But it is cool, of course, and this fun video shows a brief history & peek into the future of rotoscoping in After Effects:

Related from the archives: “Male-pattern baldness -> Great Photoshop feature“

“Do what you know, and be the best at it.” Hand in hand with this idea means that you DON’T do a whole lot of stuff you don’t know. With this relationship announcement you have two companies who focus on being the very best at what they do…

I wish could go into more detail right now – but stay tuned. This area is about to get very exciting.

See also the Maxon announcement which says, “As part of the alliance, both companies are expected to collaborate and engineer a pipeline between Adobe® After Effects® software and CINEMA 4D to give users a seamless 2D/3D foundation.”

You can read much more detail in this interview on The Atlantic.

Just as interesting to me, from a geeky perspective, is the way the famous & simple Ken Burns effect has morphed into something richer & more ambitious, imparting parallax movement to the various pans & zooms. In fact, the clip above prominently credits After Effects artist Elliot Cowan. Let’s hear it for Content-Aware Fill, “postcards in space,” and more.

[Via Troy Church]

The Fox Is Black writes:

What starts out as a few simple repeating elements soon becomes a chaotic collage of video snippets that take on a life of their own. He says that he uses Photoshop and After Effects for most of his animations, which I find totally astonishing. I’d suggest watching this video several times so that you can fully appreciate the amount of work he had to put into this incredible music video.

Reminds me of Michel Gondry’s impossibly* brilliant video for Kylie Minogue’s Come Into My World:

*if nothing else, in that it gets me to willingly listen to a Kylie Minogue song

As part of AE’s 20th Anniversary celebration, you can:

Join After Effects creators Dave Simons and Dan Wilk as they take you on a trip down memory lane to see how After Effects started—from concept to initial user interface. See how much After Effects has changed throughout the years and why things are simply the way they are.

The event is set for this Thursday at 10am Pacific time. Here’s more info.

That was in 2000, when I first met the brains behind After Effects. (I’d just joined Adobe, aspiring to build “AE for the Web.”) 13 years later, I still feel just the same. In any industry full of half-hit wonders acting like they’ve just cured cancer, I find Dave, Dan, and all the AE guys as relentlessly humble & passionate as can be.

So “Happy 20th anniversary to After Effects, the video package you keep promising yourself you’ll learn someday,” as I saw Matt May quip the other day. Here some pros salute this game-changing app:

Now that he works at Adobe, Dave’s traded his guitar-in-front-of-tablecloth aesthetic for After Effects motion tracking and more. So without further ado, check out “Extraneous Lyrics 2012″:

Includes Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen, Boyfriend by Justin Bieber, We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together by Taylor Swift, Gangnam Style by Psy, Somebody That I Used To Know by Gotye, What Makes You Beautiful by One Direction, and We Are Young by Fun.

We worked with Adobe Flash, Flash Builder, After Effects, Photoshop, and Media Encoder. There were a huge number of assets moving back and forth across these products, so it was important that they could integrate to the pipeline seamlessly. We also benefited greatly from Photoshop’s recent addition of video integration and support. […]

We also had to crop these videos to their minimum canvas area in order to speed up performance for both pieces of software and avoid layering dozens of full-screen clips over one another. Photoshop was a champion here…

He writes,

I had to import and customize the NEF files before I equalized them with the great LR-Timelapse from Gunther Wegner. (Adobe Lightroom is necessary) The observed JPEG had then to be droped into virtual dub and were rendered as AVI. When this was done, I had to stabilize the sequences manually frame by frame (AE motion tracker) and rendered each of them in 3 different sizes: (4928×3264 pixels, 1920×1080 pixels, 1024×768 pixels) Last but not least the snippets were edited fitting to the beautiful title “Diving Through The Blue” by the respectable composer and musician Valentin Boomes.

Here’s a peek behind the scenes:

Pro tip: You can shoot videos like this any day of the week here in San Jose (population 1 million) and never need to do any post-processing. “It’s more necropolis than metropolis,” says my wife. [Via Dave Helmly]

More info about the project is on PetaPixel.

Seeing is believing: I’ve gotten to sit next to PM Michael Coleman as he cruises through high-res video on his MacBook Air, and you’d swear he was tethered to a brawny machine under the desk–not talking via WiFi to a server hundreds of miles away. Here’s a quick demo:

I’m especially proud as this is the project that the other leading Adobe Nack, my wife Margot, has been working on for quite some time. Congrats to the whole team!