Creative Cloud for Design January 2014

Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and more: resources listed at Pro Video Coalition.

Secondary animation in After Effects – and the basic principles of animation

Secondary action is ancillary to the primary action of an animation. Secondary actions help to create the illusion of life, heightening interest and adding some realism – whether in character animation, visual effects, or motion graphics. Tutorials that deal with this basic idea explicitly in After Effects are rare.

Read the rest on Pro Video Coalition: Secondary animation in After Effects.

Flowchart tools in After Effects (Tab is the new Shift)

An updated post is now at the Pro Video Coalition as Flowchart tools in After Effects: Tab is the new Shift. (picture by Quba Michalski)

trackFinger AE: tracking gestures on iOS

trackFinger AE is new iOS app (on App Store) that allows you to record the movements of up to 10 fingers on an iPad, and then send tracking data as keyframes in e-mail text to paste into Adobe After Effects.

There's more on Pro Video Coalition.

After Effects 2013: features & requests

...and the AE team's thoughts on the future.

With 3 actual updates to After Effects in 2013, it's become difficult for many users to keep track of all the new features. Reading through today's post by Todd Kopriva is a good way to do a reality check of what's happened this year.

Read the rest at PVC... Top After Effects feature requests of 2013.

Circles in After Effects

Making circles in After Effects seems like a trivial exercise, but there are a ton of approaches to their various forms in design.

Circles come in movement and repetition, from expressions & scripts, as Shapes, masks, particle effects like Particle World, Bubbles, Ball Action, from the Circle effect, CC Sphere, Polar Coordinates, Wave World, Radio Waves, halftone effects (Card Dance, Particular, effects), and so on.

A few of the many circle-related tutorials and resources for After Effects are sampled in Circles in After Effects on PVC.

Spirographs in After Effects

Spirographs in After Effects had it's 15-minutes of fame years ago and were lost in the mists of time (around here anyway), except for a few tutorial/project posts. Revisiting the topic reveals a variety of approaches and directions.

Read the article at PVC...