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.
I used this new plug-in called Digieffects Camera Mapper on my latest motion graphics project. “The Camera Mapper plugin allows you to isolate one or several objects in your footage, project these objects on a separate layer and pull that layer out of the background, creating the visual illusion of the object floating in front of the original footage.”
Key Features:
I know it sounds complicated, but once you check out this tutorial it should become straight forward. If you have any questions please leave a comment below.
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.
John Dickinson who is a motion graphic designer from Motionworks and Rob Dickinson who is a business consultant from Radsmarts are producing a great online series called The Business of Design. This is a powerful video series discussing how creative people can position their business to make a profit. Some of the topics that they have discussed already are: income, communication, profits, failure, pricing and discounts. This is a must see if you are a designer looking for relevant business advice.
I just went to my first After Effects user group meeting in Toronto last night and I had a great time. I thought creating a list of all the user groups I know in North America might help people get connected.
Digial Media Artists Los Angeles
The Dallas After Effects User Group
San Francisco’s Motion Graphics User Group
Minnesota After Effects User Group
Motion Graphics Los Angeles (Non-existent)
If you have a link to a group I missed, please post it in a comment.
One breakthrough that I made when developing my new website was the ability to track when Shadowbox.js was initiated to view an FLV file. Traditionally the standalone JW FLV Media Player that Shadowbox.js utilizes can call the flashvar “callback” with the value “analytics”. Unfortunately it looks like this flashvar is no longer supported and if it was it would not work because Shadowbox.js uses AJAX to load its player and content.
The premise of the solution comes from Google’s Analytics Help article: How do I track files (such as PDF, AVI, or WMV) that are downloaded from my site? The solution is to place a piece of JavaScript code within the HTML link’s <a> tag. Here is an example that relates to calling Shadowbox.js content from a website:
<a href="myvideo.mp4" rel="shadowbox;width=640;height=480;" onclick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/videos/myvideo');">Click here to play my video</a>
Here is the breakdown of what is happening: the video myvideo.mp4 is being called to play in my Shadowbox player at a resolution of 640×480. An onclick JavaScript is also being called at the same time telling Google Analytics to track the page view for the category “videos” for the item “myvideo”. The category does not have to be named “videos” however you will want to choose a name that helps keep things organized because this is what will come up in your Google Analytics Top Content Report.
One last note is that you need to place your Google Analytics Tracking code at the top of your page within your <body> tag and not at the bottom. This is necessary because the tracking code needs to be initiated before the onclick Javascript links can work.
Written by Jeff McIntosh
