an After Effects Portal: April 2012

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 techniques with 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)