Effects at Pro Video Coalition.

Kinetic typography as storytelling

Type in motion is increasing popular, as seen in Kinetic typography as a storytelling technique a new survey by Lauren M. Rabaino at the journalism blog 10,000 Words...

Read the rest in Kinetic type in After Effects at Pro Video Coalition.

Recently in After Effects

CS6 dominates news, but there were still new scripts and a plug-in, and assorted tutorials... @ PVC.

Note: the roundup is replicated here as a backup...


Here’s another summary of the last few weeks or so of news on After Effects— this time CS6 dominates, but there were still new scripts and a plug-in, and assorted tutorials.

AEMap from AE Scripts "creates equirectangular projection maps with 286 separate countries (masks on solids) under 177 jurisdictions (pre-comps). It comes with the 'AEMap Utilities' which contains tools for dealing with a bunch of layers and nested comps." The elements are "continuously rasterized" so they may work in CS6 extrusion and ray-tracing.

cm_Barndoors, new from AE Scripts, lets you "apply a set of barndoors to existing lights, or create a new light with barndoors attached. Each set of barndoors gets a Grip layer that gives you control over each barndoor’s rotation, the entire barndoor assembly rotation and the softness of the barndoor shadows."

Dark Energy for Adobe After Effects is a new Windows-only plug-in that features de-noise and film simulation modules for images up to 1920×1080. It's sold now at a pre-release pricing. Some of these features,  leveraged using Nvidia GPUs, are available in the plug-in:

Paul Conigliaro posted Kill AE, an extension for Alfred app users on OS X; it's similar to other utilities like AE Suicide-After Effects Crash Recovery, ToeJam, and the OS X Terminal method described by Mark Christiansen that saves the project even when AE is frozen.

James Zanoni shows background and multiple machine rendering with AERender, droplet for OS X, in Terminal (command line on the Mac) in After Effects. In reality, that droplet just uses aerender, the executable program in the same folder as the After Effects app that has a command-line interface with which you can automate rendering. You can find details in Automating rendering with aerender in AE Help, and in Background rendering with After Effects . If you want an interface that leverages aerender, see BG Renderer, a script with UI at AE Scripts. Here's James Zanoni:

Trent Armstrong posted an article called Auto-Typing for Expressions, which discusses how he uses auto-typing apps to store and access commonly used expressions. In an article at .net.com, Kinetic typography techniqueswith After Effects, Angie Taylor shows how to use Photoshop and Adobe After Effects for kinetic typography - combining text and motion to express ideas in the form of animation. For background, see Kinetic typography as storytelling; here's the intro for Angie's series on the subject:

In An A to Z of Building Projections - Part 2, Chris Zwar "takes a detailed look at the After Effects workflow used to create the animations for the Melbourne projections, and how the ZBorn Toy and Freeform plug-ins were used." Here's the performance itself:

In a recent trailer for Ridley Scott’s new film Prometheus, we got a peak of some laser-like sweeper technology; now in Episode 76: Promethe-esque Security Sweeper, Seth Worley shows you how to create your own:

EditingWhiz posted Fixing Bad Chroma Key Using Colorista 2:

VinhSon Nguyen posted Planet Space Scene in After Effects and Understanding & Creating Bevels Using ShapeShifter for After Effects on CreativeDojo:

Automatic Lip Synch Of Cartoon Mouths (Papagayo to After Effects) " is a short video to demonstrate the new Adobe After Effects javascript... This javascript reads the MOHO.dat file format, generated by the open source Papagayo software." Another approach by iaian7 using Papagayo was mentioned earlier in the roundup Lip Sync in After Effects. Atom on Vimeo describes his new script:

Quick Tip – Using A Delay Expression by Matas Zaloga "shows how to animate multiple layers by using expressions":

The new features of After Effects CS6 (ships with same version as AE CS 5.5) also include changes concerning mocha, disabling launching Mocha from AE. Mamoworld details the advantages of using MochaImport+ in MochaImport+ and CS6. Here's the basics of this recently updated script:

Creative Suite 6 up to launch

Adobe has announced almost all of CS6 Production Premium (except for Illustrator), and there's a boatload of previews and other resources on the product reveal page for NAB. The full story will be unveiled on Monday April 23 at the Adobe Creative Cloud and Creative Suite 6 Launch.

As usual, Todd Kopriva has detailed "what’s new and changed" for the CS6 versions of After Effects (Global Performance Cache, 3D Camera Tracker, ray-traced extruded text and shapes, variable-width mask feather, new Cycore (CC) effects + more) and Premiere (revised UI & trimming, OpenCL, monitoring, extended multi-cam + more). Colin Stefani did the same for Audition. Photoshop CS6 resources were covered earlier in Photoshop CS6: public beta resources.

You can continue to look to Adobe blogs and AdobeTV for further feature summaries and links to new tutorials. Among many reviews, see particularly the in-depth After Effects CS6 (P)Review by Chris and Trish Meyer.

 Here's a few good overviews of the new offerings, including A Deep Dive into What's New in After Effects CS6 with AE product manager Steve Forde, a nice quick look of new stuff in AE from Angie Taylor, Adobe Production Premium CS6 by Jon Carr from the team of Vincent Laforet, and Adobe Premiere CS6 New Features from FreshDV:

Essential in-depth videos are already available at Video2brain (free) and at Lynda.com (check out the free 7-day trial for fans of Chris and Trish Meyer). Here are some samples: After Effects CS6 New Features by Chris Meyer:

After Effects CS6: New Features Workshop by Todd Kopriva

Premiere Pro CS6 New Features by Richard Harrington

Premiere Pro CS6: New Features Workshop by Todd Kopriva

Nvidia posted a cluster of web pages and demo movies on CS6 acceleration. They want to sell the better graphics cards, but like CUDA and Premiere (which added support for certain OpenCL cards on the Mac), After Effects lets you edit the ray-trace supported preference file to test unsupported setups. Another source of acceleration could be Fusion ioFX, a PCI-type card that extends RAM instead of speeding the disk subsystem like SSD, which could complement AE's new cache system [as could Intel’s SSD 910; see Finally a PCIe SSD from Intel]. For more on that see Steve Forde's Steve, Rob, Vince and Me and some event highlights, plus a good talk with Fxguide (at 1:06:00):

In another development, former AE product manager Michael Coleman @motiongfx (now product manager for Video Editing Workflows) is working on a new product or feature which was demoed at NAB: "Our collaborative editing demo shows two people in two cities editing the same 1080p footage without proxies file transfers." See also Levels Beyond Extends Functionality of its Reach Engine Solution with Adobe Premiere Pro Software for Highly Efficient Content Management on a plug-in, called Reach Engine Access, is compatible with Premiere CS5.5 and CS6.

There's also a growing number of other great tutorials and reviews that were listed AE CS6 and Production Premium Revealed [updated] when you want to dig deeper. Here's few with unique video: MotionBoutique shared several experiments with Newton's physics and the ray tracer in AE CS6:

Peter Salvia and Steve Crouch introduce SpeedGrade CS6 in FCProse Ep6 - FCP to SpeedGrade via Premiere CS6 (from Red Scarlet at 4K, transcoded to ProRes LT and cut in FCP 7, to conforming to native RAW .R3D material inside of SpeedGrade CS6 for a full 4K DI finish). Also below is a nice interview with the Speedgrade team by Fxguide.

Adobe's Ron Day posted several articles like Adobe Audition CS6 Multitrack Enhancements and Audio CD Burning in Adobe Audition CS6. Here's the sneak peek Automatic speech alignment in Audition CS6):

Adobe's Dave Helmly added Intro to Premiere Pro, Prelude, and Encore CS6 & Mercury Transmit I/O
 

Here's more that were posted before the official launch:

• Motionworks posted New 3D Features in CS6 and CS6 3D Material Template
• Eran Stern has tutorials on 3D Environment, Shapes & Illustrator, variable-width Mask Feather
• Maltaannon explains After Effects CS6 - 3D Camera Tracking
• Kevin McAuliffe dropped Introducing After Effects CS6 - Extruded Text and Shapes
• Felt Tips has a video on his favorite features and another one just on the new caching system in AE
• Each release can't cover all bases, so there's still mixed feelings for some AE users who recall older feature requests blogs.
• Josh Weiss has 9 tutorials or so at Retooled.net for both After Effects and Premiere Pro CS6 
• At Sectionone, Julio Roa shows the now unlimited Multicam In Premiere Pro CS6
• Scott Simmons considers My top 5 (or so) Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 features
• The Edit Doctor has several insights on what he likes in Premiering Adobe Premiere
• David Basulto shares his screen for Premiere Pro CS6 What's New
• Check out the short interview Philip Bloom tests Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 by Todd Kopriva
• Gary Adcock really likes Speedgrade CS6 - "...truely Native support for raw camera formats, not just RED's R3D, but how about working in native ARRIRAW ( with presets included) from Alexa directly in PPro, and oh yeah, the app that made use of all of that power is now also part of the CS6 Suite of Tools. Speedgrade is here, maybe not for everyone, but certainly for this user, I am glad it is back."
• Digital Convergence Podcast Episode 69 talks about SpeedGrade CS6 and other new stuff from NAB 2012
• Tim Siglin goes hands-on with Adobe's ingest and simple transcoding tool in Adobe Prelude: A Symphony of Pre-Event Options
• Oliver Peters posted Adobe Creative Suite 6 - First Look
• See the FreshDV NAB 2012 Video Coverage Playlist on PVC
• @DPBuZZ has audio with Al Mooney and Steve Forde on Production Premium CS6 and Sean Safreed and Andrew Little & Aharon Rabinowitz of Red Giant
• Digital Cinema Society and Studio Daily added a video interview, Adobe’s Ellen Wixted on CS6 Production Premium
• Richard Harrington discussed the future of Adobe Video with Bill Roberts the Director of Video Product Management for Adobe, as does Post mag
• Overdigital shared Flash-oriented news from NAB in Project Primetime, Protected Mobile Streaming, MPEG-Dash and More (see also Overdigital's 3D Workflow Demo – Lightwave3D to Away3D to AIR 3.2 for iOS)

Shop Vac (kinetic typography animation)

This kinetic typography music video incorporates familiar brand shapes without really stepping on the brands themselves. Adobe people noted it, as it was created using Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere and Toon Boom Animate. A labor of love by Jarrett Heather, it took somewhere between 500-1000 hours to finish.

For tutorials and other examples, see Kinetic typography as storytelling.

Kinetic Text Expressions for AE

Lester Banks notes an animation and expression on Vimeo by Danny D, Kinetic Text Expressions for AE (embedded below). Lester also points out a resource on another source on inertial bounce by Harry Frank (with downloadable presets), and by extension a thread on MoGraph.

Some related resources can be found at Motion Graphics Exchange and in recent posts here on presets and tutorials for gravity and bouncing (without the tweaks for rotation of course) . There's probably more on expression source AEnhancers. Here an example from Danny D:

Kinetic Text Expressions for AE from Danny D on Vimeo.

40+ roundups for After Effects

I was tempted to roundup 100+ tutorials just from Andrew Kramer, but instead here's a roundup of After Effects Portal topic roundups on Pro Video Coalition. Many of them have been updated since their initial release.

1. Easter eggs in After Effects: a new hunt
2. Halftone techniques for After Effects
3. Chromatic aberration: creation and fixes with After Effects
4. Long shadows: adding body to flat design in After Effects
5. Kinetic type in After Effects
6. Fly around CC Sphere in After Effects
7. Optimizing performance in Premiere & After Effects
8. 3D from 2D images: After Effects + beyond 
9. Driving Plates and Composites in Premiere Pro and After Effects 
10. 3D printing in Photoshop CC 
11. Flowchart tools in After Effects 
12. Secondary animation and the principles of animation 
13. Tracking gestures on iOS for After Effects 
14. Circles in After Effects 
15. Spirographs in After Effects
16. Spirals in After Effects
17. Secondary animation and the principles of animation
18. The Ray-traced 3D renderer in After Effects
19. Brainstorm in After Effects
20. User interfaces in the movies and beyond
21. TypeMonkey: a kinetic type tool
22. Fractal Noise in After Effects
23. Typewriter effects in After Effects
24. Headphones: a few resources
25. How to shoot car videos inside & out
26. Whip (swish) pans in After Effects & Premiere
27. HUD and UI graphics in ‘Oblivion’ + titles
28. Slideshows in After Effects
29. Charts and graphs in After Effects
30. Vignettes in Premiere & After Effects
31. Sunbursts or radial rays in After Effects
32. Set Matte: a 32-bpc node for After Effects
33. Volumetric lighting in After Effects
34. The Matrix effect in After Effects
35. Muzzle flashes in After Effects
36. Creating Fire in After Effects
37. Using and creating After Effects scripts
38. Lip Sync in After Effects
39. Remove banding in After Effects
40. The Shatter Effect in After Effects
41. 3D Text in After Effects
42. Lens wacking, free lensing, and light leaks
43. How to Light Wrap
44. LED and Casino light text effects in After Effects
45. Creating snow in After Effects
46. Animate a Photo Mosaic in After Effects
47. Lens Flares in After Effects
48. Seamless edits for jump cuts
49. Adding motion blur in After Effects
50. Light Strokes and Streaks
51. Reflections in After Effects
52. Free Lower Thirds plus Additional Resources
53. Animate a character in After Effects
54. Sky Replacement with After Effects
55. Bleach bypass, cross-process, and other looks for After Effects

Recently in After Effects (crossposted)

Posted last week on AEtuts+. AE Portal continues at PVC...

It has seemed oddly slow in the updated world of After Effects CS 5.5. One bright spot was recent word on Newton: a 2D physics engine for After Effects. But actually there has been much more -- a steady stream of new resources on AEtuts+, ProVideoCoalition, AdobeAE Facebook, and elsewhere.

Adobe is hosting the upcoming Adobe CS5.5 Production Premium Road Show in Los Angeles (June 2), San Francisco (June 14), and New York (June 21). There's also a free one-hour StudioDaily webinar, Power Workflows for Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 on May 26 with Premiere Pro product manager Al Mooney and Tyler Ginter. More relevant webinars are available from FilmmakingWebinars.

The Mac CS5 versions of Zaxwerks ProAnimator and 3D Invigorator are now shipping.

The Mac version of Freeform Pro was also delayed (problem with Apple's old ATI driver). But the Windows version is available (just as I migrate back to the Mac). There are a number of cool tutorials and presets already available, including the Folding Cube Preset by Mylenium. Tutorials include one now in 2 parts (and one more coming) by Tudor Jelescu on how to make 3D tunnels in AE using FreeForm Pro, and another by Ben Griggs on enfolding morphing 3D, Freeform Pro Gener8tor. Here's some example renders from the latter:

FreeForm Pro | 3D Morph | Ben Griggs from mettle on Vimeo.

CMG Hidden Gems: Effects Roundup Bonus by Chris and Trish Meyer features 6 videos on some general concepts and specific effects. They added another today, CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 24 – Compound Effects. Awhile back Shortformvideo noted in AE Quick Tip – Show animation presets that effect presets are hidden by default.

CS5.5 Warp Stabilizer stop motion on SinusDigitalus and After Effects Warp Stabilizer by Tysk älg are both good examples of using this new feature in CS 5.5. For more see Todd Kopriva's outline and especially Chris Meyer's movies.

Greenscreen Quick Tip Video Tutorial by 360 Media considers basics on hair. For more see Greenscreen & keying resources.

Eran Stern has some thoughts beyond EdgeHancer on Delictae Color Correction tools from Fixel.

What is a Look Up Table (LUT), Anyway? is a guest post on Nofilmschool.com by producer/colorist Jay Friesen.

AE Portal @ PVC featured surveys on "looks" in After Effects, recent AE scripts, new basic training sets, text animation, effect demos, moving After Effects plug-ins to CS5.5, and more.

Plexus, the newish After Effects plug-in from Satya Meka and AE Scripts, was revved with 8 new strong features. Here's the feature tour from Satya:

How to make a Cinemagraph with Photoshop and After Effects by Kert Gartner explains how to approach making a popular style of animated GIF.

In Red Giant QuickTip #44: Creating a Rocket Ship Trail of Letters Harry Frank guides you through the set-up and expressions required to emit a paragraph of letters from a moving After Effects layer with Trapcode Particular.

Red Giant QuickTip #41: Adding Life to Interview Footage by Aharon Rabinowitz shows you how to remove noise and add life to interview footage through color correction. The demo is in After Effects, but works for users of Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro (you can substitute filters though perhaps with less favorable or timely results).

VFX on Deadline: Monsters GT and Sapphire for After Effects featuring Marshall Fontaine is a webinar recording from Genarts.

Imagineer Systems mocha for AE CS5.5 is available, See Motion Tracking for Final Cut: iPhone screen replacement using mocha AE and other tutorials, and more on tracking see the AE Portal archive. There's a still role for the tracking feature inside of After Effects, so check out Motion Tracking tutorial by Hakan Zscherpe.

Creating Kinetic Type and Camera Rigs in After Effects (in 3D space) by Lake Keene takes a swing at kinetic type.

3D Extrude Tutorial by Alexander Dohr is a quicktip and expression for creating 3D text in AE. For oodles of similar tutorials, see 3D Text in After Effects at Aetuts+.

Create a Procedural 3D Paint Splat Logo Animation in After Effects (AE 3D text) by Esko Ahonen for Rampant Design Tools can be seen below. See also SplatterType: splatter animations with just a few clicks.

RampanTV Tutorial - Create a Procedural 3D Paint Splat Logo Animation in After Effects from Rampant Design Tools on Vimeo.

Rounding out this collection are some additional resources on stills & video:

Stu Maschwitz was way more than Mostly Coherent on TWIT's Mostly Photo show (in audio and video), which featured talk about shooting stills and video, post-processing, and video gear. Especially worthwhile was the discussion of color contrast and the split-tone controls in Adobe Lightroom.

Marc Lougee asks Shoot your film with an iPhone? and points to a substantial article in the Gamma and Density production journal.

Clay Asbury has some tips for Premiere Pro CS 5.5 - Creating a Custom Keyboard Layout at Vimeo.

Adobe’s Todd Kopriva has several new courses on Premiere and After Effects in the hopper at video2brain. They’ll be publishing a few of these courses as entirely free titles, starting now with What’s New and Changed in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.

TypeMonkey: a kinetic type tool

at PVC is a quick look at TypeMonkey, a new AE script that generates complex kinetic type animations. TypeMonkey takes away some of the drudgery to organizing and animating text, which should let designers have more time to sketch out ideas.

The special 45% off intro price is ending soon -- it lasts until Aug 26, 2013 at aescripts + aeplugins. If you want to give a spin, the trial version has a 7-day limit and allows for a maximum of 10 words.

Video Copilot Optical Flares in review

[update: Toolfarm is having a Video Copilot Sale -- 30% on ALL Video Copilot products Wednesday and Thursday, May 26 & 27, 2010 only.]

Video Copilot has released CS5 compatible versions of their After Effects filters -- free upgrades (OF, others, + update) from the previous versions. The standout among these is Optical Flares, a newer plug-in that leapfrogs longtime industry leader Knoll Lens Flare Pro in interface and features for about 1/3 the price. Here's a demo:



Andrew Kramer and company have taken a page from the Magic Bullet Looks approach to create a powerful and easy-to-use interface. The custom interface offers drawers full of visual presets and detailed control over individual flare elements, as well as a large adjustable preview of the composite or the flare alone. The advanced UI along with GPU acceleration allows users to build, edit, and manage unique and complex lens flares with speed and simplicity.

All of these features and more are built into this one plug-in:

• 3D lens flares with AE Lights
• 2D + 3D occlusion or obscuration
• edge flare-ups
• auto-tracking
• auto-animation
• textures
• matte box

In the latest release for CS5, the preset drawer has been dropped in a favor of an exposed browser panel, but new abilities to rearrange, resize, and toggle window panels are nice. The best way to evaluate Optical Flares yourself is to review the profusion of video intros and tutorials at the Video Copilot website -- there is no eval or trial version. Owners of Optical Flares get access to even more training, so there's no need to purchase extra training. There's also the VideoCopilot Preset Network and filter forums for help and inspiration.

Knoll Lens Flare Pro (which is not available for CS5 until summer 2010) has offered most of the same features with the addition of public beta releases, but without the integrated visual interface. Perhaps KLF's sole remaining advantage is that in addition to the main filters, 19 lens elements are also included for minute control over parameters, though you should be able to get similar control in Optical Flares using presets. For now, Optical Flares is an After Effects-only filter, but it is said that versions for NLEs, Photoshop, Fusion, and Nuke are under consideration.

If you don't have a dedicated lens flare filter, and there are only two in this league, you're in for a treat. Overuse of lens flares is common though -- but with a filter like Optical Flares, you can rise above the common cliche of the Photoshop default (at left). Individual flare elements can be used as the base, as seen almost everywhere, or as elements of design.

Use in more realistic shots may take some extra observation and self-control. Tony Reale recently introduced ideas on using lens flares in edits in his After Effects tutorial Add Anamorphic Lens Flares to Video. There's a lot going on beyond the basics with lighting, camera filters and lenses, etc. and lens flares can become obsessions to avoid, create, or recreate. One good resource for study is a cache of QuickTime movies of real world lens flares by Claudio Miranda.

Another obvious resource is J.J. Abrams' "ridiculous" use of kinetic halos in the latest Star Trek movie (Andrew Kramer did the titles). See various discussions of these mostly in-camera effects done by cinematographer Dan Mindel in Where No DP Has Gone Before at ICG Magazine, and more about ILM custom matching "SunSpot" CG in Back on Trek (Flare Madness) at Millimeter & Star Trek Returns at Post Magazine.

As a sort of an addendum, it's interesting to see how the idea grew for 3D lens flares in After Effects. From at least 2004, there were forum requests for help to go beyond parenting to a 3D layer. AE expression guru Dan Ebberts provided examples at MotionScript and explained a bit more about layer space transforms, which were also discussed by Chris Meyer not long ago at PVC. A few years later Mylenium's Building a Lensflare with Expressions (and Trent Armstrong's Making Light Disappear & Reappear Behind Objects Using Expressions) appeared at Creative Cow. Then in 2009, Andrew Kramer spread the idea further in Lens Flare on 3D Lights? and the race was on to incorporate 3D lens flares into an After Effects filter.

Update: Kevin McAuliffe wrote a substantive review of Optical Flares for ProVideo Coalition.

Update: Johan Romera shared Nuke2AE Optical Flares Gizmo, a Nuke script that corverts 3d data to 2d position to create AE keyframe data for Optical Flares.