I just bought the newest After Effects plug-in by Video Copilot called Optical Flares. This powerhouse of a plug-in does way more than the out-dated Knoll Light Factory and at $124.95 what is there not to like?
I just bought the newest After Effects plug-in by Video Copilot called Optical Flares. This powerhouse of a plug-in does way more than the out-dated Knoll Light Factory and at $124.95 what is there not to like?
We want to officially announce our new daughter site, Get Reel Videos, to the JMDesign family of services. Get Reel Videos sells ready to use HD motion loops for presentations, digital signage and video advertisements. These inexpensive digital assets will come in handy when spicing up your next visual project.
Click here to visit Get Reel Videos
Harry Frank has started a free social network for Motion Graphic designers. The site is called The Motion Exchange and in two days it already has over 350 members. Go check it out for yourself and see what all the buzz is about.
Nick Campbell from Greyscale Gorilla made a great presentation at MGFest titled “How to be a Motion Designer and get paid“. He covers such topics as:
How to Be A Motion Designer and GET PAID from Nick Campbell on Vimeo.
John Dickinson has been producing a great online video series called Unplugged. His 30 minute webisodes are casual interviews with leading motion graphic designers in the industry such as Andrew Kramer from Video Copilot, Peder Norrby from Trapcode, Aharon Rabinowitz from All Bets Are Off and Nick Campbell from Greyscale Gorilla to name a few. John has produced 13 outstanding episodes so far and all his fans are looking forward to watching many more.
I am pleased to announce that I am now an official AV3 Software affiliate. They are an online motion graphics and VFX plug-in retailer who sells all my favorite third party After Effects plug-ins such as Red Giants Trapcode Suite, Zaxwerks, and DigiEffects to name a few.
I will be producing short sample video clips showcasing the creative power of all their After Effects plug-ins. Stay tuned for more great discussion on AV3 Software.
Chris Zwar recently published a three-part series on the ProVideo Coalition website that is billed as a “3-part video tutorial looking at advanced 3D animation in After Effects “.
Yeah, it is that. But it’s so much more.
In part 1, Chris gives a lot of real-world insight into planning a project, including all of the things that you must do outside of After Effects if you want to be successful and have happy clients. He talks about researching the audience, the viewing environment, and the client. He talks about getting reference photographs. This is the kind of up-front work that can make or break a project. I’m adding a link to this part of the series from the “Planning your work” section of After Effects Help (which also, by the way, contains a link to one of my favorite articles by Aharon Rabinowitz).
In part 2, Chris goes into deep detail about building 3D scenes and objects in After Effects. He has some good explanations and tips about collapsing transformations, precomposing, and parenting.
In part 3, he goes into more detail about the importance of textures, lights, and shadows in making a synthetic 3D scene look more realistic.
As Chris himself points out, this isn’t a tutorial series in the sense in which the word ‘tutorial’ has been used too much lately. He doesn’t show the click-by-click steps that the viewer can follow without actually building any understanding. Rather, this is a series that aims to demonstrate and explore some important concepts in the context of a real-world project. I think that this gets back to the root of the word ‘tutorial’: it teaches.
Great work, Chris!
Have you ever rendered an MP4 on your Mac using the H.264 codec to find that your newly encoded video was washed out? I have been stung by this phenomenon for far too long so I did some research to find the cure to this awful disease.
From my understanding the root of the problem involves an issue between QuickTime and Core Video. Since 2005, the release of QuickTime 7, this problem has resulted in a gamma shift that lightens the video on playback making it look washed out. source
The best solution I found was to render the video using the free x264 VideoLAN encoder. QuickTime can render this out as a .MOV file and ffmpegX can render it out as a .MP4.
Other solutions include changing your color profile settings on your OS, using a different video player that doesn’t utilize Apple’s Core Video such as Nice Player, or there are settings within Quicktime player to correct it:
“Select ‘Show Movie Properties.’ Highlight the video track then click on the ‘Visual Settings’ tab. Towards the bottom left you should see ‘Transparency’ with a drop-down box next to it. Select ‘Blend’ from the menu then move the ‘Transparency Level’ slider to 100%. Right after that, choose ‘Straight Alpha’ from the same drop-down and close the properties window. and finally, ‘Save.’ source
Written by Jeff McIntosh
I just started using a freeware program from Squared 5 called MPEG Streamclip. It is a great program that runs on Mac or Windows for encoding video into a variety of different programs. I have been using QuickTime Pro for many years to encode video and I am tired of the errors I run into when encoding long and high bit-rate video clips. For the past week MPEG Streamclip has been keeping up with my busy work flow by encoding videos quickly, being error free and providing an encoding preview window for piece of mind.
You can use MPEG Streamclip to: open most movie formats including MPEG files or transport streams; play them at full screen; edit them with Cut, Copy, Paste, and Trim; set In/Out points and convert them into muxed or demuxed files, or export them to QuickTime, AVI, WMV, DV and MPEG-4 files with more than professional quality, so you can easily import them in Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Toast 6, 7, 8, and use them with many other applications or devices.
Supported input formats: MPEG, VOB, PS, M2P, MOD, VRO, DAT, MOV, DV, AVI, MP4, TS, M2T, MMV, REC, VID, AUD, AVR, VDR, PVR, TP0, TOD, M2V, M1V, MPV, AIFF, M1A, MP2, MPA, AC3, …
In the spring of 2009 I created a new website for JMDesign and every time I make a new site I am always learning something new by adding a new technology or adapting an old one. Here is a rundown of the technologies I used to create JMDesign.