Effects A-Z tip: Card Wipe

From here, life goes on at PVC...

The After Effects: Effects A-Z tip series from Motionworks continues with guest host James Zwadlo demoing the Card Wipe transition effect in After Effects.  Card Wipe (AE Help) and Matrix (from AE Scripts) are both easier to use than the Card Dance effect.

Update: here's the latest ones available in the series...

• The CC Flo Motion Effect January 30, 2012
• The Channel Blur Effect December 10, 2011 by maltaannon
• The Change Color Effect October 24, 2011 by Jack Grundy
• The Cell Pattern Effect October 8, 2011 by John Dickinson (makes rocks!)
• The Caustics Effect October 5, 2011 by Eran Stern
• The Cartoon Effect August 16, 2011 by Zola
• The CC Bender and Bend It Effects July 5, 2011 by Quba Michalski

Here's the list of previous posts on the Effects A-Z tip series from Motionworks.

Effects A-Z tip series: recent episodes

Note: see AE's CycoreFX CC filters inside Premiere Pro CS5 to see what works in Premiere. These filters were tested further and discussed in new Premiere training from Eran Stern, released in Feb 2011.

Here's the posts on entire Effects A-Z tip series from Motionworks.

These are the recent ones, posted at PVC:

The After Effects: Effects A-Z tip series from Motionworks continues with guest host Maltaannon demoing the 4-Color Gradient effect that ships with After Effects...  PVC

The After Effects: Effects A-Z tip series from Motionworks continues with guest host James Zwadlo on the CC Bubbles effect that ships with After Effects...   PVC


The After Effects: Effects A-Z tip series from Motionworks continues with guest host Eran Stern on the CC Blobbylize effect that ships with After Effects. Eran has two sections in this quicktip...   PVC


The After Effects: Effects A-Z tip series from Motionworks continues with guest host Adam Everett on the CC Ball Action effect that ships with After Effects. Beyond the basics he shows the Brightness Twist control, an old favorite that can make things interesting effects and how to create an easy but realistic displacement map for text...   PVC

After Effects A-Z: Brush Strokes

Motionworks' tour of built-in AE filters continues with the Brush Strokes effect with John Dickinson:

"After Effects’ Brush Strokes effect could easily be written off as a cheesy oil painting-style effect, but under the hood it has loads more potential."

The filter is much the same in Premiere Pro.

After Effects A-Z: Brightness & Contrast

Motionworks' tour of built-in AE filters continues with a few words on the Brightness & Contrast effect (AE Help) with guest presenter Topher Welsh.

Beyond that we can note that in Photoshop, Brightness & Contrast is much improved, though those improvements haven't trickled down to Afters Effects and Premiere. In AE the effect even seems different than the Legacy option in Photoshop, thought it hardly matters since you're better off with Levels or Curves anyway. For a good illustrative look at limitations (using the waveform levels monitor in Premiere), see Color Correction 1: Brightness & Contrast by Andrew Devis.

For an in-depth intro to controlling color in AE with the standard Adobe tools, see Adobe After Effects CS5 Visual Effects and Compositing Studio Techniques by Mark Christiansen. It's really the best place to learn how to use these tools in AE, and builds the foundations for mastering procedural mattes for compositing.

If you need a free option, happily there's videos at Lynda.com from Photoshop CS4 One-on-One: Advanced by Deke McClelland, with a whole section that covers the basics of Level, Curves, and related effects in detail. See also the free infographics Levels Quick Reference Guide (thanks for the picture) and Curves Quick Reference Guide by John Dickinson, as well as some useful tutorials at Cambridge in Colour.

To go a bit deeper see AE Portal references Waveform, vectorscope, and basic color correction and White balance + more with Color Finesse.

Blurs: Effects A-Z & Beyond

Motionworks has a new quicktip, Effects A-Z: Box Blur.

Host John Dickinson leverages A Tale of Three Blurs, a Prolost article from 2006, to illustrate the key differences between Box Blur, Fast Blur, and Gaussian Blur.

Here's a few more resources to explore blurs further:

• Chris and Trish Meyer have 17 movies on feature pro & cons of the Blur filter category in their Lynda.com series After Effects: Insight into Effects. Lynda.com has various free trial offers if you want to dig in.
• Motionworks previously posted on the Bilateral Blur filter, with guest host Eran Stern demonstrating Bilateral Blur.
• AE Help, of course, and posts tagged blur on AE Portal, where you can also survey previous tutorials in the A-Z series.
• Premiere actually has a Convolution Kernel effect with a 3x3 matrix if you miss KPT Convolver and want to roll your own blur, emboss, sharpen, etc.
• See FreshDV for Specular Highlights and Bokeh Primer(s). Andrew Kramer fanatics already know about the Lens Blur filter from the old tutorial 15. 2D Depth of Field. Virtual Cinematography in After Effects 7.0 is an excerpt on some blurs from the great book on AE by Mark Christiansen.
• Less exact than Motionworks' quicktip but branching to other territory is Blur 100: Introduction to Blurs, a video by Vfx Hauiku. He doesn't talk about Frischluft Lenscare, an AE filter used by many power users, but he does discuss related filters in Eyeon Fusion (see the AEtuts intro).

Blur 100: Introduction to Blurs from Kert Gartner on Vimeo.

'Effects A-Z' returns with the Blend Effect

Effects A-Z: The Blend Effect is new 3 minute tip on Motionworks. There's more on this filter for animating blends in AE Help.

It's nice to see the series continue; previous tutorials in the series are listed on AE Portal.

By the way, Chris & Trish Meyer have a similar series behind the wall at Lynda.com, except it ran though filters by Effect category (as in the Effect Menu). Chad Perkins also had a similar treatment in his Lynda.com 2008 series After Effects CS3 Effects.

Update: Crish Design noted on Facebook, "What the Blend effect is even better for is when the footage does not fill the frame - in other words, crossfading between two layers with unusual alphas without having an opacity dip in the middle of the crossfade. ..." And later John added some clarification to the original post.

Motionworks Effects A-Z: Bezier Warp

Motionworks' tour of built-in AE filters continues with the old Bezier Warp filter, which "shapes an image using a closed Bezier curve along the boundary of a layer. The curve consists of four segments. Each segment has three points (a vertex and two tangents)."

See also AE Help and Andrew Kramer's video tutorial Moving 3D Lines.

Chris & Trish Meyer have a similar series behind the wall at Lynda.com, except it is running though filters by Effect category (as in the Effect Menu). Chad Perkins had a similar treatment in his Lynda.com 2008 series After Effects CS3 Effects.

Effects A-Z: the Bulge filter with Eran Stern

Motionworks' sorta weekly tour of built-in AE filters continues onto the Bulge filter, with guest host Eran Stern demonstrating the Bulge filter.

Chris & Trish Meyer have a similar series on Lynda.com, except it is running though filters by Effect category (as in the Effect Menu). Chad Perkins had a similar treatment in his Lynda.com 2008 series After Effects CS3 Effects.

Effects A-Z: Bilateral Blur with Eran Stern

Motionworks' sorta weekly tour of built-in AE filters continues onto the Bilateral Blur filter, with guest host Eran Stern demonstrating Bilateral Blur.

Effects A-Z: Bevel with Topher Welsh

Motionworks' sorta weekly tour of built-in AE filters continues onto the Bevel filters, with guest host Topher Welsh demonstrating Bevel Alpha and Bevel Edges.

Chris & Trish Meyer have a similar series on Lynda.com, except it is running though filters by Effect category (as in the Effect Menu). Chad Perkins had a similar treatment in his Lynda.com 2008 series After Effects CS3 Effects.

Effects A-Z: Beam with John Dickinson

Motionworks' sorta weekly tour of built-in AE filters continues with the Beam filter, explained nicely by host John Dickinson.

He even managed to avoid much discussion of a lightsaber effect with the Beam filter, once so popular that it drew birds of a feather into its orbit -- Andrew Kramer (2006) and Mark Christiansen (but with alternative methods noted).

Effects A-Z: Audio Spectrum with Maltaannon

Motionworks' sorta weekly tour of built-in AE filters continues with Audio Spectrum, explained by Maltaannon, who in a previous episode presented Audio Waveform. See also Satya Meka's recent tutorial The Best Sound You’ll Ever See!

Chris & Trish Meyer have a similar series on Lynda.com, except it is running though filters by Effect category (as in the Effect Menu). Chad Perkins had a similar treatment in his Lynda.com 2008 series After Effects CS3 Effects.

Effects A-Z: CC Time Blend FX with Brian Maffitt

Motionworks' sorta weekly tour of built-in AE filters continues with CC Time Blend FX with Brian Maffitt. This is nostalgia that still informs:

"CC Time Blend FX was originally published as part of the Final Effects plug-in set, but is now included in After Effects as one of the Cycore (CC) plug-ins. In his recent Unplugged interview, Total Training founder and After Effects legend Brian Maffitt discusses the Total FE (Final Effects) training series and how he used Time Blend FX to make realistic smoke and plasma [before Spawn's Violator]. It’s my privilege to tell you that Brian has given Motionworks permission to host the Time Blend FX tutorial. It’s over 10 years old (the After Effects was black and white back then) but is still amazingly useful. Special thanks to Carey Dissmore for transcoding from tape."

Effects A-Z: 'Auto' Effects

Motionworks' sorta weekly tour of built-in AE filters continues with the Auto Color, Auto Contrast, and Auto Levels filters; see Effects A-Z: Auto Effects with guest Topher Welsh.

Chris & Trish Meyer have a similar series on Lynda.com, except it is running though filters by Effect category (as in the Effect Menu). Chad Perkins had a similar treatment in his Lynda.com 2008 series After Effects CS3 Effects.

Effects A-Z: Audio Waveform

Motionworks' sorta weekly tour of built-in AE filters continues with the Audio Waveform filter; see Effects A-Z: Audio Waveform with guest Maltaannon.

Motionworks Effects A-Z: Arithmetic

Motionworks' sorta weekly tour of built-in AE filters continues with the Arithmetic filter; see Effects A-Z: Arithmetic with guest Harry Frank of Graymachine.

Chad Perkins has a similar treatment on Lynda.com. This effect goes back to the earliest days of After Effects when Photoshop didn't have layers & dinosaurs ruled with the Calculations command, when transfer modes were anyone's game, and VideoFusion seemed easier.

Effects A-Z: the Angle Control filter

Motionworks' sorta weekly tour of built-in AE filters continues with guest presenter Maltaannon who explains some techniques for using the Angle Control effect with basic expressions. See Effects A-Z: Angle Control.

Effects A to Z: Alpha Levels

Motionworks' sorta weekly tour of built-in AE filters continues with the Alpha Levels filter; see Effects A to Z – Alpha Levels with guest Topher Welsh.

Chris & Trish Meyer have a similar series on Lynda.com, except it is running though filters by Effect category (as in the Effect Menu).

Effects A to Z weekly: Advanced Lightning

Motionworks' weekly tour of built-in AE filters continues to Advanced Lightning; see Effects A to Z – Advanced Lightning with guest Eran Stern.

Motionworks: Effects A to Z weekly tour

Motionworks is starting an extended series of whirlwind tours to uncover essential details of every default effect that ships with Adobe After Effects. This week's fateful trip starts with the Add Grain effect.

Chris & Trish Meyer have a similar series on Lynda.com.