Version 1.7 of the REDCODE importer plug-in was just released.
That, along with the After Effects 9.0.2 update yesterday, means that you now have all that you need to make great use of RED (R3D) footage with After Effects CS4. I have some instructions on using the new features at the end of this post.
Today, the After Effects 9.0.2 update was released.
If Adobe Update Manager hasn’t already told you about this, go ahead and check for new updates for After Effects CS4. (Choose Help > Updates, or go to the download pages for Windows or Mac OS and click the “Adobe After Effects CS4 9.0.2 update” link.)
There are a lot of fixes and tweaks in this update. You can read about them in the After Effects 9.0.2 release notes. I’ll mention a few here, though, since some of these are important enough that I really want to make sure that people see them.
If you’re updating from 9.0.0, you might want to read about the changes that were made in the 9.0.1 update, too. The 9.0.2 update is cumulative, so you’ll get the 9.0.1 fixes with it.
You can skip to the last section of this post if you just care about the RED (R3D) support update.
["Misc Section"]
"Flush RQ Rendering Every X Seconds (0 = off)" = "0"
Note: Turning off this check (by setting to 0) will no longer preserve a portion of the completed render, but can allow the render to complete without stopping. Also, this setting will not appear in the preferences file until you render with this version of After Effects 9.0.2, but you can add it manually before launching After Effects.
Here’s a partial list of things that we fixed. (Note that we were able to find and fix a lot of these problems because of the great feedback that we got when we asked people to use the Adobe Crash Reporter. Please keep doing so. And don’t hesitate to file bugs and send feature requests.)
There’s a known issue with a specific update scenario:
If you downloaded the After Effects 9.0 trial, then updated to After Effects 9.0.1, and then activated the application with a serial number after purchasing a license (all in exactly that order), then the After Effects 9.0.2 update will fail to update your third-party content, like the Cycore (CC) effect plug-ins. It appears that uninstalling the third-party content and then restarting the application will cause the updated third-party content to be installed correctly.
If this doesn’t work for you, please let us know on the After Effects user-to-user forum, and we’ll try to help you through it. There’s also contact information for Adobe Technical Support on the home page of that forum, and you can get free assistance with many installation issues.
See the After Effects 9.0.2 release notes for other known issues.
You can get the new REDCODE importer plug-in from the RED website. You need version 1.7 of the REDCODE importer plug-in to take advantage of the new features for RED (R3D) footage in After Effects 9.0.2.
The good folks at RED provide a set of release notes and a pretty detailed document (RED Plugin Workflow Guide.pdf) with the installer for version 1.7 of the REDCODE importer plug-in. You really should read the whole thing, but here are some important things that bear reiteration:
For more information about RED and the Premiere Pro 4.1 update, see the Adobe Premiere Pro training blog.
David Helmly provides an overview of new features in Premiere Pro CS4 (4.1) and After Effects CS4 (9.0.2) in a video on Adobe TV. The RED stuff starts at about 14:35, and the After Effects stuff starts at 20:55. He’s also got an overview that concentrates on the Premiere Pro features here.
When you start After Effects, it presents a welcome screen, which includes a tip of the day. A few people have asked for a document that contains all of the tips of the day, so that they can be searched or browsed more easily. So, here it is. (Or you can download a PDF version.)
I’d think that people would have a better experience searching the much more comprehensive After Effects CS4 Help document, rather than a somewhat random and redundant assortment of tips, but I also like to give people what they want.
If you have tips of your own to contribute, please do so by leaving a comment at the bottom of the relevant page of After Effects Help on the Web. Pretty please?
(Note: The tips in the application are specific to one operating system or the other with regard to modifier keys like Ctrl versus Command and Alt versus Option. I’m giving the Windows version here, only because my Mac is about 10km away as I write this. I trust that nearly everyone reading this knows how to map the Windows version to the Mac OS version. The Help document gives both.)
I just saw a message that referred to the “top 6 undiscoverable menu commands” in After Effects. I thought that I might be able to make them a bit more discovered (if not more discoverable) by broadcasting a short message telling y’all about them.
View > Look at Selected Layers
This is handy for orienting a 3D view to look at selected layers. It’s otherwise too easy to get lost in a huge 3D world, not really knowing where you’re looking.
Layer > Mask > Hide Locked Masks
This works well with Layer > Mask > Lock Other Masks. To isolate one mask, you can lock other masks and then hide locked masks.
Layer > Mask and Shape Paths > Free Transform Points
Free-transforming a set of path points (vertices) is a way to scale, position, or rotate a set of vertices together.
Composition > Crop Comp To Region Of Interest
The value of this should be obvious… once you know that it exists.
Layer > Transform > Fit To…
You can scale a layer in many ways, including fitting the layer to the composition’s height or width, preserving the layer’s original image aspect ratio.
View > View Options
You can toggle which layer controls (light wireframes, layer handles, mask and shape paths, effect control points, motion path controls) to show in a view.
Chris Jackson’s book, Flash + After Effects was written for After Effects CS3 and Flash CS3, but there’s still a lot of great information in this book for users of After Effects CS4 and Flash CS4.
For example, the chapter on exporting SWF files from After Effects is just as relevant as it was when it was written, since that feature hasn’t really changed since After Effects CS3. I found Chris’s chapter to be a really good practical companion to the reference section in After Effects Help, “Render and export a composition as a SWF file”.
Similarly, the techniques described in the chapter on creating SWF files and QuickTIme movies from Flash for import into After Effects are still valid and useful. I think that Chris did an especially good job of explaining the technical specifications of video standards for the Flash user, so that you can prepare your work in Flash such that it works well on a TV screen. (One change for CS4, though, is an update to pixel aspect ratios and frame dimensions.)
Of course, we also added a few things to After Effects CS4 to make integration with Flash better, like exporting a composition to an XFL file. I hope that Chris covers those in a new edition of this book soon. But, until he does, you’d be well served to pick up the currently available version and check out the “Rendering and exporting for Flash Professional and Flash Player” section of After Effects Help for the new stuff.
Someone asked on a forum recently how they could make radial rays in After Effects.
This is actually really easy using a single shape layer. You just make a polystar (the hybrid object that can be used for polygons or stars) with a huge inner radius and 0 outer radius. Then you can tweak the number of points to change the number of rays and change the outer roundness to change the thickness of the rays.
An additional hack is to set the stroke width to be pretty high, which gives the color to the rays that aren’t filled by the standard fill. (To make this work, I had reorder the stroke and fill to make the fill paint over the stroke.) You could also just use the stroke in the normal way and let an underlying solid-color layer or other shape provide the alternating rays’ color.
I discovered recently that most people don’t know about the loopOut and loopIn expression methods, which allow you to tell After Effects to loop or continue an animation in many different ways. The details about loopIn and loopOut are in After Effects Help, but an infomographic is worth a gazillion words.
Marcus Geduld just released a new book, After Effects Expressions, on Focal Press.
The fine folks at Focal Press have made a couple of excerpts of this book available on the Web. These samples have some great example expressions, as well as some explanation of how some of the trickier parts of the expression system work.
In the “String Manipulation” section, Marcus shows how to use basic JavaScript to manipulate the text in the Source Text property of a layer. He even shows how to use an array of strings so that a layer’s Source Text property can be set to a specific word from a list.
In the “Physical Simulations” section, Marcus shows how to use expressions for orbits, bounces, jiggles, and collision detection. I know that math is scary, but just learning to use some basic trigonometry can make realistic animations so much easier. Marcus shows how.
(BTW, Dan Ebberts also has an excellent page on collision detection.)
And, of course, there’s a lot of information in the “Expressions” chapter of After Effects Help:
Peachpit Press has released several books recently that include material about Camera Raw. These books were written with a Photoshop focus, but the Camera Raw information is almost all equally relevant to After Effects.
Peachpit has done us all the great service of making some excerpts from these books available on their website. I’m sure that many of you will want to buy these books after you’ve checked out these useful free samples.
Conrad Chavez describes the changes introduced in Camera Raw 5.2 in an excerpt from his book, Real World Adobe Photoshop CS4 .
Bruce Fraser and Jeff Schewe provide instructions for using Camera Raw to evaluate images in an excerpt from their book, Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS4.
Ben Willmore and Dan Ablan provide a very detailed explanation of Camera Raw in an excerpt from their book, Adobe Photoshop CS4 Studio Techniques.
Of course, I also recommend reading through the Help sections on Camera Raw:
Layers magazine just posted their “Fourth Annual Layers 100 Wicked Tips” article, which includes 10 tips about After Effects.
Some of the tips are about increasing efficiency, and some of them are about more creative aspects.
Here’s a list of the 10 tips:
For details about each, see the article and the section of After Effects Help listed after each tip above.