Trapcode users rejoyce

If you haven't already checked out Trapcode's new site GO check it out here:

http://trapcode.squarespace.com/

Its a web site dedicated to users or Trapcode Particular. You can share tips and tricks, and of course... presets. If you where sad to see trapcodepeople.net go this will put a smile on your face.

-J

News segment

As you all know I have been absent from the blog for a while. Reason being is that work has flooded my life as well as family and life in general. However as you might have noticed Tony is also helping me run this site and has been very generous with his time.
There are many things to come this year so expect changes. One of them being that I will hopefully post more around here. In the mean time, tony has put up some great tuts, so make sure you check'em out.

Now as far as Actual news goes many of you must know something about CS5, unless you have been living under a rock for the past couple of months. To re-cap here are some things:


Adobe CS5 will come in one flavor only, thats 64-bit. Good news for everyone, bad news for plug-in makers. Since plenty of code will have to be ported to 64-bit. The decision is clear though and its the right move. If you want that better performance and more stability then 64-bit is the way to go. Speaking of performance, adobe's new Mercury playback engine is said to give Premiere PRO real-time editing capabilities. However according to sources the Mercury engine is CUDA based and so to run it you need a Nvidia card. Sorry ATI people, but you will be left out this time. Which is a shame because ATI makes some very powerful cards. Over all adobe is moving in the right direction. News on AE cs5 is scarce, but i do hope they have listened to our suggestions.

If you want to add suggestions, report bugs or make a wish your self hop over to:
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

Have a good one

-J

AE: Greenscreen Tutorial

Second in depth tutorial, and this is on chroma keying. Since the last one covered compositing more I thought this time I should focus more on greenscreen work. These tutorials are a bit more advanced and require some knowledge of AE and greenscreen work already since the focus is more on the workflow and its more in depth, so the basics will be flown over by pretty quickly.

I will let you know that im running CS4 right now and i apologize to all of my CS3 and below users. However if you follow the PDF's you should be just fine and I do provide you with the project file and footage.

This one is also courtesy of Umesh, and I want thank him for the awesome work he has been doing for a while providing everybody with free HD footage for a while. If you want to play with footage go check out his site.

http://umesh3d.blogspot.com/

Download the project file:

Project file

AE: Compositing tutorial

Learn how to create a jet fighter flyover shot using only 2D elements. The result is a very realistic yet easy (if you know what you're doing) way of doing these types of shots. We will also cover some good compositing techniques and tips for color matching.

After having had some time off I decided to put up a tutorial on actual compositing, a subject skipped by most tutorial web site about After effects. You find a good amount of Nuke and Shake compositing tutorials but not many AE ones. Well I plan to change that. You can bet there are going to be more compositing tutorials for AE coming up soon. So stay tuned for those.

The footage is a free clip courtesy of Umesh off his website here:

http://umesh3d.blogspot.com/

Download the Project file and PDF here:

Project File

Free Project file download

Here is a free project made in After Effects CS4. Its a countdown on a spinning box. Download it, use it tweak it, learn from it. Makes use of some cool After Effects tricks so if you have been looking to do some motion graphics here is a good project file to help you out.

Download AE project

The Film Makers Guide

Hi sorry for the lack of posts but I have been busy with tons of projects. However since now I write for VFXschool along with my buddy here Jason. We thought it would be cool to put out a short guide on getting started with film making. It's a real quick over view of basic things you should know heading out to a shoot. I cover lighting, audio, and cameras as well as a cool post strategy to keep things organized and I finish it off with a quick guide on color correcting and grading.

Hope you enjoy it and find it useful.

Tony

Download Guide

*Edit:

I wanted to make something clear about lighting. In the guide I stated that most of the lighting is done in post. After reading it again today i thought some people might get confused. I had implied is that the final polishing is done in post.So you always want to light on set how the image should come out. However, you want to have minimal contrast. To do that shoot with a flat gamma and always lighten up your shadows with a bounce card. If you are doing a three point lighting, your fill light should lighten your shadows. When u have a custom set up or you shoot out doors, add a bounce card on the shadow side so that you shadows aren't completely dark. That way you always have that extra bit of data to work with. Use this tip especially when you shoot DV.

Most useful tutorials

Now a days you have your pick from tons of people making tutorials. But the problem is that almost none of them are good. Its hard to get some one to nail down the basics and even more importantly teach them in a manner that is easy to understand. Creative cow is one of the very very few places that makes tutorials that are so well made they have become a staple in the online Mograph and VFX community. They host some of the best and most useful tutorial you can ever hope to find on the web. If you are a AE user your owe it to your self to watch all of these tutorials.

Go learn something.

The best Creative cow tuts so far:

Removing Chromatic aberrations

2.5D Rig removal

Calculating rotation

The famous droste effect

multi Freeze-frame effect

Simulating whip-pans

Sci-Fi Classics

(Audio) ADR basics and how it works

Looping particle systems

Making a water color effect on videos

Better Compositing

Reverse Earth Zoom

Jumbotron look

Vanishing point in AE

Invisible cape

Shoot like Film

Gatorade Effect

Light Writting

Cinematic compositing

Building a 3D world in AE

Creating a automated Odometer

Smart volume meter

Simple object removal

Smoking letters

Destroy AE CS4

DESTROY AE distortion generator for After Effects CS4

Ladies and gentlemen what i present to you know is the all new-fully re-vamped preset for creating digital and analog artifacts and distortion. I had a small job a few weeks ago that called for me working on a short 10 sec. shot of a handheld camera falling down, obviously the they wanted the camera to distort freeze up an snap to black. So I did some searching and found Digieffects distort plug-in. Once i saw what it did, i realized that instead of spending money i could just create the effects my self. Glad to say that after some tinkering i came up with some presets that allowed be to create the effects. However to get a very custom preset i used keyframes. Obviously those can't be saved as presets. So instead using my little knowledge of expressions I added some controls and. Also since my footage was rendering very slowly i managed for this release to do away with tons of effects and tons of layers thanks to some friends, google and my good friend CC composite. Now you can enjoy dropping in the preset on any footage and voila. In fact i would go as far as to say that its a perfect substitute for Digieffect's plug-in. The one thing lacking is a time effect. Which I worked around by using TIMESHUFFLER by polygonstudio (maltannon.com). Enjoy.

Download:

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=f1a082d8ed39bc127432d3c9683f450ae04e75f6e8ebb871