AE Quick Tip - Null Objects

Soooo I've been a bit lax with this project, this will change in the new year.

first up a quick tip when working in After Effects with many text/solid layers being parented to Null objects. as far as I can work out the default colour picker lets you define the colours for video/music/still layer but doesn't differentiate between null/text or solid layers. usually the null objects are controlling the other layers in one way or another and there for finding them quickly to make changes is useful, naming them differently helps (unlike my image below) but I've started also changing the colour by clicking on box and selecting any one from the drop down list helps me instantly distinguish from a sea of red layers.

thats all for now. see you all in the new year.

General Errors in Encore

Quick tip for anyone building dvd’s in encore. It is a picky little bitch, it is always good to use an external encoder like adobe media encoder or episode (mac) to pre-render files into mpeg2 format instead of using the transcoder in Encore. Also render the sound files separately where you can, the quality is better sometimes. If you’re getting a general error when you try to build and burn the projects, it is sometimes because one of the  sound or video files has been encoded differently to the others. Encore won’t tell you which one, because its helpful like that.

Settings I’ve found useful are for video:

and for sound

at the end of the day it really depends on how much your trying to squeeze into a shiny disc. I hear dvd studio pro is easier but I have never been able to use it.

Jason

A few freeking awesome artists:

http://john-nevarez.blogspot.com/search?q=paul+felix

Those environments are mind blowing

http://paperwalker.blogspot.com/

Just found him today-kind of oldschool style, just really well done

http://creaturebox.com/

And my favorite of the moment-their book is stunning!

-D

Cross platform helper

http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/

Found this for PC, will allow you to read Mac formatted external hard drives. goodbye FAT32 and your stupid file limit.

Jason

brushes /vectors

anyone got any good sites for brushes / vectors for photoshop illustrator?

dany carlyle

edit detector after effects

Hi Maggots - 

for anyone working with After Effects and large chunks of footage with scene changes 

Tom Sellick is the man for you - well magnum pi-the script

http://aescripts.com/magnum-the-edit-detector/

this is a script that detects edits in footage and automatically cuts em up for you 

freeing you up to watch old re-runs of Magnum P.I while wearing hawian shirts and drinking pina colada's

p.s kris twitch is just a phone call away

Dany Carlyle

Creating a Similar Effect to the 'Twitch' Plug-in

I found this tutorial a little while back when I was working on animation and for the life of me couldn't manage to get a copy of the twitch plug-in.

Its a long work around but good fun with building up groups of effects.

It can be found at -http://www.projuice.org/BuildingEffects.html

Christian

Kworx Media

http://www.kworxmedia.co.uk

Rotoscoping in After Effects

Recently I rotoscope these two horses running diagonally across the frame into camera, shot on a wide angled lense they went from 8 pixels high to filing the screen. not all that much fun. I was lucky, the footage was shot at 100 fps because they were being re-timed later. I used some useful tips from Mark Christiansen's book on studio techniques; such as using multiple mask instead of one horribly complex beast of a mask, starting simple adding points as you need them and keying where possible (the sky was very blue). I also found that with the reddish horses on a green and blue background I was able to duplicate the footage, desaturate the bottom layer then applying the masks to the top layer. This helped to find the edge of a horse by looking for the correct colour pixels, which was handy when zoomed in closely to the footage. Also I recommend making sure cycle mask colours is ticked in your display preferences.
 

then all you need is a quiet room and lots of patience.

-Jason

iTunes ReOrganiser

Here is a lil' itunes wonder (not that creative) but I'm sure it'll help people.

http://www.tuneupmedia.com/index

-Dany