'Epic' VFX Time

A few people have already seen this (1,040,424 so far). If you haven't, here's Epic VFX Time from Freddie Wong and crew:

Hidden Gems: 3D Space

Chris & Trish Meyer’s series of tips, tricks, gotchas, factoids, and shortcuts continues with CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 13 - 3D Space.

This article, 1st of a group of 4 on 3D in After Effects, covers Rotation versus Orientation, 3D Views & Shortcuts, View Options, Axis Modes, and Mixing 2D and 3D Layers. That last section is good to review because of the gotchas with Layer Styles and Adjustment Layers with AE 3D. Chris explains:

Groups of 3D layers that are stacked between 2D layers in the Timeline panel are internally flattened down to a 2D result, as if they were in a precomp by themselves. The entire composition is then rendered as if it consisted only of 2D layers, with each group of 3D layers being treated as a single 2D layer in the middle of the stack.

AE Help explains it this way:

You can apply a layer style to a 3D layer, but a layer with a layer style can’t intersect with other 3D layers or interact with other 3D layers for casting and receiving shadows. 3D layers on either side of a layer with a layer style can’t intersect one another or cast shadows on one another.

If you remember that it's an odd man out in render order, Layer Styles are useful beyond the obvious for light wraps (see AE Portal) and Track Matte shadows (explained by Chris Meyer in an earlier Hidden Gem; other wrinkles at PVC). Keeping track of render order is tricky, for more see Creating Motion Graphics (AEtuts+ book review), Standard render order and the Transform effect (video by Todd Kopriva), 3D layer interactions, render order, and collapsed transformations in AE Help, and Understanding The Render Order In After Effects at AEtuts+.

A hungry mob is an angry mob

In SADAT'S DAT, Adam Curtis revives a 1982 documentary on Egypt, which noted that food shortages and prices played a big role in Anwar Sadat's downfall. And of course the vision thing on our end. You'll have to visit his BBC website to see the doc Why Was Cairo Calm?

Here in Babylon, we may forget that 'a hungry mob is an angry mob'...

New Premiere training from Eran Stern

Eran Stern has launched a new product, The Best of Premiere Pro, with more than 4 hours of training for Adobe Premiere Pro and Production Premium. The package covers various features for intermediate users and ambitious beginners, with dozens of tips and tricks to tame a number of Premiere's quirks.

Eran covers multicam and some editing, graphic design, titles, audio mixing, and transitions and effects. Over a third of the training deals with a single project using a Dynamic Link workflow with other software in Production Premium -- Photoshop, After Effects, Soundbooth, and Encore to create a Blu-ray HD DVD and interactive content. Eran's an old hand at After Effects, so his coverage is effects-oriented but really aiming to stay inside Premiere for fast render and playback, and only going to AE when really needed.

The focus on gotchas is not the usual stuff you see repeatedly in free tutorials, though instead of a section on 3rd-party filters (see AE's CycoreFX inside Premiere Pro CS5), I would have rather seen approaches on media management and avoiding reconforming (the "worst" of Premiere).

The package is inexpensive and includes 2 free HD clips, courtesy of Artbeats. There's sample tutorials on Eran's blog, like Transparent Video in Premiere. Here's the intro:

The Best of Premiere Pro from Eran Stern on Vimeo.

Thunderbolt: a closer look at new MacBook + more

Engadget posted Intel Thunderbolt: a closer look, with video showing streaming of 4 1080p clips from a MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt running Final Cut off a Promise RAID.

See for yourself:

Update: there's always just one more thing, so check out Thunderbolt, Xsan built into Lion Server, hello cheap fast shared storage! at FCP.co and Swipe, Save And Serve: What’s New in Mac OS X Lion [VIDEO] at Mashable.

Behavior presets intro

Trish & Chris Meyer have a new video snippet on Behavior presets in After Effects (embedded below). An excerpt on Presets from their book Creating Motion Graphics is also available. It's refreshing to see a tutorial that tells people to double-click the preset or drag it into the comp window -- most tutorials have people drag into timeline.

Another CS5 tutorial on presets by Chad Perkins also looks at the Behaviors presets (also below).

For more tutorials and resources on presets, see AEP posts labelled presets or Animation Preset. To get under the hood quick, see Building Effects From The Ground Up from Pro Juice, which shows how to create effects like Video Copilot Twitch with just built-in filters and Wigglerama.

Behaviors | After Effects Apprentice 04: Layer Control | by Chris Meyer and Trish Meyer

View this entire After Effects course and more at lynda.com.

Zaxwerks ProAnimator updated

Zaxwerks ProAnimator 5 has just been released. ProAnimator comes as both a standalone application and as an After Effects plug-in. It's expensive but rich in basic and advanced features missing from AE. There's a bunch of video tutorials for a closer look.

The Mac standalone app is shipping, but a version for AE CS5 Mac is still in the works.