Final Cut & editing tips

Oliver Peters has 11 More Final Cut Pro Tips, in addition to his earlier Ten Tips For A Better Final Cut Pro Experience.

More FCP tips can be found at Diana Weland's Top Ten Features in Final Cut Pro 7, The Top-Ten Things I Wish I Knew About Final Cut Pro…Ten Years Ago by Jeff Carrion, and Final Cut FAQs from Shane Ross.

There's more links to good editing tips from Peters, Hullfish, Meyers and others in previous AEP posts Better editing + shooting & music, Lessons & advice from editors, Wikipedia on Editing, and Hitchcock explains editing & the Kuleshov Effect.

Update: FCP guy Larry Jordan has some basics in this video, 10 Tips for Faster Editing.

17 Custom Effects for After Effects

Topher Welsh rounds up 17 Custom Effects at AE Tuts:

"There comes a time when all good things must come to an end, and "Have It Your Way" Week is no exception. But we aren't just gonna kick you to the curb, I got a roundup all the Custom Effects I could find from around the web for you to download, test out and dink around with yourself."

In some cases, Topher gives you a direct link to the custom effect but skips the tutorial and background; see for example 'Custom Effect' to distribute layers in 3D instead of his Distributor entry.

Echo effects: Luxand, Time Blend FX & more

Luxand has released Echo Effects for After Effects, with five properties to adjust: Echo Intensity, Trace Length, Oscillation, Phase, and Frequency. Any advantage over AE's built-in Echo Effect is not been made explicit.

Update: Topher Welsh has a tutorial on Echo below, inspired by a recent music video.

Maltaannon also recommends another built-in AE filter, CC Time Blend. For background on that filter check out Blend and Bend Time by Eran Stern and the old-timey classic CC Time Blend FX with Brian Maffitt posted recently by Motionworks.

Maltaannon session on rotoscoping

Rotoscoping made easy is an archive of Maltaannon's latest live session:

Deinterlacerator: an After Effects Custom Effect

Fix Interlaced Footage With Deinterlacerator! – Custom Effect by Jorrit Schulte on AE Tuts shows you how to adjust various slider thingies in ways that might not have occurred to you. While using a 3rd party filter is much easier, this tutorial will exercise your AE muscles. You'll have to compare the benefits of various methods yourself.

The Adobe Mercury Playback Engine

The Genesis Project, an Adobe blog, has details on the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine, the GPU playback engine demoed at IBC in September and mentioned a few weeks ago on another Adobe blog which discussed Premiere Pro "Next".

Again, check out the details in the Q&A, but you won't find the phrase "After Effects"!

If you want After Effects to be a better finishing tool, then make a feature request at the Adobe website.

Update: Karl Soule has a coupla posts too, Three words you'll be hearing a lot of: Adobe Mercury Engine and More on the Mercury Engine...,

"we do have external people testing it out now, including some people posting over in the RED forum here. As soon as we have any information about availability, I will be the first one to post it here."

On the RED forum, Adobe's Simon Hayhurst says,

"On topics like TC, Grading Integration, RED Rocket™ --- all important stuff .... and we're continuing to knock these kinds of items down one by one. Prioritization of which order to do them in is the hard question ..... Mike Kanfer is our most active Red forum participant and your first port of call for prioritization opinions.
[...]
On the topic of AE and Mercury --- the engine in AE is very different to an NLE engine --- there is inevitably some tech cross-sharing that can be done, but the apps work in very different ways at their core, so much of the core rendering engine needs to be different"

Update: note that the RAM base of the approved graphics card will effect performance (how many clips at what sizes and number of filters applied), so if you're doing RED files you'll want the more expensive cards.

Photoshop CS4: scaling, cropping, blending

There's some more recent Photoshop tutorials by Julienne Kost that are good, especially for those slow to digest CS4 features. First, there's Top 10 little-known features in Photoshop CS4.

For more on working with scaling, alignment, and auto-blending, check out Photoshop Works for You. In her latest tutorial, Julieanne Kost shows you how to open 3 images at once in Photoshop and then easily arrange them into a triptych. This sort of thing is much easier now: