After Effects region of interest

If you’re running After Effects on Mac OS and you have a full keyboard (as opposed to the crippled sub-keyboards on the new MacBook Pro laptops), then you can very easily tell After Effects to generate a list of all plug-ins loaded into After Effects, including version numbers.

Just press Command+Option+Shift+Help. (No, not the Help menu command. There’s a Help button on full Macintosh keyboards. It’s on the right side on my keyboard.)

But what if you’re running After Effects on Windows or using one of the new, maddeningly incomplete MacBook Pro keyboards? Don’t worry. The command is still available. You just have to remap the keyboard shortcut to a different key combination.

Just change this line in the shortcuts file and then restart After Effects:

“WriteVersionFileExtra” = “(Ctrl+Alt+Shift+HELP)”

I mapped mine to Ctrl+Alt+Shift+1 on Windows, like this:

“WriteVersionFileExtra” = “(Ctrl+Alt+Shift+1)”

You can find the shortcuts file on Windows in the Application Data\Adobe\After Effects\ directory, the same directory that contains the preferences file. For example, this is where the file is on my Windows XP system:

C:\Documents and Settings\kopriva\Application Data\Adobe\After Effects\9.0\Adobe After Effects 9.0 Shortcuts.txt

David Torno’s work on the Pistol Youth video for “In My Eyes” has gotten a lot of positive feedback. He used After Effects together with mocha-AE to replace the faces of the Golden Girls with the face of Bradley Hanan Carter of Pistol Youth. The result is as impressive as it is entertaining.

Now, David has done us all a huge service by posting two detailed videos in which he explains exactly how he did the tracking, compositing, and other post-production work for this piece:

• part 1 (basic)
• part 2 (advanced)

Though it’s easy to focus on the motion tracking aspects of these video tutorials, I think that they’re just as valuable for the tidbits about rotoscoping, color correction, and time remapping—all of which are crucial for integrating one shot with another as David has done so well. He even shows how to degrade the high-definition footage of Bradley Hanan Carter so that it fits better with the, um, cruddy VHS footage of the Golden Girls.

Thanks, David!

Adobe has just posted a new demonstration and white paper (PDF) that show how to create a searchable video using CS4 Production Premium.

A couple of months ago, I posted about a way to do this using Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Flash. This new paper and demonstration show how to use Soundbooth to create an XML file that contains the metadata, rather than using After Effects scripting to convert cue points.

There are many ways to use the XMP metadata features in Creative Suite 4 Production Premium. Hopefully, these two different approaches to the same problem will help you to see the breadth of these tools.

The Adobe user-to-user forums have switched over to a new underlying software system. I like it (mostly), but there are a few new things to get used to. I’ll try to lay out the basics here as well as I can.

You should also read this post on Mylenium’s blog, which provides some additional tips and color commentary. (Speaking of Mylenium and forums, here’s a blog post in which I join him in pleading for some common sense on forums.)

If you want to discuss the new forum software (rather than the After Effects forum specifically), please do so using this forum, which was created for exactly this purpose. There’s an FAQ list about the forum software, too.

new links and some navigation tricks

• main After Effects forum (and here’s its RSS feed)
• After Effects FAQ list (and here’s its RSS feed)
• After Effects scripting forum (and here’s its RSS feed)
• After Effects SDK (plug-in developer) forum (and here’s its RSS feed)
• After Effects expressions forum (and here’s its RSS feed)
• After Effects resources forum (and here’s its RSS feed)

I like using the RSS feeds. Once a day or so, I can open my feed reader (I use Google Reader) and browse through all of the posts that have come in since the last time I checked. The web interface for the forum also sorts threads with recent activity to the top, and the titles are shown as bolder and darker for threads that have unread posts in them. You can navigate to the most recent post in a thread from the list of threads by clicking the “[some time] ago” text in the Last Post column.

What I don’t like is the email notification interface, which brings us to…

disabling automatic flooding of your email inbox

I answered a question about these nuisance email messages with a screenshot here.

Sure, some people might want to receive an email message for each time that a post is made on a thread that they’ve participated in. But I don’t.

forcing the forums to use the full width of the browser window

By default, the forum messages only take up a fixed, somewhat narrow part of the browser window. If you want to force the messages to take full advantage of the horizontal space available in a wide browser window, follow these instructions from forum host Andrew Yoole.

script to show and hide the pods in the right sidebar

You can get even more usable horizontal space by temporarily hiding the pods in the right sidebar. Here’s a link to a forum post in which Eric@MCA explains how.

new FAQ list (currently in its infancy)

The After Effects FAQ list is intended to be a real FAQ list. You know—a list of questions that people really do frequently ask. Unlike the other forums, this one is pretty heavily moderated. The forum hosts (including me) will prune away and consolidate some answers so that the list serves its purpose as a somewhat definitive set of questions and answers. That said, I do encourage people to contribute both questions and answers to this effort. Over the next few days, I’ll be migrating the relevant parts of our old FAQ list to this new place.

using the History navigation tools

If you spend a lot of time on several different forums, you might benefit from bookmarking this page: History page showing recently visited forums

(If you haven’t visited any forums yet, or if you’re not signed in, that’s not going to be very useful.)

This page gives you direct links to your favorite forums. Or, if you’re just on the After Effects forums, then you could bookmark the main After Effects page and use the subforum pod on the side.