CMG Hidden Gems: Masks, Stencils, Track Mattes

Chris & Trish Meyer’s series of tips, tricks, gotchas, factoids, and shortcuts continue with tips on Masking, Track Mattes, and Stencils in CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 10 – All About Masking, CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 11 – All About Track Mattes, and CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 12 – Stencils and the “T” (the Transparency switch).

For additional handy info and tutorials, see Track mattes and traveling mattes, Stencil modes, and Preserve underlying transparency in After Effects Help and The return of the Set Matte filter at AE Portal.

If you don't know already, check out the tip on hitting the Arrow keys while drawing Rounded Rect mask or Polygon/Star shapes. For some handy info, see the sections on creating and working with masks in After Effects Help, and posts tagged mask at AE Portal.

Blending Modes: CMG Hidden Gems + more

Chris & Trish Meyer's series of tips, tricks, gotchas, factoids, and shortcuts continues with tips on layers in CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 9 – Blending Modes.

This edition has a video tip on tinting with solids or gradients and modes.

There's other details on blending modes in AE Help: Work with layer blending modes and Exclude channels from blending, and via the AE team from Motionworks, Blend Modes on Collapsed Layers. And there's additional resources of course:

• Tutorials for Photoshop with good info on modes are numerous. Deke’s Photoshop Top 40, Feature #11: Opacity and Blend Modes (a video overview) is good, and Mastering Photoshop’s Blending Modes by Richard Harrington is succinct (there are others also on Tip Squirrel). Also, Adobe's Julieanne Kost had a series of recent posts on blend modes in Photoshop.

• Chris Meyer also looked at Blend Modes in Adobe Premiere Pro and earlier, Composite Modes in Final Cut Pro.

• Mark Christiansen has a tip on Linear Blending at Any Color Depth in After Effects.

• Subtract and Divide blend modes were added to After Effects CS5; Todd Kopriva noted related tutorials. Ben Rollason showed how to emulate these modes in AE CS4 in Subtract and Divide Blending Modes in AE CS4.

• Here's a sample tutorial on blending modes from After Effects CS5: Learn by Video by Angie Taylor and Todd Kopriva, courtesy of Peachpit (this embed behaves better on Firefox than Chrome):

Blending Modes from 'AE CS5: Learn by Video'

Peachpit posted this sample tutorial from After Effects CS5: Learn by Video, which includes 14 hours of video instruction from instructor Angie Taylor and Adobe Technical Support Lead Todd Kopriva. Todd's description of the package was posted here earlier. BTW, this embed behaves better on Firefox than Chrome.

Blend modes in Premiere Pro & beyond

Chris Meyer looks at Blend Modes in Adobe Premiere Pro. Layer composite modes were added in Premiere CS4, though forever a feature in FCP where layer dupes and mode changes sometimes served as quick & dirty color correction or a soft focus look (with a blur on the top layer). See also Chris' older Composite Modes in Final Cut Pro.

For more, see Blending modes and layer styles in AE Help, AEP posts tagged blend modes, and The Pass Through Blend Mode and others in a series of recent posts on blend modes in Photoshop by Adobe's Julieanne Kost.

There's in-depth treatment of concepts behind blending modes in various Adobe docs, but good practical in-depth info can be found in handy books like Mark Christiansen's Adobe After Effects CS5 Visual Effects and Compositing Studio Techniques and Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects by Chris & Trish Meyer.

Update: Peachpit posted a sample tutorial on blending modes from After Effects CS5: Learn by Video; Todd Kopriva's description of the package was posted here earlier.

Premiere for switchers

Adobe has a big push to attract new users and switchers away Apple. It seems that Adobe has a window until a probable late 2011 update to ProApps (various references), with Steve Jobs messages (calling the next versions "awesome" then apparently downgraded to "great") working on user nerves. But rumors work both ways, with scenarios of Microsoft buying Adobe and Avid, and early switchers taking a longer view and switching back to Final Cut [update: Todd Kopriva noted that this article was based on experience with CS4, though workflow issues might remain even with better XML in CS5].

To lure users, Adobe has posted a video series on Switching to Premiere Pro CS5 with Karl Soule and Kevin Monahan. Monahan, who with Sharon Franklin and others started the first FCP user group (SF Cutters) in 2000 and had been in quality assurance various times at Apple, now has steady work promoting Premiere as Todd Kopriva's replacement on the Adobe Learning Resources team. And as Kevin notes on his blog, there's a 4-Part Premiere Pro & Switcher Series Coming Next Week!

[Update: PVC has a roundup of the recordings in Switching to Adobe Premiere Pro-A 4-part switcher series.]

Here's a sample from the Adobe TV Switcher series from Soule and Monahan, on keyboard shortcuts in Premiere and how to customize the keyboard to make it more familiar for Final Cut Pro users:

Update: here's a nice demo via Karl Soule (he's using Windows, which may explain his amazement about people still using Final Cut),

CS5: Cutting off the Card from Clint Milby on Vimeo.

Update 2: the video above ended up in an article on PVC. Though the title's Premiere = "salvation" is over-the-top, Karl Soule added these comments,

"There still are some effects that require rendering, and Clint uses some of these effects in his video. However, the following effects DON’T require any rendering in a properly configured system:

Positioning
Scaling
Opacity
Blending Modes (including 25 blending modes from Photoshop)
Fast Color Corrector
Three-Way Color Corrector
RGB Color Corrector
RGB Curves
Gaussian Blur
Sharpen
Color Balance
Gamma Correction
Ultra Key (Chroma Keying)
multiple Garbage Matte Effects
Track Matte
Noise
Basic 3D
Drop Shadow
Crop
Edge Feather
Dissolves
Dip to color effects
Levels

This isn’t a full list, but should give you some idea of the effects that are real-time, and don’t require rendering.Now, what is a “properly configured system”? It just means that the system has a recommended graphics card, like a $300 GTX 470 card. These effects are all GPU-accelerated, and won’t give the “red bar” on the timeline."

Update 3: maybe someday a Premiere fan will get a rebuttal from an Avid user, like the posts by FCP fans; see Dylan Reeve on What IS the big deal about FCP?

Premultiplication + Subtract and Divide modes explained

Ben Rollason posted new After Effects tutorial videos on Creative Cow: Lens Flare in AE and Premultiplication Explained and Subtract and Divide Blending Modes in AE CS4:

"Ben suggests that now that people are creating new CS5 projects with built-in subtract and divide blending modes, there may be a call to 'retrofit' these options to earlier versions. [He also explains] how compositing applications create a composite" so you can control premultiplication and predivison manually if needed.

XML workflow between Final Cut and Premiere CS5 + FCExpress

Joost van der Hoeven of Animotion posted a video overview of the new Premiere CS5 feature Exchange between Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro CS5.

"With CS4, Adobe added XML import capabilities in Premiere Pro. In CS5 they have now also added XML export, making basic round tripping possible between Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro [and Avid]. In this tutorial I give an overview of how to exchange projects between Adobe Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut Pro. ... But the supported options for motion graphics are very limited."
Read more...

Exact information on supported effects, transitions, composite modes, etc. for FCP exchange can be found in Premiere Pro Help. Also, feature overviews on open workflows with Final Cut and Avid software are on the main product page (Avid exchange is with AAF sequences + OMF export). Here's Joost:

Premiere Pro CS5 and Final Cut Pro Exchange from animotion on Vimeo.

Update: in a Comment below the fold, Joost also found that XML from Premiere Pro CS5 imported into Final Cut Express 4.

New AE color correction effects and blending modes

Todd Kopriva posted on the Color correction effects and blending modes new in After Effects CS5. Todd lists a few references for CS5 additions of three new CC effects from Photoshop -- Black & White, Vibrance, and Selective Color -- and two new blending modes -- Divide and Subtract.

If you've followed up on earlier posts on Lynda.com tutorials, you're set. If not Lynda.com offers free 24-hour pass to their Online Training Library that would easily cover the 4 hours of tutorials by Mark Christiansen and by Chris Meyer. Of course, the Lynda brand has plenty of membership options for reviewing all 12 new CS5 courses now in the Online Training Library.

log2lin and lin2log in Photoshop

Brendan Bolles of fnord software posted log2lin and lin2log in Photoshop; here's an excerpt:

"For the record, you're not crazy if your have a 32-bit linear workflow but want to paint in log space. For one thing, many of Photoshop's tools aren't available in 32-bit (hello, Curves?!?). And some of the tools that are in 32-bit have not been appropriately tweaked for linear (I'm looking at you, Levels). Finally, if you have some film preview profiles, Photoshop can't use them in 32-bit mode like After Effects can.

So by painting in Log, you 1) reclaim some of your favorite tools, 2) can use film preview profiles, and 3) can still paint overbrights because 100% white in log space maps to 13.52 in linear. But be careful! Realize that layers will composite in Log space differently than in linear space, especially if you have soft feathered edges or use transfer modes such as Screen. If you flatten your layers before converting to 32-bit this won't be a problem, but if you need the layers to be separate, make sure you test everything first."

Composite Modes in Final Cut Pro -- and Premiere!

Chris Meyer discusses Composite Modes in Final Cut Pro at PVC, and now Premiere users can use the same ideas with Premiere CS4. As usual Chris adds related extras in sidebars on each page.

In Premiere, Modes aren't found in the Timeline but hidden inside the Opacity section of clip panel Effect Controls. For basics, there a video from Frank McMahon at Layers. There's also an AdobeTV video that explains the larger context of Premiere CS4 enhancements to Photoshop file handling.

Using Modes can help you make a quick & dirty color correction by playing with different modes and opacity of a duplicate on top of the original clip, or help you add a filmic glow by adding a blur to the mix on the top dupe. Learning in other apps can now be leveraged with synergy in Premiere; there's also a blending mode reference and a gallery in After Effects Help, and a video on blend modes in Photoshop is on Adobe Video Workshop.

Update: see the later CMG post, FCP Overlay Issue, since it seems there is a bug in the way Final Cut Pro handles the Overlay composite mode.

Free Glow filter training by CyberMotion

Studio Daily and Toolfarm are both selling online AE training modules by well-known After Effects experts Chris and Trish Meyer of CyberMotion that "are designed to jump-start your creativity as well as quickly get you up to speed on important technical aspects of motion graphics and video. These are not just paint-by-numbers recipes; Chris and Trish make sure you have a deeper understanding of the underlying concepts so that you can easily modify the techniques to your own projects."

So far there is a Technical Track (Understanding Fields & Interlacing, Working With 3:2 Pulldown) and a Motion Graphics Project Studio track (Learning the Glow Plug-in, Creating that "Instant Sex" Look with composite modes, Lighting Tricks, Hot Looks Using Floating Point). The 2 movies on the Glow filter are free.

Blend Modes on Collapsed Layers

from Motionworks:
"Have you ever been annoyed by not being able to apply a blend mode to a collapsed layer? ...[Here's a workaround:]

Apply an effect to the collapsed precomp (this can be something like EFFECTS > EXPRESSION CONTROLS > ANGLE CONTROL that does nothing) and the blend mode popup will become active again."

AE is part of Shake

AE for Shake is a full package of macros for Shake to mimic the 124 effects and 30 blend modes of After Effects within Shake. For now up to 124 effects and 30 blend modes are supported. The User Interface is exactly the same in After Effects and Shake which allows a very fast transition between the two packages.