TechTip: Math... Yum!

Now and again you might find yourself needing to modify a parameter JUST SO. Perhaps an art director has asked you to 'please move that logo down precisely 115 pixels, and move it 91 pixels to the right. Maybe it's already at 232/ 54, your brain hurts because you've got a perfectionist hanging over your shoulder, and you just can't add the numbers up in your head.

Don't reach for the calculator, let AE do the work. With a layer selected hit the 'P' key to bring up the position parameter. Assuming it's a 2d layer, you'll see two numbers (in the above case, 232 for the x axis position and 54 for the y axis position). Click once on "232" and (as expected) it'll become highlighted and will allow you to type in your changes. Now go to the END of the number and simply type "+115" (without the quotes). It should now say "232+115". Hit 'enter', et voila! AE will do the math for you.

This technique works with simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, but does NOT, alas, work for more complicated math. For instance, it won't calculate "232+5*(4/2)". Which, I'm sure, you do often.

Sticky Roots

Waaaay back in my film school days, I had decided that I wanted to be a cinematographer. I lived Arri's and HMI's, could tie in to electrical panels, and read the ASC Manual every night before hitting the sack. I once built my own steadicam crane (!) out of plywood, 2x2's, bolts and bungie cords (it actually worked, too, but was a tad difficult to maneuver). But then photography intervened. I discovered that it was much easier to create imagery without a huge crew (and buckets of money) and for some time hung out my shingle as a photographer. That led to Photoshop. And that in time led back to motion with After Effects, and here I am!

Film production, photography and motion graphics are to me, at their core, exercises in problem solving. You've got to get the shot, or you've got to get the idea of the editorial across, and you've got all of these cool tools (digital and analog) to make it all come together and look great. But sometimes it all just comes down to a roll of gaffers' tape.

Last summer I picked up the video camera, taped it on to the end of my photo strobe boom and took to the local park to document an earthen structure I helped build back in '05. Earthen building is another one of my passions, and this short clip can show you what you can do with a bit of clay, sand and straw while you wait for those extra-long RAM previews to render :)

Youtube doesn't really do the clip justice, of course, so if you'd like you can take a look at THIS full-rez version of the clip (MP4, h264, 34 megs, 1:51)

Calienté!

Most of my projects these days involve the creation of moving title sequences and show packages. My usual approach is to first create the "hero" frame in After Effects (usually close to the end of the intro, where you see the main title rendering) and then work backwards from there. I find that from this seed grows a mighty oak tree. Or sometimes a lush forest. Or on occasion just some modest shrubbery, as the script may well call for.

I've just finished (or perhaps started) a project that's going in a slightly different direction. A local independent film maker is putting together a proposal for a documentary and wanted to put some imagery into his written grant proposal. Something to "set the mood" for the granting agencies. This was a great opportunity to establish the 'look' of a project from the outset, not only in terms of what might happen once the financing is arranged, but also in terms of putting together a seamless, well-designed production package, which is a necessity for those of us in a creative industry.

Click on the header image at the top of this post to see a larger view of the image that is going on the title page for the grant proposal. Now, I do most of my work in After Effects these days, but it's really nice to get back to my Photoshop roots now and again. Although the application continues to evolve, the fundamentals remain the same.

The interesting thing about this project is that even though it was designed in PS, I had to start planning for the mobile future. Assuming that financing comes through, the doc is going to need motion graphics title sequences, intersticials, credits and such, and I kept all that in the back of my mind as I was laying it out. For instance, when shooting commences, it would be VERY helpful to get some footage of dancers shot against a green screen. Put all of the elements in the title image in 3d space with keyed imagery, and it will be a very compelling motion graphics spot. You might well call this image a 'key frame' from which the entire graphical look of the film may grow.

Idle Dimensional Speculation

Way back in April, I spent some time going on about Adobe's notable lack of a 3d program in their stable of applications. Recently, I've received several marketing spots in my inbox touting the Adobe/ Maxon Power Integration Tour. To the casual observer, it would certainly seem that Adobe and Maxon are getting pretty cozy. Are they dancing, or merely leveraging their respective core strengths? Who's to know! But let's see now... the last date in the tour is here in Toronto on April 3rd. The NAB show takes place in Vegas April 11-17.

Hm!

Copy/ Paste bug in After Effects: Possible FIX

If you're running After Effects on a windows machine, you may have run into a problem where elements that you copy in an application other than AE refuse to paste into AE. For instance, it might happen that you copy some vectors in Illustrator to paste onto a solid in AE, but when you select the solid and choose 'copy-> paste' nothing happens. The same thing might happen if you were to copy text in Wordpad and try to paste into an AE text layer.

You may also have discovered that to get around this problem, you have to quit After Effects and restart, at which point copy/paste works again. Not only is this behaviour a royal pain, but it can be a huge time waster if you've got a massive AE file that takes forever to load.

Having duly submitted the bug to aebugs@adobe.com, I received this email from an adobe employee a short while later...

It was recently brought to our attention that Microsoft has issued a "hotfix" for a condition that commonly causes copy/paste functions to break between After Effects and other applications.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941282
May I please ask you to run the hotfix and see whether it resolves the issue you reported a while back where copy/paste often breaks after an indeterminate time?

It would appear that the offending application is Microsoft Media Player v11. Take a look at 'symptom 1' on the hotfix page linked above and see if it is relevant to your situation. You can even test it by starting AE, then viewing a WMV clip with windows media player and then trying to copy/paste some text into AE. I did, and the paste indeed failed. I then ran the hotfix, and, well, the problem was fixed!

As with all 'patches', YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY. I can therefore not guarantee that the patch will work for you on your system, nor can I guarantee that the patch won't turn your gear into a blubbering pond of goo. I recommend that if you choose to proceed, then backup your system prior to running the hotfix.

While the fix appears to have taken on my system, the adobe contact wrote with the following request...

One possible problem with the hotfix is that the clipboard functions broken by WMP can theoretically be broken by other running applications as well, and apparently the clipboard doesn’t break for all applications, just some, and AE seems to be one of them.

If you should run into this again, please note any other applications that are running when it breaks. Maybe we can get Microsoft to address this more comprehensively, or figure out a more reliable way to handle the API.

So if you DO choose to apply this hotfix and the problem occurs again, send a note to aebugs@adobe.com and be sure to include all of the particulars. Include in your note one or all of the following bug report numbers:
After Effects bug # 46079
Adobe bug # 1663988
Microsoft bug # SRX080114600334

2008 Reel

I've updated my demo reel for the new year... some new, some old, all of it looking and smelling great! Take a couple of minutes out of your busy day and give it a gander HERE. New clients are always welcome, so don't be shy... drop me a line!

Edgy Glints

Have you ever wondered how to create those little traveling glints that you'll see now and again on design lines and element edges? Every designer has their own 'recipe' that works for them, and here you'll find three different strategies that will give your compositions a little extra bit of zing.

First, take a look at THIS little clip (QT, MP4, pjpeg, 1.7 mb) and you'll see a simple composition with three subtly different glints traveling along the edge of the lower 3rd element. Then walk through how it's done with THIS clip (QT, MP4, h.264, 28.8 mb, 16:37).

TechTip: Seeing the Forest for the Trees

Adobe After Effects can look pretty "messy" at times. If you've got a 3d composition with plenty of layers and nulls and cameras and lights and masks, you'll find that your composition view can get pretty... uhhh... well, "dense" would be a kind way of putting it! Even a single layer with a mask can make it difficult to objectively visualize your composition.

Fortunately, there are some quick ways to cut through the trees to see the forest, none of which (alas) involve chain saws and rollicking Coureurs-de-Bois tuneage. Take a look at THIS short tutorial (QT, .MP4, h264, 6:34, 11.8 megs) to see how it's done.

HDRI: Oh My!

I'm in the midst of my first 3d project utilizing the VRay rendering platform out of 3dsMax, including the use of HDRI textures for lighting and reflection. The preliminary results thus far are rather stunning. The big downside, of course, is that the files are rendering like it's 1992 :( Whoops! Time for that new quad-core machine :)

THIS (QT, h264, 5 sec., 3.7 megs) is a very short materials test with a simple glassy texture making use of HDRI lighting and reflections, and refractions. I was helped along by following the simple and excellent VRay tutorials at Aversis (where, incidentally, you can also download some HDRI imagery to play with). Take a gander also at vray-materials.de where you can review and freely download tons of remarkable (and system-humbling) materials.

TechTip: Multi-layer Parameter Manipulation

Let's say you've got a bazillion 3d layers in your After Effects composition, and you want to, say, turn shadow casting 'on' for all the layers. Time to tell the boss you'll be working late, then start opening up twirly's for each and every layer. My wrist hurts just thinking about it!

Fortunately, there is a better way. Take a look at THIS little tutorial (QT .mp4, h264, 4:55, 8.8 megs) and discover a quick, flexible little workflow that not only allows you to quickly (and repetitively) change parameters on any number of layers, but that is nearly fast enough for you to 'toggle back and forth' as you work.

Marking Music

You'll often find yourself with client-supplied music tracks, and of course it's good to have your animations 'work' with the beats. But how can you 'visualize' these beats so you can make informed decisions about where to lay down the keyframes?

Take a look at THIS short tutorial (QT, h264, 3:06, 5.7 megs) explaining one way to quickly give yourself some visual clues to help you with your workflow.

Walkin' in 3d

A client brought me a nice challenge recently: create an opening based upon nothing more than the client-supplied logo. Free reign on the creative! We bounced some ideas back and forth and finally decided to make the logo speak (or rather 'walk') for itself.

The spot was to be executed in After Effects. The trick is, how does one create an entire world in the "flat" AE 3d space? And once that was solved, how then to give all of the letters some personality as they range around the set? And to compound the issues, how does one animate everything whilst keeping an eye on client-side changes that might necessitate whole-sale changes to the movements on scores of layers?

First, take a look at the finished spot HERE (QT, h264, :37, 8.4 mb) Then take a look at THIS project walk-through which gives you an overview of what I did to pull it all together.

Vectorizing Bitmaps

Sometimes you'll find that you need to vectorize a bitmap image (the differences between vector and bitmap imagery are described HERE). The reasons for this are many: perhaps you want to be able to scale it waaay up and don't want the image pixellated. Perhaps it's a "look" that you're going for, or maybe you need imagery to edit and place in a Flash scene.

You can use the 'live trace' functionality in Adobe Illustrator (overview and tut's HERE, technical white paper HERE) but what to do if you don't have Illustrator?

I stumbled across VectorMagic, a research project that came out of the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It's a very effective, easy-to-use web application that does a really nice job converting imagery to vector. Compare the results of VM to Illustrator and Corel HERE. I've played around with it with a few images and have been very impressed with the results (click on the header image on this post), and you certainly can't beat the price: Free!

Max2AE Global Scale

If you use Boomerlabs' "Max2AE" plugin a lot, you've probably come across an issue where you have to scale your After Effects layers very small to get them to fit the 'world space' that was exported from your 3ds Max project. Depending on your project settings, you might find that you need to scale a 3d After Effects layer as small as 1% to get it to 'fit'.

Now the interchange will still "work" visually (things line up where they're supposed to and such), but you'll find yourself saddled with a few gotchas. For instance, dealing with layers that are so 'small' can make layer tranforms (like moving) very difficult to execute when scrubbing in After Effects. Panning around the worldspace can be painful. And most importantly, you'll find that your shadows look AWFUL.

Fortunately, there is a simple way to fix this problem, so long as you know what to look for and plan ahead a bit. Take a look at THIS tutorial (Quicktime, h.264, 9:35, 33 megs) that walks you through the process.

Shortcut-o-rama

Alright, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, one more post on keyboard shortcuts. Paddling around the 'net the other day, I came upon KeyXL... it's the self proclaimed "largest online database of keyboard shortcuts in the world". Be still my beating heart! A quick gander seems to suggest that it is, indeed, a fairly substantial repository of cutz. Granted, many applications aren't followed too closely (kind of weak in the video editing category for instance) but they're right on top of the latest Adobe CS3 suite. Indeed, they seem to be cribbed directly from the Adobe help files.

Ok, so why wouldn't I just hit the "f1" key and check out the kb shortcuts in After Effects? Well, for one thing they're multi-paged in the app 'help', and are thus hard to 'browse' if you're just kicking around on a render looking for something geeky to do. Plus all cutz are close at hand for all apps, making it a fast reference. And you can search the page with your browser keyword 'search' function (ctrl+"F", usually) to locate a particulary pesky shortcut. Worth a look.

Key'd Up

Those who know me know that I'm mad for keyboard shortcuts when using After Effects. And not just because it impresses clients when you use a 'ninja' KB shortcut like "ctrl+alt+shift+'C'" to create a camera, but also because it's the key (so to speak) to a fast, effective After Effects workflow.

The trouble is, you're pretty much stuck with the default shortcuts that ship with After Effects, unless you have the wherewithal to track down and modify the AE KB shortcut text file. This can be a substantial problem for non-US keyboards where certain critical keys (like the '~' key for maximizing windows) may be missing.

Enter Jeff Almasol, scripter par excellence. He's written a script called "Key'd Up" that brings a GUI to modify your KB shortcuts directly from within After Effects. You can find the script (in a package with a few other awesome bits 'n pieces) HERE.

Key'd Up works very well, and at the risk of sounding ungrateful (I'm so very not!) there are a couple of things missing from the script that would make it (to my mind) perfect. First, I'd like to be able to execute a KB shortcut within the script and have the result shown. For instance, if I were to hold down "ctrl+'C'", it would tell me that that shortcut is used to "Copy" a parameter. You CAN do this by selecting a command and changing to the KB shortcut that you'd like to identify, then hit the "Show Usage" button. But this method won't work if I want to rapidly find out what certain key combinations use.

Second, I'd also like to be able to search the 'Categories' and 'Commands'. For instance, AE CS3 replaced my much-loved 'ctrl+"G"' kb shortcut ('go to time') with something else. I'd like to change this behaviour back using Key'd Up, but I couldn't find the "Go To Time" command on the left pane. You'd think it would be in the "Timeline Navigation" category, but alas it's not (it's in the 'General' category, BTW). Again, you can use the 'show usage' button to eventually figure it out, but a quick search would definitely be handy.

All that said, it's a great script that I use often to enhance my workflow. Highly recommended.

And 15 years later...

... I discovered a super-duper, handy-dandy right-click functionality that has probably been in the After Effects application for years but that had for some reason eluded me.

When applying an effect, I often search for what I want in the "Effects and Presets" window (especially after they re-ordered all of the effects with AE v7, like moving 'Beam' from Effects-> Render to Effects-> Generate). But when I know the effect I want (say, Fast Blur) then it's quicker for me to go to the 'Effect-> Blurs...' menu along the top of the application window and choose it from there.

And here is what I discovered... This morning, I pushed the wrong button on my Wacom pen (equivalent to a right-click) while I was hovering over the Effect Control Window, and Lo! what should appear, but all of the effects, ready for me to select! No more do I need to mouse up to the top of the application window! They're all right there! Waiting! Whoo hoooo!

Alright, I know, I know... THAT is a head-slappingly obvious, you've-got-to-be-kidding-me, you-seriously-didn't-know-that? noob discovery. Of COURSE you'll get the freakin' effects when you right-click in the ECW. What else are you going to see? But let s/he who is without blindingly-obvious discoveries in spite of years of experience throw the first raspberry... I bet there are tons of little gems waiting for YOU too. After Effects is a pretty mature app, and it sometimes pays to do something just to see what happens, especially with the right-click button, and those little triangle flyout thingies up in the corner of most palette windows. Explore!

So that's my humbling little discovery 'o th' day that reminds me I'm human after all. What super-obvious gems have YOU discovered in the last little while?

Creating Trees in After Effects

A client came to me recently with a very interesting and challenging project. They wanted to create an instructional DVD and use as source the imagery that had already been created for the print campaign.

The predominant image was a leafy fall branch superimposed over a soft, billowy background. After some consultation, it was decided that I'd make the branch into a 3d tree, and use this 'world space' as the basis for the introduction.

I contemplated tackling the project in 3dsMax, and indeed spent a good deal of time modelling trees and playing around with shaders and textures and such. But in the end, I decided that it would tie into the print campaign best if I were to use the 'actual' imagery. I decided to tackle the project using ONLY After Effects.

Now as most of you know, AE is a "2.5d" application. The worldspace is 3d, but any imagery you have (discounting 3rd party applications such as Invigorator and such) is "flat". Much head scratching ensued, until I finally hit upon a technique that really sold "the look" that I was trying to achieve.

Take a look HERE to see what the fully rendered intro ended up looking like (MPEG4, h.264, 1:04, 7 megs) and then take a gander at THIS tutorial (QT, h264, 25:27 dur, 43.7 mb) that explains the technique in detail, plus walks you through the finished project.

NOTE: at 5:16 in the tut, there is a little editing jump. Cut out accidentally was the step where I changed all of the masks to 'subtract' mode.

In the tutorial I talk about how one can interactively control camera focus distance, and here are the instructions and the necessary expressions code so you can do it too (thanks Harry and Dan for whipping this one up!)

1) Make sure you've got a camera in your composition.
2) Create either a solid or a null and name it "focusControl" (note: you can name your solid when you create it, but to change a null you have to select it in your comp window and hit the 'enter' key. You can then type a new name for it.)
3) Make the solid/null a 3d object.
4) Apply this expression to the "Focus Distance" parameter of your camera:

length(thisComp.layer("focusControl").transform.position, toWorld([0,0,0]))

The camera will now focus wherever your null or solid happens to sit. This expression is golden when you're doing a lot of Depth of Field work.

Whipping Masks

Yes, I've wanted to discipline my masks in the past, especially when I had one mask that I wanted to use on multiple layers. Copy, paste. Copy, paste. Copy, paste. And then the art director tells me that they want to change the shape.

Gah!

And then AE CS3 came along. Plenty of great new features, but dig a little deeper and you'll see mention of a new capability a LONG time coming... the ability to pickwhip masks.

Whoo hoo! No more copying and pasting! Now when I need to use masks, I can create just ONE, and link it to any number of layers across any number of comps via expressions, specifically the pickwhip.

Click HERE for a very short overview of what it is and how it works (QT, h.264, 3:38, 3.8 mb).

AE shadows on Rendered 3d Clips

Take a close look at the header image. Nothing too special about it, is there? There is some AE text, and it's in a composition above a "wood textured" AE bitmap layer with some rendered 3d imagery composited over it all. Right? Wrong. There are only TWO elements in the scene: The text, and a 'flat' 3d image sequence rendered out of 3dsMax.

So how is the text throwing a shadow on a 'flat' image rendered out of a 3d application, matching the scene, AE objects and camera moves perfectly? Can't After Effects only throw shadows onto it's own layers? Maybe, or maybe not!

Thanks to the opportunities afforded artists by Boomerlabs' "Max2AE" plugin and some tricky compositing, you CAN cast shadows from your After Effects layers 'onto' imagery rendered out of3dsMax. You can also use the same technique if you use Cinema4d, Maya and other popular 3d applications that have integration with After Effects.

Click HERE to view a Quicktime tutorial walking you through the technique (QT, h.264, 16:27, 19.7 mb).