AE & Motion apprentice text + 3D spiral text

Chris and Trish Meyer have posted After Effects Apprentice Video Tutorial #4: Animating text in After Effects, which follows on #3 which introduced text in AE. In this video, they "show how to master Text Animators, including Range Selectors, the secret to creating cascading animations, and more."

This follows yesterday's meaty post by Trish Meyer, Animating Text in Apple’s Motion: A primer for After Effects artists.

Also, older but fun is text in a 3D spiral, pictured above, from 3D Type QuickTip by Ko Maruyama, which is reminiscent of a very old tutorial by Brian Maffitt.

Christiansen's 30 April tips starts: BG Renderer

Mark Christiansen is posting 30 tips on PVC in April!

He says, "No matter what is happening in the world around you, that sense of knowing your own value, of what it was important for you to do, helps you to keep doing more of it." That could be, but many people should do something different -- we might need it -- after all this world is no paradise.

Mark's 1st tip is Render Faster & Smarter in After Effects with BG Renderer: This free script will add tons of value to your multiprocessor system.

AE 3D Earths with & without 'Knowing' lava

There are several tutorials to help you start to construct a rotating 3D Earth in After Effects, but do you know which direction to spin things to avoid the Sun rising from the West?

With Knowing Earth, MaxAfter gives you the project and a good start how to make lava cracks and falling particles similar to a shot in the current movie Knowing. (Quick tangent: see The Nicolas Cage Movie Plot Generator.)

If you want your Earth a bit more refined, Creative Cow has a tutorial that you can peruse, Creating a Realistic 3d Earth using only AE. In this video tutorial, Michael Park uses only effects built into After Effects: "Special attention will be given to combining multiple instances of the CC Sphere effect to create unique layers with different specular properties for the land and water masses, as well as creating lights from urban centers on the night side of the earth."

Maltaannon is also in the ring of 3D Earth tutorials with the variously titled Advanced 3D Planets / 3D Solar System. He planned to create a scaled solar system in 3D that you could fly through, so the 3D Earth tutorial might be just a small piece of the bigger project.

Of course there are several more. Jonas Hummelstrand (with map and texture links), The Genesis Project (with help from Aharon Rabinowitz), and Andrew Kramer also have planet Earth tutorials with projects. Kramer's Video Copilot crew has a variety of planet and related tutorials with projects. You may even find out something new in the old Total Training teaser Globe Grid. Earth zooms are also popular, and tutorials are provided by Video Copilot and Digital Arts.

There's also a tutorial for Apple Motion from Timesaver Tutorials for those stuck in a Final Cut Studio world, Rotating Earth. There are many more of these sorts of tutorials, even by NASA (in AE) using their own images, and some for Google Earth Pro.

You can even do 3D earths in Photshop CS4 Extended. Russell Brown CS4 shows how using real 3D objects (download textures here) in a more advanced tutorial he called Advanced 3D Eclipse Animation.

Most of the projects include textures but there are alternatives. Ever-popular Earth textures (various strings attached) can be found at JHT's Planetary Pixel Emporium (with C4D tutorials), Unearthed Outdoors True Marble-free version, and NASA's Blue Marble Next Generation.

Update: VideoCopilot has a tutorial similar to the one by MaxAfter, Dead Planet, as well as a calmer The Blue Planet in 3D.

Update 2: More earthy textures.

MSM calls Hollywood pot black

HDFilmtools and Chris Meyer noted the troubles in the LA in Mainstream Media Calling Hollywood on its Obsolete Business Model and Circling Around the Drain, while AdAge puts it in the larger context of troubles in most all media segments. See Future May Be Brighter, but It's Apocalypse Now, which starts off with a bang:

'Chicken Little, don your hardhat. Nudged by recession, doom has arrived. The toll will be so vast -- and the institutions of media and marketing are so central to our economy, our culture, our democracy and our very selves -- that it's easy to fantasize about some miraculous preserver of "reach" dangling just out of reach. We need "mass," so mass, therefore, must survive. Alas, economies are unsentimental and denial unproductive. The post-advertising age is under way. This isn't about the end of commerce or the end of marketing or news or entertainment. All of the above are finding new expressions online, and in time will flourish thanks to the very digital revolution that is now ravaging them. The future is bright. But the present is apocalyptic. Any hope for a seamless transition -- or any transition at all -- from mass media and marketing to micro media and marketing are absurd. The sky is falling, the frog in the pot has come to a boil and, oh yeah, we are, most of us, exquisitely, irretrievably f*#$ed [bleep].'

Ad Age seems surprised even though the writing on the wall could be seen for quite awhile. The news business has led the way down; see how it's faring at these websites: Mediashift, News Videographer, Andy Dickinson, Advancing the Story, Ricochet by Chrys Wu, Poynter Institute. And Recovering Journalist recommends a recent Clay Shirky essay and articles in Editor & Publisher that write critically about the newspaper industry's titans and the various alternative business models now proposed.

Creative Suite One Laptop Per Child +UltraDuck

from J.C. Burns:

"Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ABDE) today announced the Creative Suite CSOLPC® product family, a breakthrough release of the industry-leading design and development software optimized for the One Laptop Per Child XO machine, running a version of the Linux-based operating system with the distinctive Sugar GUI. The release will, for the first time, enable entire villages of small children to use After Effects and Photoshop on a computer they understand and use everyday—the OLPC XO—to make a creative contribution to the world by taking on the ever-growing number of film and video industry projects that require rotoscoping, motion tracking, color retouching, and wire removal.

... Once entire villages of children have activated the software over the convenient XO wireless mesh network, they will begin to receive 2K and 4K film frames to rotoscope and retouch using the After Effects application, which will break the large frames up into dozens of small tiles optimized for the child’s XO and attention requirements. The finished frame will be then reassembled and sent back to a central server in San Jose, where it will be securely returned to the film or video studio who requested the job. The process is seamless and transparent on both ends."

There's more of this April 1st "press release" at Positively Atlanta.

Update: Be sure to catch the new hotswappable drive technology UltraDuck, just pre-announced. The yellow one is a prototype that may be seen (but not touched) in Las Vegas.

RED Post – an Easy Way

In RED Post – the Easy Way Oliver Peters gives you an overview from the perspective of an editor on 2 recent commercials.

Oliver also links to the recent outline of RED post production paths by RED's Ted Schilowitz, Simple Post Production Options for RED ONE. Ted demonstrated Shooting with the RED ONE Digital Cinema Camera in a movie posted last October on MacVideo. For a bit of a reality check, see Matthew Jeppsen's On Set with Red: A Weary AC’s Rant.

Similar tips were by posted last week by Mark Christiansen in 5 Tips to Maintain Sanity in RED Post; more RED info can be found through these posts.

Update: There's a thread on Oliver's article on FinalCutPro-L.

Update 2: Mark Christiansen has another tip, Apply Color Adjustments to RED QuickTimes, for when colors are not quite right working natively with QuickTime files linked to R3D files.

More metadata, search, yada yada

Metadata and metrics may be the talk of the town but "discovery" (search results) seems important when housewives can't find shows and times using digital cable and the web. Maybe Google will make even more in ad money from the confusion. Debra Kaufman at Studio Daily has a report from the recent Future of Television conference in Hollywood. Here's an excerpt from her Online Video: Room to Grow:

'At the Future of Television conference in Hollywood, a group of panelists debated the global opportunities and challenges of distributing and monetizing online video. ...Online video has become a huge commodity, and these experts discussed the obstacles they currently face to make it bigger than ever. Metrics and metadata were two of the most talked-about issues.

... The moderator pointed out that metadata also has its complications. “If you buy something in the US, my metadata will be in English but it might have to go to a German audience,” he said. “How do I cope with this complexity in international distribution?” Metz said that “as an entertainment metadata company, Macrovision has been researching how to take metadata, prioritize markets and translate.” She revealed that the company is already partnering with a provider in Japan, but she notes that key to the issue is starting with quality data. “At the end of the day, the data without the guide is irrelevant,” she said. “We’re looking at how you look ahead to what the market needs worldwide and create enough depth to facilitate search and discovery.”'

Additional perspectives can be found in an AEP post, Metadata, search, analytics & monetization, and in other posts.