After Effects region of interest

Michael Coleman is tracking the status of After Effects on Snow Leopard on his blog.

But there’s one issue that I wanted to make sure that everyone saw:

After Effects CS4 (9.0.0) on Snow Leopard doesn’t work well with Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing. You must update to After Effects CS4 (9.0.2) if you are going to use Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing on Snow Leopard.

Of course, there are so many other reasons to update that you’ve already done it, right? Right?

from Michael Coleman’s blog:

“This week we’re going to try something different. I’m going to publish a phone number that will let you call into our Friday wine down.

Anyone can call and there is no agenda. We just want to invite you to share some time with us. You can ask us questions, tell us about something cool you’re working on or urge us to go in a certain direction, pitch your favorite feature — whatever. We may even have a few questions for you. ”

[This post gives instructions for how to send feedback about After Effects. Don't send your feedback about After Effects by adding comments to this blog post.]

One of my favorite design blogs, GoMediaZine recently posted an article near and dear to me.

George reminds people that the best, most direct, most effective way to communicate with Adobe about bugs and feature requests is to use the official feature-request/bug-report form. In After Effects, you can open that form by choosing Help > Send Feedback in the application itself.

Posting rants on forums may feel good, but don’t count on it helping you or helping the software improve. The After Effects team doesn’t necessarily see every post on every forum, but we do see every entry through the the official feature-request/bug-report form.

It also helps a lot if you opt into the Product Improvement Program.

Also, be sure to use the crash reporter.

We really do read all of the bug reports and feature requests, and the software really does get a lot of benefit from detailed crash reports.

Of course, forums are good for asking questions about how to use software like After Effects. I especially recommend the Adobe After Effects user-to-user forum. Several motion graphics and visual effects professionals help people on that forum. I monitor that forum, too, so I can help you to get an answer there. When asking such a question, please supply information about the version number of your software, some details about your computer, et cetera.

If you are going to post your problem on a forum, then please follow some basic best practices that will help you get help faster and keep the forum hosts happy. The number one best practice for posting a question on a forum is to be sure to do your own search first and check the FAQ list so that you’re not wasting people’s time asking a question that has been answered a hundred times before.

Don’t forget about contacting Adobe Technical Support or Customer Service, too. For information on how to contact Adobe Technical Support, see this page. (Note that you must register your product before you can open a technical support case for it.)

If you have tried to get help from our support staff, but the service was inadequate, I can help you to escalate your issue if you send me your case number at kopriva at adobe dot com. You must provide me a case number. I am not offering to solve your problem myself; rather, I am willing to forward your information to someone if you have already hit a dead end with our Technical Support or Customer Service.

If you have feedback about the content of the After Effects Help document, then please add a comment at the bottom of the relevant page. You can add comments to add information, to add links, to make corrections, or to ask for clarification.

If you want to keep up with the After Effects team, then you can follow our blogs, Facebook page, Twitter feed, and so on.

Oh, and I can’t resist this opportunity to remind you to update to the most recent version of the application. Don’t be surprised when the first thing that you hear back from us is that you need to install the latest updates. We fix a lot of things in updates, and we don’t want to go chasing bugs that we’ve already fixed. We’ll keep you posted on our blogs, Facebook page, and Twitter feed about updates as they become available.

Someone just asked on a forum what the earliest works to use After Effects were. That conversation caused Dave Simons to hand me the After Effects 1.1 demo reel from 1993. Of course, I just had to post it.

The movie does have sound—just not in the first few segments. I think that this is from primordial times, before we learned that motion graphics without audio might as well be a blank screen. Even smooth jazz is (a little) better than silence.

If you have some old, old After Effects work to point to, let me know in the comments.

I like this new AIR application for searching and browsing keyboard shortcuts.

This application contains a database of all of the keyboard shortcuts for all of the applications in Creative Suite 4.

To see all of the shortcuts, be sure to click All Categories. The default Essentials view just shows a small subset.

For After Effects, the information appears to be identical to that in the “Keyboard shortcuts” section of After Effects Help. (I’d recognize my own writing anywhere.)

I like the search features in the AIR application, and I also like the fact that I have the shortcuts for all of the applications that I use all in one place.

If you want to search for keyboard shortcuts in After Effects CS4 Help, you can do that, too.

For information on editing keyboard shortcuts, see the top of this page.

David Van Brink is a smart, creative guy who likes to play with After Effects. Even better, he likes to share the products of his play with others.

For example, he provides a quick video walkthrough and downloadable example project that show off some of the things that you can do with the Particle Playground effect.

As you can see, I’ve already included links to some of David’s posts in After Effects Help.

I’m working my way through his other blog posts, learning and smiling. I like it when I can do both of those things at once. I’ll post back with some more information about what I find, but I just wanted to say sooner rather than later how much I like the omino pixel blog.

Amusing, mostly unrelated side note: John Nack used to make tutorials about using After Effects and Flash together. Eight years sure is a long time ago in this industry. (link through the wayback machine to John’s olde-timey tutorials)

I recently watched the 15 episodes published so far in Steve Holmes’s “Real World Footage Effects” podcast on the Artbeats website.

I like it.

Artbeats obviously has an agenda in mind—to sell more of their stock footage—but Steve manages to showcase these assets without being… well… an annoying shill. His experience shows through his practical techniques, and his demeanor is both professional and pleasant. (His experience and creativity also show in the demo reel for Energi Design, for which Steve is the Creative Director.)

Throughout the episodes, Steve is showing you how to make use of stock footage in your After Effects projects. In doing so, he shows some crucial, bread-and-butter techniques. Consider that few if any of the following items in a stock footage asset are going to exactly match your needs for a specific project:

• duration
• timing
• colors
• dimensions (width and height)
• presence of an alpha channel

So, in showing you how to get the most out of the Artbeats clips, Steve shows how to do the following:

• trim, extend, and slip-edit layers
• trim footage items
• time-remap and time-stretch layers
• correct and adjust colors
• scale layers
• crop layers with simple masks
• create and use mattes
• …and use a variety of clever techniques to create and extract alpha channel information for compositing

• Episode 1: Glow effect and motion blur
• Episode 2: time-remapping, video editing (e.g., trimming and sequencing layers)
• Episode 3: Displacement Map effect
• Episode 4: lights, casting shadows, and accepting shadows
• Episode 5: Compound Blur effect
• Episode 6: more time-remapping, with both fast and slow motion
• Episode 7: layer styles, including a good tip for light altitude in Bevel And Emboss
• Episode 8: track mattes
• Episode 9: Steve’s trick with the Linear Wipe effect for cropping
• Episode 10: stacking and compositing 3D layers of smoke
• Episode 11: day-to-night color adjustment and using Motion Tile to repeat an SD rain asset across a larger (HD) frame
• Episode 12: Steve’s trick with Shift Channels and Remove Color Matting to knock the black out of a clip of a candle flame
• Episode 13: copying mask from Photoshop, free-transforming masks, mask expansion
• Episode 14: animating a camera to add a camera move to a high-definition image in post-production
• Episode 15: Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator Pro plug-in

Here are two techniques that Steve demonstrates and uses quite often:

When Steve needs to use a clip of fire or smoke that was shot against a black background, he reliably reaches for the Shift Channels effect and the Remove Color Matting effect. He uses the former to take the alpha channel value from either the luminance or (in the case of fire) the red channel of the image. Of course, since the black areas have neither luminance nor red, this sets the alpha channel value to 0 in the black areas. In other words, it keys out the black. The use of the Remove Color Matting effect is to get rid of the remaining traces of the black background in areas of partial transparency (of which there are many in a shot of fire or smoke).

There are many ways to composite a clip with a black background, from the use of something like Knoll Unmult (which is best for keying out black in clips with light effects, like fire and flares) to the use of a blending mode like Screen.

Steve’s technique seems to be more versatile than using blending modes when you’re using the same asset in a variety of different ways, because it actually creates alpha information. This is a good tool to have in the ol’ utility belt.

Normally, the Linear Wipe effect is used to make a transition from one layer being visible to the layer(s) under it being visible. You know, a wipe.

Steve has found another use for this effect.

When he wants to crop a layer from one side, he reaches for the Linear Wipe effect, sets the Transition Completion property to a static value, sets the feather amount, and voila!—cropping done. In some cases, he’ll crop from multiple angles with multiple instances of the effect, each with a different feather amount. That’s something that you can’t do with a single mask, since a mask has the same feather all the way around.