I’m excited to be able to offer a free top-up course on my website to all my lovely visitors. In this free course, Adobe Technical Support Lead Todd Kopriva offers dozens of tips for optimizing Premiere Pro, After Effects, your operating system, your computer, and your workflow for maximum speed and performance.
He makes recommendations for RAM, CPUs, graphics cards, and hard disks – both what to buy and how to set up your applications to make optimal use of these resources – and for setting preferences and other options in After Effects and Premiere Pro to minimize the amount of processing needed at each step of your workflow.
You’ll also learn what CUDA, OpenGL, and the Mercury Playback Engine are, and what each means to you in practical terms. After completing this workshop you’ll get more done in less time, both by making things work faster and by avoiding common causes of wasted time.
Animation as we know it has been around since Horner invented the zoetrope in 1834. Since then animators have developed rules of animation that help us to draw viewers into the world we have created. From Disney classics to the latest stereoscopic 3D productions, we’ve plundered them all to find the 12 key techniques you need to master to be a top-flight animator.
Some of these rules are based on real-life physics, and others on observations and reactions. They provide a set of invaluable ‘tricks’ for animators that have been proven to work in almost every situation.
In the article I delve into the world of animation to pick out the 12 rules of animation that every animator and motion graphics artist must know. Drawn from the forms 150 year history, you’ll learn a wealth of dos and don’ts that will help you produce more engaging projects, whether you’re working in 2D, 3D, graphics, stop-motion or a mixture of them all.
In this session, I will share an in-depth look at the options for working with text in Adobe After Effects. I’ll show examples of successful motion graphic designs and will discuss the components of design that make them work. In this session you’ll earn about the rules of typography and how to apply the rules of typography to your designs to make them easier to read and more dynamic. I’ll also take an in-depth look at the typographic controls available in After Effects and will also show you how you can use hand-drawn text to bring a unique aspect to your designs.
I’ll also be presenting four other sessions at this event which you can find out about here. If you want to register for a full day of valuable creative sessions by me and all the other speakers you can do so here on the Eventbrite page. I hope to see some of you there, please make sure to say hello if you can make it along.
I was very pleased to get a call from John Davey, the organiser of the amazingly successful and entertaining “Flash on the Beach 2011” conference, asking me to speak at his event.
It’s an annual conference, held in my home town of Brighton. Bringing together the best designers, developers and minds in the Flash, design and web community, it’s a conference with a difference. It attracts an interesting and diverse mix of people and is focussed on the work that we do as well as the tools that we use.
I’ll be doing a session on creating Kinetic Typography animation in Adobe After Effects CS5.5. I’ll be featuring a breakdown of a real-life art project that I worked on in collaboration with Artist Richard Walker titled “That Day”. In this session I want to focus on the design process and demonstrate how After Effects allows creative flexibility throughout a project. For my more geeky attendees, don’t worry! I’ll also share plenty of my software tips and tricks as well as important techniques for structuring projects and optimising workflow in Adobe After Effects.
I’ll also feature some extracts from my book “Design Essentials for the Motion Media Artist” and will be giving away a copy of it, plus a copy of my “After Effects CS5 Learn by Video” training DVD. There are always lots of great parties, dinners and other networking events structured around Flash on the Beach and you’re guaranteed to meet and interesting and eclectic mix of creatives and geeky types. So why not book a place now, it sells out fast every year!
Well, here I am, back in the UK after an exhausting trip to Las Vegas to attend NAB 2011. I was speaking at the Post Production World Conference which I’m pleased to say was busier than ever. My sessions were very well attended and I met some great new people who gave me the most generous feedback, thanks to all of you! Keep an eye on this space for a recorded version of one of my sessions, coming soon!
Me Presenting at NAB 2011, courtesy of @mediaguy777
I also got to catch up with lots of old friends and colleagues at the Media Motion Ball and the Adobe party. I’ve made many life-long friends through this industry and it’s great to see them all in one place, although it could be a bit overwhelming for me at times-all that love and talent in one room!
So, what did I see at the show that impressed me? Well, top of my list has to be the new version of After Effects CS5.5 and companion products in the Production Premium CS5.5 suite. The new Production Premium suite delivers improved performance, workflow improvements and new powerful audio editing capabilities via Audition which I’m happy to say is finally back on the Mac!
The powerful Mercury Playback Engine has better GPU hardware support for laptops and more graphics cards are now supported. All this makes the Production Premium more compelling than ever as a comprehensive studio containing everything needed from creating your source material and storyboards to transcoding and delivering your final product in multiple formats.
Me with Chris and Trish Meyer, courtesy of @mediaguy777
After Effects in particular is very exciting for me as it is my every-day application. The flag-ship feature is the is the ‘Warp Stabilizer’. Mainly aimed at folks shooting on DSLR and other hand held cameras, it tracks, stabilizes and scales your footage automatically. It also compensates for rolling shutter artefacts and can ‘heal’ the edges of the stabilized shot to minimize scaling.
The Camera Lens Blur effect is based on real-world lenses and offers more realistic depth of field blurs. The Light Falloff effect enables users to simulate natural illumination falloff to mimic how light behaves in a 3D scene and can be used to create other light intensity effects.
There are also dedicated tools for Stereoscopic 3D workflows too including a 3D camera rig, new 3D Glasses effect and controls for 3D Focus and Convergence.
On the down side I must say that I am ever-so-slightly underwhelmed with this upgrade from the perspective of an animator/ motion graphic designer. Don’t get me wrong, what’s in there is great if these are features you need. I don’t know if it’s just my built-in habit of going against current trends but none of them are features that really excite me personally as much as past ones like Expressions, 3D, Shape and Text layers.
I guess it’s not surprising as I’m not really a visual effects artist, I’m more interested in making things look surreal than real! I want tools that help me push new boundaries and inspire me creatively, I’m afraid these features just don’t inspire me as much as say the Puppet tool or Vanishing Point feature did.
In my opinion the last couple of releases have focussed a little too much on visual effects features. I’d love to see the next release concentrate on more Motion Graphics oriented features and let Nuke and the Discreet systems fight it out for VFX supremacy.
I’m also a little disappointed that the Warp Stabilizer doesn’t include the ability to reverse the process of stabilisation to reintroduce wanted camera movement. When compositing elements into a shot, painting rigs, rotoscoping etc. It’s often desirable to steady the shot before you work, this makes adding visual effects much easier. But in many situations you may want to reintroduce the movement, it may be intentional camera movement, like seen so often these days in films shot in a hand held style.
Traditionally VFX artists would stabilize the footage, add VFX and then reverse the stabilization process, adding the movement back to the comped footage. The Warp Stabilizer does an absolutely amazing job of removing ‘unwanted camera movement’ but it doesn’t allow us to reintroduce our ‘wanted camera movements’. Sad as this addition could have made a good feature truly great.
Me with the lovely Aharon Rabinowitz (courtesy of Michele Yamazaki)
Adobe also rolled out their new Subscription based system where you can effectively ‘hire’ the Creative Suite apps on a month by month basis. A great option for folks who only want to use apps on a project by project basis. Or may only want to use newer features now and then.
Red Giant Software had exciting new releases to showcase including great free tools. Colorista Free provides a simple yet comprehensive interface for After Effects and Final Cut Pro enabling creation and sharing of color profiles via CDLs. Color Decision Lists allow users to share color settings and metadata across a variety of systems.
LUT Buddy allows you to create, read and share LUT profiles directly from After Effects using any color correction effects you want. Color Lookup Tables are similar to CDLs (they do not include all metadata) in that they allow users to share color profiles between different systems, for example between desktop apps like After Effects and high-end DaVinci or Discreet systems. Previously the only way you could save LUTs from After Effects was via the full Color Finesse interface.
Charlie's Angels! 🙂 (courtesy of Michele Yamazaki)
Magic Bullet Grinder helps you get footage from your DSLR into Final Cut Pro timeline easily. They have also utilised their Magic Bullet technology to create some funky and exciting new tools for people who want to make movies on their iPhones and iPads.
Movie Looks allows you to add stylish pre-made “looks” to your iPhone movies, giving them a slick, professional look. Noir Photo provides and amazing level of control when creating cinematic black and white, monotone, or tinted images. It includes fun controls for adding dramatic lighting to your photos and developing them into professional-looking, polished images.
And of course, predictably, the expected unexpected was announced stop-press-style from Apple! The new Final Cut Pro X (Watch the videos, part one and part two) was finally announced at the Supermeet. This brand new version has been completely rewritten from the ground up. With a brand-new 64-bit architecture Final Cut Pro X can now take full advantage of all the RAM you can fit into your Mac, from Macbook Pro’s to high-end desktops, making performance significantly better. Grand Central Dispatch support also improves performance by optimizing the way your processors operate. Both of those features should result in significant speed and workflow enhancements.
Emphasis was put on ingest operations like auto-detection of footage content, for example, it can automatically detect how many people are in a shot, then label and manage the footage accordingly. This happens on ingest, in the background and creates data to help manage and organise footage without the need for manually adding keywords. It also auto-detects color balance irregularities and corrects them on ingest, using Color sync. Once you’ve got footage into the new Browser you can add keywords to clips or even to frame-ranges from within clips, this should make searching and managing content a whole lot easier.
Smart Bins can be created for clips, similar to the Smart Mailboxes from Apple Mail, or Smart Playlists from iTunes. Clips will be included into these smart bins as common data is detected. References to the clips can appear in multiple smart bins without having to create copies of the files. For example, you could have a clip of a person standing on the beach at night, this clip reference can be automatically placed both in the ‘Night shots” bin, the “beach shots” bin and the “One person” bin simultaneously without duplicating the item.
You can even edit your footage while it’s being ingested meaning there’s no need to wait while this is happening, you can get to work straight away . . . . as long as you’re working with disk-based media!
The star of the show for me though is the new Timeline. It looks and behaves like a sexy beast! The ‘Magnetic Timeline’ is so simple a concept that it’s brilliant. As you drag clips around the timeline, other clips automatically shift to accommodate the changes, there’s no need to add new tracks first to accommodate changes, Final Cut does this automatically as and when they are required. The Timeline is now fully native and resolution independent so you can get right into editing your footage straight away, mixing footage from different sources and formats without the need for transcoding,
You can now create Compound Clips which are kind of like After Effects precomposed comps. Select a few clips and group them into one single editable item. This has the benefit of simplifying the edit and making the editing process easier and more logical by reducing clutter in the timeline. I’ll be interested to see how it works practically, whether it renders the compound clips or keeps them live within the edit, very interesting though.
Keyframing motion properties of clips can be done directly in timeline now with a clear, easy to use graph editor. I’m not sure what level of control is available via the graph editor but it certainly looked pretty slick and easy to use. The application of retiming has also been simplified and improved with quick access to commonly-used speeds and the ability to easily create vari-speed effects by dragging on the edges of clips.
The new Auditioner allows yo to collect clips into ‘Audition groups’. These appear in the Timeline like little footage wells. You can sample clips within them using Cover-flow- style toggling of clips and compare results of them directly in the Viewer. This makes comparing clips and making edit decisions so much easier, great if you’re sitting with a client peering over your shoulder.
We didn’t see any plug-in-type effects used during the demo but color matching and balancing now appears to be integrated into the main application functionality. Color Board is a powerful primary and secondary color corrector which allows you to correct color based on channel selections or shapes.
Whats in there looks great but it’s hard to tell what it really operates like from a demo. Apple demo’s are always very slick and worked out to the nth degree. If it is as simple and brilliant as it looks then fantastic but I have some concerns about what’s missing from the list of features though. There was no mention of support for tape-based capturing or EDL support, making me wonder whether Apple are abandoning old technology altogether and relying on the fact that there are enough people using an exclusive disk-based workflow. I must say that most facilities I work in still use tape so I can see this being an issue if the rumours circulating are true.
There was no mention of third party plug-in support either which also concerns me. The third party plug-in developers are often the ones who push the big companies to continuously improve their apps by innovating and really listening to users. It would be a sad day if Apple was to turn it’s back on these pioneers.
So that’s a quick round up of NAB 2011. I must admit I didn’t get to see as much as I’d planned to this year. The jet lagged killed me and I was kept busy at the conference most of the time. But these are the highlights I saw on my travels. As a special NAB promotion I have a discount code for you to get money off my video training workshops here on my website. You can download free movies here and if you like them enough to buy a complete workshop, use this code on checkout. it’s good till the end of April 2011; ATV2B20. Until next year, goodbye Vegas and NAB.
After Effects can be a difficult application to learn simply because it offers you so may options. Many of these options are not immediately apparent to users so they muddle through using default settings when a better solution may be available to them. My job is to point you in the direction of these hidden helpers!
When working in 3D, have you ever experienced difficulty when positioning or rotating layers, cameras or lights within 3D space? If the answer is yes, then understanding the 3D axis modes may help to you.
Click on this image to enlarge it
In this example (taken from my After Effects CS5 Learn by Video DVD) you can see a Square layer inside a 3D comp. Notice in the Active camera view (top left) you can see the three-way-axes attached to the layer. It consists of three arrows, each representing one of the three dimensions of 3D space. The red axis (representing the horizontal ‘left-to-right’ X axis) is an arrow facing left to right. The green axis is pointing upwards and represents the vertical ‘top-to-bottom’ Y axis. Finally, it’s a bit tricky to see in this view but the blue arrow, representing the ‘near-to-far’ Z axis is pointing towards the viewer.
It’s a bit easier to see this if you look at the layer in the Right view. Notice in this view that we see the axes (and the layer) from a different angle. We can imagine that we are now standing to the left of the layer, looking towards the right. therefore, the blue arrow, representing the Z axis is pointing to our right, towards our imaginary viewer, who is standing in front of the layer.
Local Axis Mod is the default behavior for these axes in After Effects. In this mode the axes are attached to the layer. So, wherever the layer moves, the axes will follow as if attached to it. Let’s see what happens if I rotate the layer.
Click on this image to enlarge it
In this second example I’ve rotated the layer by 90 degrees on the X axis. When I rotate the layer, its 3D axes rotates with it. Notice in the Right view, the Green Y axis is now pointing towards the viewer.
Local Axis Mode may seem logical, when you rotate a layer, the axes rotate with it. But confusion occurs when you then start using the axes to move or rotate the layer in the Composition panel as the axes may not actually affect the values you think you’re adjusting.
Notice in this movie, if I grab the Y axis to move the layer in Right view, I’m actually adjusting the Z value of the layer. axismodesThis can be seen refelcted in Z position value in the timeline, notice it changing as I drag. If I adjust the position by dragging on the Z axis, I’m actually adjusting the Y value in the Timeline. At times this can be very confusing!
The good news is, if this causes you difficulty, there are two other axis modes to choose from. You can change the Axis mode by clicking on the Axis Mode buttons in the Tools panel that runs along the top of the application.
If I switch to World Axis Mode notice what happens to the axes on the layer as I do so, it changes so that the axes is fixed to the coordinates of the Composition (or world) rather than to the layer itself. If I rotate the layer again on the X axis, the axes do not move with the layer, they remain relative to the composition.
For new users to After Effects, this mode is perhaps more logical as dragging on the individual axes in the Comp panel will always adjust the corresponding values in the Timeline as they would expect. Adjusting the position by dragging on the Y axis will always adjust the Y value, adjusting X axis always affects X and adjusting the Z axis always affects the Z value. Regardless which view I select, or how much I rotate my view or my layers the axes will always be aligned to the edges of the Comp.
The final axis mode, View Axis Mode can be a little tricky to get your head round so beware! View Axis mode will align the axes to whatever view you are in. It allows you to rotate around the geometric center of your scene as it is currently being viewed as opposed to the comp itself.
I hope this has helped you understand the different axis modes available in After Effects and how they can help you when moving or rotating layers within 3D space. If you want to learn more about 3D in After Effects why not pop along to my session, ‘Introduction to 3D in After Effects’ at the NAB 2011 Post Production World Conference. Please say hello if you do! Happy Keyframing!
I’m giving away lots of goodies this week. In this blog I’m offering you some free sample movies from my ‘2D Character Animation in After Effects’ workshop from video2brain. I’m also pleased to announce some fantastic discounts on my training courses in London in March.
A one-off funding offer means that there’s currently a massive 80% off my Photoshop and After Effects courses at the Bridge Training. You can find out about these offers here. Just to give you an idea of the sort of savings on offer, my After Effects training 2 day training courses (Fundamentals, Intermediate and Advanced) have been discounted from the usual price of £504 to the incredible price of £108 for anyone based in the London Westminster area. Please contact The Bridge Training here to book a place.
I’m so excited to be able to introduce a set of video training products specifically aimed at character animation in Adobe After Effects CS5. I’ve included a link to a free sample from this workshop here, just click on this link to watch it in HD. There are also some other free videos available here.
As a freelance illustrator and motion graphics designer, I use After Effects every day to create artwork and animations of various styles. As a result, I’ve developed some powerful techniques for creating quick but compelling 2D animation, and in this workshop I share them with you. You’ll learn how to import layered files and paths from Illustrator into After Effects and how to animate flat vector artwork in both 2D and 3D space.
Topics covered include:
Setting up After Effects for creating 2D character animation
Using input devices to capture motion and apply it to your characters
Creating animation and lip-syncing with audio files, using expressions and scripting to make the process easier
Applying grouping techniques and using parenting to create hierarchical animations
Following the best working practices for outputting your animations for the web, TV, and mobile devices
All this is presented in a series of short, focused, and solution-oriented videos that steer clear of technical jargon. Whether you’re a motion graphic designer, animator, storyboard artist, video editor, or illustrator, if you want to create 2D animation from flat, vector-based artwork, this is the workshop for you.
The lessons are wrapped in a feature-rich interface that lets you jump to any topic and bookmark individual sections for later review. Full-Screen mode provides a hi-def, immersive experience, and Watch-and-Work mode shrinks the video into a small window so you can play the videos alongside your application. This course also includes project files so you can follow along and try out new techniques as you learn them.
Wow, what a busy week. I’ve just finished the first day of Broadcast Video Expo 2011 where I’ve been presenting After Effects and the Production Premium workflow on the Adobe booth. It’s been great being back with the Adobe UK team again and seeing lots of friendly faces.
I’ve also got a brand new product released today. My new Character Animation with Adobe After Effects workshops with video2brain are now on sale. You can check out some free sample movies here by clicking the link. Enjoy and please let me know what you think.
Quite a question – Is Premiere Pro a real-time engine for After Effects? Well this week I hope to answer it at Broadcast Video Expo 2011 I’ll be on the Adobe booth demonstrating and sharing my favorite tips and tricks about Adobe After Effects CS5.
Those of you who have used After Effects will know that it isn’t really designed as a video editing application. there’s no real-time engine so it can be really tiresome editing footage there and waiting for previews. However, did you know that the Adobe CS5 Production Premium comes with a special, little known, real time engine for After Effects, it’s called Premiere Pro and I’m rapidly falling in love with it all over again!
I’ll explain a little about why I describe Premiere Pro as a real-time engine for AE in a minute, but first a little bit of history (imagine wavy transition and spacey music, signifying time passing!) The first NLE I used was Adobe Premiere 4.0 on Mac, back in the mid-nineteen-ninety’s (Oh dear – showing my age there!). It was amazing to be able to edit video on a Mac and it opened video editing up to a whole host of new people after being a pretty exclusive domain, primarily owned by Avid at the time. Sadly Premiere never kept up with the pack and it’s reputation was almost destroyed with the disappointing release of version 5. Final Cut Pro also raised it’s rather sexy head at that time and it almost put a nail in dear old Premiere’s coffin.
But I’m glad to say that Adobe have persevered and have battled to bring Premiere Pro back to being a serious contender in the bloody battle of the NLEs .They still have a way to go, to convince folks that it really can give FCP a run for it’s money. Many people are still cast under the Apple Marketing spell and many of the people who ‘dis’ Premiere Pro have never actually tried it so keep that in mind and make your own decision about whether it’s a worthy contestant. I’ve used it in real-world projects and have found it to be reliable, fast and creatively flexible. And I also use Final Cut Pro in my work as a freelancer so I know both applications well and am speaking from a real-world user point of view. Incidentally, did I also mention that the BBC are using it throughout the organization? ‘Nuff said?
OK, back to the present! Why do I call Premiere Pro a ‘real-time engine for AE’? Well, as I said, working in AE can be a PIA (don’t you just love those TLA’s?). Often when working on music videos or opening title sequences, I’d want to edit a few clips quickly in time with music, add a few text animations, experiment a bit with the edit and timing. After Effects doesn’t facilitate this easily, you have to wait for things to render before you see them. But this is a perfect situation to use the Dynamic Link features in CS5 – you’ll get the best of both worlds by using Prem Pro and AE in conjunction with each other.
Premiere Pro is excellent for real-time editing. You can even set up keyframe animation, time-remapping and effect animations in real time, creating a rough cut of your finished piece. Adobe Dynamic Link then allows you to send this to AE, maintaining a live (dynamic) link between the apps, and whats more, it works!!!! The sequence opens in AE with no rendering required, ready for you to tweak and fine tune FX and keyframes. I’ll be demo’ing techniques using Dynamic Link (on a real world project) next week at Broadcast Video Expo. For those of you who can’t make it, here’s a few quick tips on the basic workflow & how it works!
Create your project in Premiere Pro – capture or import all your source files into this project and save it.
You can use the thumbnail view in the Project panel to create a rough storyboard for the piece before you bring footage down into the timeline, making sure that shot order and duration is roughly correct – this will save time later. Once you’ve done that, place your audio in the Timeline and then add the footage in the order it is sorted by using Premiere Pro’s amazing “Automate to Sequence’ button. So that’s the rough cut done.
Still in PremPro, make any edit adjustments required. Keyframe any basic transformations, add effects if necessary. Once you are happy with the rough edit, and ready to jump to AE, make a selection of clips that you want to finesse in the Timeline, Right-click and choose ‘Replace with After Effects Composition’ to open the selected clips in a translated After Effects timeline. Here you can do whatever you need to do in AE.
The beauty of this technique is that the link between the apps remains live so any changes made in AE automatically update in PremPro and visa versa, no need for rendering either way till the project is finally finished. I used this technique on the last project I worked on and reckon it saved me about 40% of the time it would have taken me only using AE.
If you’re in the UK please pop along to Broadcast Video Expo later this month where I’ll be demo’ing this exact technique on the Adobe booth. Please say hello if you do. 🙂
A question appeared on the Video Copilot website today about uprezzing old projects which can be a bit of a nightmare in AE. You can often find that layers positions get messed up and effects change appearance when you scale your comp.
Incidentally, making projects bigger is a massive headache so always good (if you have the opportunity of course) to create your projects at the biggest size you think may be required. If there’s ANY chance of HD requirements then use HD, even if the immediate requirement is only for SD.
Having said all that, there are always times when you need to up-rez. Updating old projects for showreels; adapating other old projects for new jobs etc. So, if you simply HAVE to do it, there’s a couple of scipts that will work. In the Demo Palette (can be opened by going to File > Scripts > Demo Palette) there are two gems, one is called ‘Scale Comp’ and can be used to scale your entire composition, keeping all layers in the correct position. The other is called ‘Scale Selected Layers’ which will work on a selection within a comp, again, maintaining their position relative to each other.
You need to make sure your preferences are setup correctly to use scripts in order to use these. to do so, go to Preferences >General > Allow Scripts to Write Files and Access Network.
You will still need to go through the somewhat painful process of editing effects but this will save you a lot of work with layers etc.
To find out more about After Effects and download some FREE movies, check out my After Effects CS5 Learn by Video page where you can watch excerpts and learn more tips.
“Hi I am newish to after effects and I have created a old map effect that pans from the UK to africa now I want to add a red line that reveals like in the Indiana Jones graphic.”
There’s definitely a trick to getting this right but once you know the trick, it’s easy, so, here are the rough steps for getting it right.
1. Place the map in a new comp, it’s best if the Map is bigger than the comp if you want to pan around it. In the Timeline, set a keyframe for the Anchor Point property as it’s this property you will animate to pan around the map. NB: Don’t animate the Position property as you’ll just run into problems.
2. Alt-double-click the layer to open up the Layer panel, this is where you’ll do the animation. It’s great as you’ll be able to see an overview of the whole image without having to faff around in the Comp panel. Make sure that the Target menu is set to Anchor Point Path.
3. In the timeline, move to where you want the next change in direction of the path to happen, and in the Layer panel, click and drag the anchor point to the landmark that you want to be central in the comp panel at that time. You’ll notice that, in the Comp panel, the point that the anchor point is on (in the Layer panel) is always central in the Comp panel, which is what you want exactly!
4. Keep repeating this till you have completed the journey you want the ‘camera’ to follow and so have completed the positional aspect of the animation.
5. If you want to smooth out the timing of the animation so that it maintains an even speed throughout, select all the keyframes except the first and last one, right-click on them and choose Rove Across Time. Once you’ve done that you can pull or push the first or last keyframes to speed up, or slow down the whole animation.
6. Now apply the Write On effect to the layer. Choose a color and style by adjusting the settings.
7. To make the Write on effect follow the path you can either use and expression to link the Brush Position property to the Anchor Point property of the layer (my preferred option) or, if you’re not keen on using expressions you can simply select all the keyframes from the Anchor Point property, copy them, then paste them into the Brush Position property.
8. In the Write On effect, make sure that the Paint Style property is set to On Original Image.
The nice thing about this technique is that it’s now easy to make it into a 3D map pan. All you need to do is add a camera and some lights, adjust the camera angle and animate the zoom property and that’s it! The camera and lights will automatically follow the anchor point so no further animation will be necessary unless you want to animate the angle, zoom, or depth of field.
To find out more details of this technique and others, check out my After Effects CS5 Learn by Video DVD that I created alongside the wonderful Todd Kopriva from Adobe.
When designing motion graphics in Adobe After Effects there are times you just need to create a plain old layer to apply effects to. Solids are just right for this purpose, and for lots of other uses in After Effects.
This video is aimed at a basic level. It shows you how to create solid-color layers and walks you through some of their uses.
You can find more free videos like these from our After Effects CS5 Learn by Video product on the video2brain website. Please enjoy them – happy keyframing!
I’m very pleased to offer my readers a couple of free tutorials from my very first video2brain workshop on Adobe Illustrator. This workshop will teach you how to use Illustrator’s tools and features to prepare 2D files for animation in Adobe After Effects.
You’ll learn how to make the most of Illustrator’s drawing tools and Autotrace feature, and to how use Live Paint and Kuler to recolor artwork. You’ll also get tons of tips and tricks for giving artwork a hand-drawn look and find out how to set up layers, aspect ratios, and transparency options for importing into After Effects.
I’ll share many of my techniques for using Illutrator’s extensive drawing capabilities to create characters for animation. Topics covered include:
Setting up your workspace for video and animation
Working with Autotrace, Live Paint, and Kuler
Using multiple artboards for creating storyboards
Taking advantage of views and workspaces
Drawing freehand in Illustrator using a variety of tools including the new improved Eraser tool and the Blob Brush tool
Whether you’re a motion graphic designer, animators, storyboard artists, video editors or illustrators, if you want to create 2D animation from flat, vector-based artwork, this workshop will be an invaluable resource.
The lessons are wrapped in a feature-rich interface that lets you jump to any topic and bookmark individual sections for later review. Full-Screen mode provides a hi-def, immersive experience, and Watch-and-Work mode shrinks the video into a small window so you can play the videos alongside your application. Also included are exercise files that give you an easy way to try out the techniques you learn.
Click here to get an overview of the workshop and download free tutorials using the following links;
