Premiere and After Effects teams at NAB

Todd Kopriva shares information on the Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects teams at NAB:

We’re gearing up for a big show at NAB 2011 and Post | Production World, and we hope to see you there. ...We’ll be posting a lot of news and information the week of the event (and after that).

Read the rest...

3D Text in After Effects (updated)

Read the rest of the updated roundup at PVC... Creating 3D Text in After Effects.

Creating 3D text in After Effects has long been a cottage industry, generating many workarounds and 3rd party plug-ins.

Adding to the parade is one of the big new features in After Effects CS6, the extrusion and material options in the Ray-tracing renderer, which almost requires an Nvidia GPU. Many will benefit from beautiful renders with the new features, though many will get bogged down by requirements, render times, or inadequate features, and turn to older methods surveyed here.


Update: Despite some optimism, in the summer of 2014 Adobe appeared to be leaning heavily on a single 3rd-party app for future 3D. For more and major current tool options, see the above roundup and AEP's Comparing 3D type options for After Effects, where you'll find that Ray-traced 3D was declared (walking) dead by Adobe. Ray-traced 3D still works, but it will be retired in some future release.

Vignettes in After Effects [updated]

Vignettes have become more popular, and especially in After Effects since the release of the DV Rebel's Guide by Stu Maschwitz. Of course there's numerous ways to make vignettes, and it looks like the topic is quite well-covered now, thank you. 

An updated roundup of some tools & tutorials on the various options for Premiere and AE can be found at PVC, Vignettes in Premiere & After Effects: A plethora of resources.

AE Lounge: new community chat channel

AE Lounge is a new Convore channel on After Effects if you want to chat realtime about AE, problems, solutions, etc... There's also e-mail summaries and an iPhone app.

According to Forrest Maready, Convore is an indexable, searchable group chat. So, rather than ask a question on a forum, hopefully you can get immediate feedback on something if your stuck. An AE group chat could be fun if there's enough people around who not already totally engulfed by Twitter or Facebook and older lists and forums.

BS Compositing Bundle: free plug-ins

BS Compositing Bundle for After Effects is a free bundle of 3 Pixel Bender plug-ins for After Effects CS4+.

They're from Bartek Skorupa (no BS), who has a demo explaining the purpose and features of the new filters at AEtuts, Enhance Your Workflow: BS Compositing Bundle – Plug-ins Presentation. The filters are replacements for Set Matte, Compound Arithmetic (adding color correction), and Tint but with extra features and 32-bit processing oriented towards compositing passes from 3D apps.

Edit & update: the BS_CompositingBundle is now available at AE Scripts.

Modifying Keyframes with KeyTweak

Mamoworld, home of Mathias Möhl and friends, has published a new quick tip tutorial (embedded below), Modifying Keyframes with KeyTweak. Mathias says that KeyTweak is a must-have when working with hundreds of keyframes, like in his stabilize motion tutorial. The new version is easier to use -- you can push around keyframes in the work area just using the Arrow buttons.

Mathias explains:

Although the new version of KeyTweak was published last December, I didn't have a tutorial about its new features (the new "local mode"), hence almost nobody discovered its potential so far. While the old version of KeyTweak (consisting only of the "global mode" of the new KeytTweak) had a somewhat confusing workflow (you needed to duplicate a property, delete all keyframes in it that you want KeyTweak to take care of etc), the new local mode is much more intuitive. 
With a set of arrow buttons you just move around all keyframes in the work area, and also fade in/out those changes if you like. The old "global mode" remains still useful for properties that are not 2D, like transparency (local mode works only with 2d properties and mask shapes).

After Effects Tutorial: Modifying Keyframes with KeyTweak from Mathias Möhl on Vimeo.

The Parallel Worlds of 3D in After Effects

Chris and Trish Meyer posted CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 16 - Parallel Worlds on PVC. It's an introduction to the "Parallel Worlds" of special cases and gotchas that crop up when you try to combine 3D layers in After Effects, live Photoshop 3D layers, plug-ins that render 3D images onto 2D layers, renders from 3D programs, Adobe Repoussé (Photoshop), and Digieffects FreeForm (included in CS5).

This "Hidden Gems" summary covers:

• Rendering Bins (3D layer groups) and Breaks (2D layer pipelines)
• Casting 3D Shadows Onto 2D Layers
• 3D Effects and 2D Layers
• Making Photoshop 3D Layers More Interactive
• Displacement Mapping with FreeForm

You can find more on these topics in 3D layer interactions, render order, and collapsed transformations in AE Help and of course in Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects 5th Edition (reviewed earlier on AEtuts+). There's also extras from CMG itself -- an excerpt from the Parallel Worlds chapter with some extra stuff not covered in the current summary, as well as an Integrating with 3D applications excerpt on importing 3D info from Maya, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max, and other 3D apps.