After Effects Roundup – Blancer.com Tutorials and projects

Here’s some recent After Effects tutorials, plug-ins, scripts and other news from around the web. You never know when you’ll need more examples, so don’t forget to scan the varied AEtuts+ tutorials as well.

Video Copilot released free stock footage and some tutorials for creating practical particle effects with ordinary flour; see Flour Fusion: Real Particles, Snow Particles, and Free Particle Stock Footage & Tutorial. In all it is “very exciting.” Perhaps VCP took inspiration from India’s Festival of Colors (pictures). Here’s the intro:

Also giving away footage is Jake & Dan with over 20 inkdrop-cloud chamber files in Giveaway: Ink Chamber Footage.

Video Copilot also released The Portal, a new tutorial based their Demon Cam video, which features a portal effect. The tutorial shares techniques like Chroma Keying, Screen equalizing, Spill Suppression, Building the Portal using included Smoke Clip, Color Correction, Glow Effects & Optical Flares, Accurate depth revealing effect using ZPass from a 3D program, and some droll monologue.

Todd Kopriva has detailed resources (and much of it is his work) for optimizing for performance: Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects.

RenderMon by Digieffects (currently in beta) is an innovative new web-based application that enables digital media artists to remotely monitor and manage the video rendering process, as well as securely upload, view and share the rendered video from Vimeo:

David Powers discusses Opening help in a browser or PDF instead of the Community Help application (an app that serves little purpose). It sure seems like development money could be saved by sticking with the HTML/PDF version.

Eran Stern has another tutorial at Artbeats, Rock The Street, which “takes you through the steps of distorting footage to match your source, in this case a city scene shot with a fisheye lens. Then follow along as Eran creates a title which appears to burst from an explosion, ending with the individuals letters burning out.”

Mark Christiansen continued his ‘After Effects Script of the Week’ series at PVC:

Chris and Trish Meyer posted more articles on “hidden gems” in AE:

Todd Kopriva and Jeff Almasol detail scripting changes in After Effects CS5.5.

In Getting Started with Magic Bullet LUT Buddy, Aharon Rabinowitz shows you how to use Magic Bullet LUT Buddy, a free plug-in from Red Giant that allows you to communicate color changes between After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Final Cut Pro, and to share those color corrections with higher end systems, like Davinci Resolve.

Whip Pan & Transporter tutorials for AE rounded up some tutorial and filters for whip pans in AE and NLEs.

Adam Everett Miller shared Simple Principles To Make Rotoscoping Less Crappy. There’s much more in Rotoscoping tips and a mess of posts tagged roto at AE Portal archive.

Mikael Lubtchansky released a conform tool called foolcut_AE to export any project from Final Cut Pro X directly into After Effects. It supports all the main features of FCPX and will also relink any RED camera clip to the original raw R3D files, etc. Rumor has it that Stephen Hawking did the voiceover for the intro video.

Red Giant TV Live – Episode 1: Exploring Form 2′s OBJ Import Features shows the new OBJ loader in Trapcode Form and how to integrate OBJs with After Effects 3D space andCinema 4D. Harry Frank showcases how particles can be manipulated with the new Quick Map Offset controls. See also RGTV Episode 60: Creating Light Effects with Trapcode 3D Stroke, in which Owain Street shows you how he created light effects from a series of commercials for using Trapcode 3D Stroke. Also, here’s a ball of fractal loop made by Aharon Rabinowitz using a Trapcode Form preset by Harry Frank from Red Giant People:

Michael Jones has a variety of tutorials for AE and C4D; here’s his Beam Effect Quick Tip for creating animated lines between objects:

In Camera Mapping in After Effects, Andrew Devis shows how to create parallax with a single item. There’s much more on camera mapping in posts tagged camera mapping at AE Portal archive.

PixelCloud from BlurryPixel is a relighting plug-in for After Effects that’s still in beta. It will allow changing the perceived shading of a rendered 3D image. If you’re curious, there are several videos up that introduce features.

Premiere, Photoshop, and Audition

Preparing and importing Photoshop files from AE Help is useful if you’ve experienced the pain of reusing assets from old projects. Organization is key because there is no Dynamic Link between AE and Photoshop, and layered PS files imported as sequences don’t relink after being moved around.

In Photoshop and AE: Content Aware Scale, Richard Harrington demonstrates how to combine Photoshop and After Effects to use Content Aware Scale: “In Photoshop, you can detect skin tones or choose to protect a selected area from transform, but be able to completely re-scale an image while leaving the selected area unchanged.” Harrington has a few other new tutorials too, Photoshop and AE: Animating the Lens Blur Filter and Photoshop and AE: Color Grading Video.

Eran Stern has an overview of the options available for creating accurate cuts, dissolves and wipes. He looks at the limitations and gotchas of Premiere Pro, and how you can improve your inventory of effects and transitions by using third-party plug-in’s from the Sapphire family of effects from GenArts.

Todd Kopriva details free sample chapters and videos from An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro, a newish book by Robbie Carman, Jeff Greenberg, and Richard Harrington. Here’s a sample:

Miscellaneous

Adobe acquired cinema tech, staff from Iridas. Peter Salvia of Proactively says adobe + iridas = fcp dead, while Adobe’s Todd Kopriva explains What the Adobe acquisition of IRIDAS technology means for our professional video applications. Here are peeks at IRIDAS SpeedGrade with an NVIDIA GPU and a 3D workflow: