After Effects region of interest

Our technical support staff has put together a new document that collects the issues reported on this blog and Michael Coleman’s blog about After Effects on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

See “Known issues with Adobe After Effects CS4 in Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)”.

In case you haven’t done so already, I recommend that you check out Christopher Green’s website, where he provides several very useful (and some merely interesting) scripts.

Here’s a list of his scripts that I find especially useful:

• Connect_Vertex_to_Point: Link a mask vertex to any two-dimensional point (such as a Position property or effect control point) to animate individual mask points independently of one another.
• Queue_Comp_Sections: Use multiple guide layers to designate multiple time spans to be rendered and exported separately through the render queue. As Chris puts it, “This is sort of like having multiple work area settings for a composition.”
• Project_Items_Renamer and Selected_Layers_Renamer: Rename compositions and footage items selected in the Project panel or layers selected in the Timeline panel. You can search and replace text in the names, append characters to the beginning or end of the names, or trim a specified number of characters from the beginning or end of the names. The layer renamer also allows you to replace the names with a series of numbers.
• Selected_Comps_Changer: Change the composition settings for multiple compositions selected in the Project panel.
• crg_Text_from_File: Create one or multiple text layers based on the contents of a text file. You can either create one text layer from all of the text, or you can create one layer for each line in the text file. The script also provides options for leading and other spacing.

There are many more scripts on his site; the ones above are just the ones that I have found especially useful.

Oh, and there’s a Donate button on his site. I can confirm that it works. I’m just sayin’.

If you want to find even more useful scripts, check out the “Where to find additional useful scripts” section of After Effects Help, where Chris is now listed alongside such creators of useful scripts as Dan Ebberts, Jeff Almasol, Paul Tuersley, Mathias Möhl, Charles Bordenave (nab), and Lloyd Alvarez.

Please take one or both of the following surveys about tasks that you might do in After Effects. Pretty please? Your doing so will help us to learn what people are having trouble with and how we can make it better.

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Thank you.

I’ve been working lately on providing concise introductory sections in After Effects Help that each give an overview of a topic, provide some related tips, and then give a bunch of useful links to more detailed information.

I’d like to get some feedback on how these sections are working. Feel free to leave a comment on this blog entry or, if you have something specific to add to one of the pages, go ahead and leave a comment on the Help document itself.

• “Rotoscoping introduction and resources”
• “Keying introduction and resources”
• “Motion tracking overview and resources”
• “Color correction and adjustment”
• “General workflow in After Effects”
• “Examples and resources for text animation”
• “Expression examples and resources”

If, as I hope, these overviews and collections of tips and resources are helpful, then I’ll do more of this kind of thing.

Chris Zwar recently published a three-part series on the ProVideo Coalition website that is billed as a “3-part video tutorial looking at advanced 3D animation in After Effects “.

Yeah, it is that. But it’s so much more.

In part 1, Chris gives a lot of real-world insight into planning a project, including all of the things that you must do outside of After Effects if you want to be successful and have happy clients. He talks about researching the audience, the viewing environment, and the client. He talks about getting reference photographs. This is the kind of up-front work that can make or break a project. I’m adding a link to this part of the series from the “Planning your work” section of After Effects Help (which also, by the way, contains a link to one of my favorite articles by Aharon Rabinowitz).

In part 2, Chris goes into deep detail about building 3D scenes and objects in After Effects. He has some good explanations and tips about collapsing transformations, precomposing, and parenting.

In part 3, he goes into more detail about the importance of textures, lights, and shadows in making a synthetic 3D scene look more realistic.

As Chris himself points out, this isn’t a tutorial series in the sense in which the word ‘tutorial’ has been used too much lately. He doesn’t show the click-by-click steps that the viewer can follow without actually building any understanding. Rather, this is a series that aims to demonstrate and explore some important concepts in the context of a real-world project. I think that this gets back to the root of the word ‘tutorial’: it teaches.

Great work, Chris!

I just pushed a big update to After Effects CS4 Help on the Web. If you tend to work offline, now would be a good time to grab a fresh copy of the PDF version of the document, because there is absolutely no circumstance under which you should be using the local, HTML version of Help that was installed on your hard disk when you installed After Effects. I mean it.

This update is full of a bunch of little changes—mostly clarifications, links to tutorials, and some minor restructuring. I won’t bore you with all of the changes here.

There is one big change, though: As many people have requested, I’ve put all (and I do mean all) of the After Effects CS4 keyboard shortcuts on one page with anchor links. Several people asked that I do this so that they could search on a single page rather than having to click through several individual category pages and search on each of those.

Let me know what you think of this change. Sometimes it’s hard to strike the right balance when parsing a large document into discrete web pages. I want to make sure that this is working for y’all.

Finally, I again urge each and every one of you to add comments to the pages of After Effects Help on the Web. Those comments are the source of a lot of these updates. Have you recently watched a video tutorial that taught something about After Effects especially well? Then leave a comment with a link to that video tutorial. Did you recently post a template project, script, plug-in, or animation preset on your website that you’d like to share with other After Effects users? Then leave a comment with a link. Got a tip? Leave a comment. Got a correction? Leave a comment.

Here’s an example of a page with a comment from David Bogie that is likely helping every person who reads the page. Thanks, David!

Just sign in at the bottom of the relevant page of After Effects CS4 Help on the Web and click the Add Comment button that appears.

Toolfarm is maintaining a table of plug-ins noting compatibility with After Effects CS4 and some other applications on Snow Leopard (Mac OSX 10.6).

As I mentioned in a previous post, users of After Effects CS4 should update to After Effects CS4 (9.0.2) to prevent some problems with crashing and freezing on start under Snow Leopard.

See this previous post for some additional details.

One problem that I’ve just recently become aware of on Snow Leopard is from Frank, a reader of this blog: “Unfortunately it is no longer possible to use After Effects in a different language in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Apple has removed the option to deselect languages in the finder info window.”

I have heard many complaints about Adobe TV, including complaints about its lousy navigation and poor performance. In fact, many of these complaints that I heard were coming from my own mouth. I had to create a page with an ordered listing of video tutorials because it was hard for users to find the video tutorials within the Adobe TV interface.

So I’m quite pleased that Adobe TV has undergone a huge, substantial transformation.

Navigation is much better. When you’re done watching one video, you can actually see what’s next in the series or what else is available about the same application. This was flaky at best in the previous release of Adobe TV. There are actually useful channels that make sense and are easy to navigate between and within.

Search is better. This one is self-explanatory, I think.

Performance is better. Videos load more quickly and play more smoothly. (And I hear that this is going to get even better soon.)

Oh, and you can subscribe to shows using RSS feeds.

There are other new features, but these are the ones that I know will make my life better… and yours, too.

Thank you, Adobe TV team!

As I noted in a post a few days ago, After Effects CS4 on Snow Leopard must be updated to After Effects CS4 (9.0.2) to use Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing.

It turns out that there are some additional reasons to update After Effects CS4 for use on Snow Leopard, too. In some circumstances, updating fixes some problems with After Effects not starting (or freezing on startup) on Snow Leopard.

Michael Coleman is tracking these issues on his blog.