After Effects region of interest

[There was a breakdown in communication that necessitated me taking this blog post down for a little while. I think that we've got it worked out, so let's try again...]

It pains me to say it, but Trish and Chris Meyer are better at my job than I am.

They’ve been writing books about After Effects for much longer than I have, and their aesthetic sense is better developed than mine.

So, in an attempt to make their expertise immediately available to you, I asked the good folks at Focal Press—who publish the Meyers’ books—to post some excerpts of these books on the Web. They kindly agreed, and so now I can point to these excerpts to flesh out some of the explanations of concepts and techniques in After Effects Help.

I hope that you read these newly posted excerpts and decide to buy the books. They’re truly required reading.

I won’t be publishing a new version of After Effects CS4 Help for at least another couple of weeks, so here is a list of the excerpts from the Meyers’ books that you can use right now. I’m also including a link to the section of After Effects Help that will soon host each of these links, and where you can already go for more details about each topic.

Happy reading!

After Effects Apprentice: Real-World Skills for the Aspiring Motion Graphics Artist

“Layer Control”: moving, trimming, reordering, and sequencing layers
(For more information, see “Selecting and arranging layers” in After Effects CS4 Help on the Web.)

“Creating Transparency”: basics of masks
(For more information, see “Alpha channels, masks, and mattes” in After Effects CS4 Help on the Web.)

“Parenting and Nesting: basics of parenting, precomposing, and nesting
(For more information, see “Nesting, precomposing, and pre-rendering” and “Parent and child layers” in After Effects CS4 Help on the Web.)

Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects (4th Edition)

“All About Track Mattes”: pretty much what the title says: luma mattes, alpha mattes, mattes, mattes, mattes…
(For more information, see “Track mattes and traveling mattes” in After Effects CS4 Help on the Web.)

“Shape Layers”: basics of creating shapes
(For more information, see “Overview of shape layers, paths, and vector graphics” in After Effects CS4 Help on the Web.)

“Integrating with 3D Applications”: introduction to importing 3D data from 3D applications (and what to do in those 3D applications to get the best results in After Effects)
(For more information, see “Preparing and importing 3D image files” in After Effects CS4 Help on the Web.)

Peachpit Press publishes many books about using Adobe applications, including the Classroom in a Book (CIB) and Studio Techniques series. The CIB series is good for beginners, providing step-by-step instructions and basic overviews that provide an introduction to a creative application like After Effects. The Studio Techniques series is more for intermediate and advanced users, providing detailed instruction about techniques that the pros use to achieve high-end results.

Peachpit posts free excerpts of these books on their articles page. I use the RSS feed for this page to keep up with what’s new from Peachpit.

Here are some links to a few of the notable excerpts posted recently for After Effects.

This excerpt from the After Effects Classroom in a Book gives a friendly, click-by-click introduction to After Effects workflow:
“Getting to Know the Workflow”
(Yes, this was written for After Effects CS3, but the features covered in this excellent tutorial are not significantly changed in After Effects CS4.)

This excerpt from the After Effects CS4 Classroom in a Book provides a basic introduction to animating with keyframes:
“Keyframing a Motion Path in After Effects CS4″

This excerpt from After Effects CS4 Studio Techniques gives detailed instruction for using Keylight to do color keying in After Effects:
“Using Keylight for Adobe After Effects CS4″

A couple of excerpts from the After Effects CS4 Visual QuickPro Guide give an overview of the user interface and how to view and preview items in After Effects:
“How to Use All Those Panels”
“Controlling the View in the Footage Panel in After Effects CS4″ (which is an oddly narrow name for a section that talks about a lot more than the Footage panel)

In a previous post, I mentioned that we have a new white paper that explains the new image state adjustment features in After Effects CS4 and Photoshop CS4. One of our more savvy power users pointed out that the white paper and the After Effects Help section about these image state adjustments left some important questions inadequately answered:

The new document is a bit opaque, and upon initial reading at least, fails to answer a central question: Why?

I guess the question is: What should I do to modify my workflow to be even more correct?
1) Set my Project Working Space or Output Module to the display profile?
2) Leave the above at the scene profile, and just enable output simulation to the display profile?
3) If I’m not [supremely persnickety power user], just ignore it altogether for right now?

And by that, I’m just talking “which profile do I assign” – I haven’t even gotten to the Project Settings checkbox!!!

Here’s what the person who wrote the code and the white paper said in response:

The new option to compensate for scene-referred profiles should be checked. This is the “more correct” option. It is presented as an option in Project settings so legacy projects will look the same in CS4 (the option would be unchecked in this case).

For HD/SD workflows, using this option has the effect of turning on Output Simulation for HDTV/SDTV. When viewed, the pixels in the scene-referred HDTV (Rec. 709) color space are interpreted as they would appear rendered on an HDTV monitor while the compositing is still done using the scene-referred tone curve in the HDTV (Rec. 709) color space.

I would not recommend setting the Project Working Space to your monitor as your monitor may have unique (and in some cases quite strange) behavior. That behavior is modeled by the monitor profile and used by the color management system to draw effectively to the monitor screen. However, this unique behavior (like channel cross-over if your monitor is really screwed up) my cause unexpected and unwanted results when compositing. Best to stick with a more “device-independent” color space like HDTV (Rec. 709). Also, if you are sharing projects with someone else, they will get the HDTV profile with their project (it’s embedded) and this may be valuable metadata. “Oh, this project is built for Rec 709.”. If they get a project that has your monitor profile embedded, they may scratch their heads a bit, especially if your monitor profile has an esoteric name.

Check out the new After Effects Help and Support Center.

In addition to a Community Help search field, this page has links to community resources, tutorials, forums, blogs, Help, Adobe Technical Support, SDK and scripting documentation, and just about everything else that you need to use and learn After Effects.

Make sure that you expand the groups of links in the right column. There’s a lot of good stuff in there.

Some users will be prompted to fill out a survey to give us feedback. Please leave feedback. We need to know what’s working for you and what isn’t.

After Effects CS4 Help is live, and now all of the links should work (unlike the beta build posted earlier).

At the bottom of each page is an Add Comment button. Please use it.

Add a comment to a page to point out an error on that page.

Add a comment to a page to link to a tutorial that is relevant to the topic of that page. Yes, you can and should link to your own stuff, as long as it’s relevant and good. I would be be thrilled if someone were to add a lot of comments to Help that point to tutorials and other resources on Toolfarm, Video Copilot, et cetera. (I’d be especially thrilled if the links were on the most relevant Help pages, not just added willy-nilly)

If we get a comment about an online resource that isn’t already in our After Effects Community Help search database, then we can add it.

You can even add a comment to a page to tell us that we did a good job on that page. (No, no one really does that. And that makes us sad.)

If you add a comment to the most relevant page and that comment adds information, then you can get points. When a moderator approves a comment, they decide how substantial and appropriate the contribution is, and points are awarded based on these evaluations. What good are points? Among other things, they are one of the bases on which we promote users to moderator status.

One thing that comments are _not_ for is ongoing, threaded conversation, such as conversations about troubleshooting issues. Those conversations belong more on forums like After Effects user-to-user forum. If we do get troubleshooting comments and questions on the Help pages, we’ll most likely just redirect them to the Technical Support system and the forums.

We just posted two white papers for After Effects CS4 on the After Effects Developer Center.

The first paper is an updated version of the color management white paper that we published for After Effects CS3. It tells you click by click, step by step, how to use color management features in After Effects and Photoshop for various outputs. Separate workflows are provided for HDTV, digital cinema, and SWF outputs.

See the Color management workflow in After Effects CS4 white paper.

The second paper is much shorter. It explains the difference between scene-referred and output-referred color profiles, and it explains why you should care.

See the Image state adjustment in After Effects CS4 color workflows white paper.

Here’s an excerpt from the “Gamma and tone response” section of After Effects CS4 Help that gives the basics about image state adjustment in After Effects CS4:

Color profiles are said to be scene-referred if their tone-response curves are based on the conditions in the typical scene. Color profiles are said to be output-referred if their tone-response curves are based on the conditions in the typical viewing environment.

By default when you use color management, After Effects automatically adjusts the contrast of images when converting between scene-referred color profiles and output-referred color profiles. This automatic conversion is based on the gamma values specified in the HDTV video standard.

To disable this automatic color transformation, deselect Compensate For Scene-referred Profiles in the Project Settings dialog box (File > Project Settings).

The Compensate For Scene-referred Profiles feature also exists in Adobe Photoshop CS4, but this feature does not exist in other applications. To match the colors in other applications—including After Effects CS3 and earlier—disable this automatic conversion. When you open a project created in After Effects CS3 or earlier, the Compensate For Scene-referred Profiles option is deselected.

Note: Some links within these documents may not work yet. We’re still in the early days of posting documents for After Effects CS4. I figured that you’d rather have these posted now than wait until we got all of the kinks ironed out.

People seem to like video tutorials. Heck, I’m probably the person with the most invested in the After Effects Help document, and even I have to admit that sometimes I’d rather watch Aharon Rabinowitz or Andrew Kramer than read a Help document.

We point to a lot of video tutorials from Help. Many of these video tutorials live on websites other than the Adobe website and are provided by other members of the community. But we also provide some of our own. For Creative Suite 3, we used the Adobe Video Workshop, but now we’re moving toward using Adobe TV. You’ll still find a lot of useful material in the Video Workshop, since a lot of things are still the same between After Effects CS3 and After Effects CS4.

Here’s a link to a page that catalogs the video tutorials available now on Adobe TV and in the Video Workshop that are relevant to After Effects CS4:

Video tutorials for After Effects CS4

There will certainly be more added over time.

You can search After Effects Help for video tutorials linked to in context, too.

(We provide and point to many video tutorials in languages other than English, too. See “After Effects video tutorials, esercitazioni, tutoriales, didacticiels, Lehrgänge, チュートリアル”.)

Tip: When you’re using a video tutorial that was created for After Effects CS3, you can use this page to determine what instructions may need to be modified because of changes made for AFter Effects CS4: “User interface changes from After Effects CS3 to After Effects CS4″