Recently in After Effects Category

Digital juice has done it again, they have teamed up with the guys at Red Giant and are offering one fo my favorite plug-ins at 50% off. It is Trapcode's Particular. Particular is a powerful 3D particle system that can produce a wide range of effects from natural smoke and explosions to geometric or organic abstract motion graphics design elements. Tight integration with Adobe After Effects provides bouncing particles on 3D layers, emitting particles from layers and lights and using a layer as custom particle. Comp-camera aware and 16bit of course! The physics engine includes air resistance, gravity and turbulence, providing very realistic particle motion. The keyframable Physics Time Factor gives you full control over time so you can freeze time and move the camera around in a scene. Particular has many uses and make sure you check out these great examples. Don't miss this great opportunity to save big on a very useful plug-in and sign up for our next After Effects class and learn how to utilize this great plug-in!

Adobe After Effects has many great effects, plug-ins and presets. They are very useful if you know how to apply them. One of my favorite plug-ins is the CC Sphere effect that comes free with your purchase of Adobe After Effects. It allows you to turn any flat image into a sphere and then animate it. You can make everything from stone or glass marbles an entire universe. The example here is a simple flat image of the earth with the CC Sphere effect applied, some clouds added and then a simple rotation animation. This only took a matter of minutes to make and the possibilities are endless. You could make a whole galaxy and fly through it from planet to planet or just to the moon and back. This is one of the many great tricks you will learn in one of our intense After Effects training classes. Sign up now, class sizes are very small and they fill up fast!

 

If you are trying to sift through all of your render options and find that you are confused by all of the settings, then I would like share with you my work-flow and hopefully it will help stop the confusion. First and foremost you need to decide the delivery vehicle for your program, is it going straight to the web, are you publishing a DVD or simply exporting to another application. My philosophy is to always keep my exports at the highest quality at all times. So to do this I have found that a QuickTime movie set to Animation is the best uncompressed export setting. There are a few key reasons that I have come to use this for my exports. It will always embed a clean alpha channel that is easily recognized by most applications, it does not compress your sequence and even if I am making a DVD I still render to this setting and I then allow Adobe Encore or Sorenson Squeeze hand the transcoding. This is not only efficient but most authoring programs handle the transcoding much better then After Effects or Avid. If you want to make animated gif for the web After Effects allows you do this and I use this setting if I am posting something to the web that is not needed for any other application. The last setting I use is .FLV. Flash Videos are the best way to post your work on the Internet. Not only do they play fast but they look great. The settings for your .flv will change from project to project so you will need to play with your settings to achieve the results you are looking for. Just remember that QuickTime set to Animation; Flash Video and Animated GIF’s will get the results you are looking for in most applications.

If you have used After Effects for any amount of time I am sure you have noticed there is no way to make true 3-D text. The only way to achieve this has been through a third-party plug-in such as Zaxs Werks. I always like to try and use what is already in After Effects without spending money on a plug-in, if I can make it work. Well our friend at maltaannon.com has come up with a great preset for making 3-D text without a plug-in. This is amazing and you need to check this out! This allows you to extrude any vector based layer to give it a real 3D look inside After Effects. No more duplicating layers, no more expensive 3D software.