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MAYA
Iron Man 3: The Trixters Behind Tony Stark's Shiny New Armor
Seventy artists from Trixter worked an entire year to create a formidable 208 VFX shots for Marvel's Iron Man 3. Each new episode in the Iron Man saga details a slick new technology created by the ingenious Tony Stark, and the new installment does not disappoint! Combining the hard surface geometry of the Iron Man suit auto-assembly with the flexibility of the human body was one of the challenges that Trixter brought from previs to believable screen reality.
Editorial, Feature, People / Interview
Alessandro Cioffi |
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Adobe After Effects
AE - RE:MATCH Non-matching Cameras in After Effects
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In this tutorial, Andrew Devis demonstrates a relatively new plug-in by RE:Vision Effects called RE:Match and how it can very quickly and accurately deal with the very common problem of non-matching cameras in After Effects.
A typical approach to dealing with say a white balance issue would be to apply Color Finesse 3 and work with that which can be a slightly convoluted process, while RE:Match deals with the whole thing in a couple of clicks!
This very powerful effect can save a great deal of time for an everyday problem and so earn its cost back very quickly as well as giving excellent and fast results.
There is another tutorial showing how this effect works in Premiere Pro as there is a slightly different way the two applications deal with reference images.
Tutorial, Video Tutorial
Andrew Devis |
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NAB Expo
NAB 2013: Adobe Introduces Adobe Anywhere
At NAB 2013, Adobe is introducing Adobe Anywhere, a collaborative workflow platform that centralizes projects and allows users to share and change project files. Also new are some powerful new features for Adobe Premiere Pro, including color grading and the ability to "link & locate" clips. A newly designed SpeedGrade also makes color grading tools more familiar to Adobe toolset users, and After Effects celebrates its 20th anniversary.
Editorial, Feature, People / Interview
Debra Kaufman |
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Adobe After Effects basics
AE Basics Extras: Butterfly Wing Text Animation Part TWO
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In the second part of this two part AE Basics Extra tutorial, Andrew Devis continues to build the butterfly in After Effects and then shows how to keep it 3D as it is formed.
Items covered in this tutorial include custom views, 3D and collapse transforms to keep items working in 3D once pre-composed, duplication and flipping layers, vertical type, text formatting, and complex animations with motion sketch. These tutorials will be valuable for anyone learning and developing text animation skills in After Effects.
Tutorial, Video Tutorial
Andrew Devis |
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Adobe After Effects basics
AE Basics Extras: Butterfly Wing Text Animation
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In the first part of this two part AE Basics Extra tutorial, Andrew Devis starts to show how to create a butterfly wing with text.
The purpose of these tutorials is to give additional hints and tips for text animation in After Effects. Items covered in this tutorial include, using the pen tool, paths, copying mask paths to shape layers, text along a path and path option, 3D layers, animation of a wing, loopOut expression and viewing your composition in a different viewer.
In the second part of this tutorial Andrew will go on to complete the animated butterfly in 3D and show how to have it fly around your screen.
Tutorial, Video Tutorial
Andrew Devis |
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Adobe After Effects basics
AE Basics Extras: Caterpillar Text Animation
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In this AE Basics Extra tutorial, Andrew Devis shows some more text animation techniques by animating 'Caterpillar' text in After Effects. Andrew shows how to shape your text so that it curves from large to small to create a 'tail' for the text and then he shows how to set up and animate the path that the text will use. Andrew then goes on to lock the text to the animated path and continues by adding additional animators to give body movement to the animated text.
This is a helpful tutorial for anyone wanting to learn to use a wider range of options for text animation in After Effects.
Andrew will be following up with a similar but different tutorial looking at creating a flying butterfly text!
Tutorial, Video Tutorial
Andrew Devis |
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Adobe After Effects
IK Character Animation: Walk to the Beat 1: Finding the Beat
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This tutorial is both a follow-on tutorial to Andrew's previous tutorials on IK controllers in After Effects and a helpful stand-alone tutorial showing how to define a beat range to use as a guide to animation in After Effects.
To start with Andrew shows how to use a simple expression to deal with a potential problem of controllers scaling your objects. Then Andrew shows how to find and download sample music which can be used to base your animation on. He goes on to discuss the difficulty of matching frame rates with audio sample rate and then shows how to get a reasonably close 'loop' in both After Effects and especially in Audition.
Tutorial, Video Tutorial
Andrew Devis |
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Adobe After Effects
AE: Inverse Kinematic Character Animation PT 2
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Standard character animation in After Effects uses a process called 'Forward Kinematics' in that we animate down a linked chain - for example, upper arm linked to forearm linked to hand. To get animation we need to move the items down the chain one at a time. Inverse Kinematics creates a link back up the chain such that moving the hand would also move the forearm and the upper arm without breaking that link. This is a simpler and easier way to control animation and is often used in 3D programs such as C4D and 3ds max etc. and allows us to control the animation for the complete chain through a single controller.
Tutorial, Video Tutorial
Andrew Devis |
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Adobe After Effects
AE: Inverse Kinematic Character Animation
Play Video
Standard character animation in After Effects uses a process called 'Forward Kinematics' in that we animate down a linked chain - for example, upper arm linked to forearm linked to hand. To get animation we need to move the items down the chain one at a time. Inverse Kinematics creates a link back up the chain such that moving the hand would also move the forearm and the upper arm without breaking that link. This is a simpler and easier to control form of animation often used in 3D programs such as C4D and 3ds max etc. and allows us to control the animation for the complete chain through a single controller.
Tutorial, Video Tutorial
Andrew Devis |
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Adobe After Effects
Prisoner To My Passion
"I don't know if it's addiction or adoration, but one way or the other, I'm hooked on her," says Creative COW's Rob Mize. "The signs are all there: the obsession with After Effects, the inability to function without After Effects there next to me on my laptop, waiting to be clicked. And the torment of each moment spent suffering any separation from my cherished compositor. Is it any wonder that I, a once innocent naïf in an analog world, now find myself enraptured by this non-linear, digital Delilah?"
Editorial, Feature, People / Interview
Rob Mize |
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Adobe After Effects
Advice To Editors: LEARN AE!
Kevin McAuliffe's experience has been that all editors need to know Adobe After Effects at least as well as their NLE. His own experience has been that anything less than intermediate to advanced knowledge makes it impossible to actually get anything done. Even working with the compositing power of Avid Symphony, Kevin is in AE all day, every day. Here's the story of how he got there.
Editorial, Feature
Kevin P. McAuliffe |
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Stereoscopic 3D
Tim Squyres Edits Life of Pi
Tim Squyres, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on Life of Pi, got hooked on film when he took an introductory film course at Cornell University in upstate New York. Squyres talks to Creative COW about the challenges of editing Ang Lee's first digitally shot feature film, which was also a stereoscopic 3D release.
Feature, People / Interview
Tim Squyres |
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Adobe After Effects
How Did They Do All This?
When he saw a particular commercial for another local company years ago, John Cuevas was blown away, "so I asked our senior editor 'how did they do all of this?' He replied, 'After Effects.' I looked him dead in the eye and said 'Yeah, I get that they did the effects after, but how do they DO it?'" After over 10 years of visiting the COW daily, he's clear about it now, and still learning how to do it better.
Editorial, Feature
John Cuevas |
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Adobe After Effects
Ronald & Kathlyn and After Effects & The COW
Soon after they purchased CoSA After Effects in 1994, Ronald & Kathlyn Lindeboom found themselves in a little over their heads. There were virtually no web resources for learning AE -- frankly, virtually no resources whatsoever, as this was long before training tapes and books. So, they founded a web community to help find the help that they themselves needed, and 18 years later, it's still growing! And After Effects is still playing a central role in its success.
Editorial, Feature
Ronald Lindeboom |
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Adobe After Effects
Expressions, Scripting, Automation -- and Fun
"I first encountered After Effects in a somewhat roundabout way. I have (as many people do apparently) an aversion to public speaking, so I came up with the bright idea of creating a video to do the talking for me." So begins the journey of longtime Creative COW leader Dan Ebberts, which takes a dramatic -- and fun -- turn with the introduction of Expressions in AE 5.
Editorial, Feature, People / Interview
Dan Ebberts |
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Adobe After Effects
Creating Our Own Destiny
"I was learning that After Effects was unlike any other piece of software I’d ever used. I dove in thinking it was a pool, but found it just went deeper and deeper - the Marianas Trench of programs," says Psychic Bunny's Rick Castañeda. The endless grind of one frame at a time roto blossomed into, well, everything.
Feature, People / Interview
Rick Castañeda |
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Adobe After Effects
Inspiring Me to Enable Myself
"My journey with After Effects is a reflection of my journey as a creative. Fear, skepticism, blood, tears, mocking, understanding, confidence. The cycle repeats sometimes, but it expands and contracts too. Some days it's a thing of wonder and beauty, other days it's collapsing in on itself like a dying star. When you start to have more days like the former than the latter, nice things start to happen both on your screen and in your mind. For all the rest, there's coffee," says Creative COW Contributing Editor Kylee Wall.
Feature, People / Interview
Kylee Wall |
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Adobe After Effects
An Old Dog, Learning New Tricks
You'll be surprised at how late Andrew Devis started with After Effects, but he's thrilled to be constantly learning new tricks. The excitement he finds in turning that knowledge into tutorials has clearly been reciprocated, as he has become one of the web's most popular trainers.
Feature, People / Interview
Andrew Devis |
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Adobe After Effects
Keeping Them Guessing
For 22 years, Dave LaRonde created on-air promotion for KCRG-TV, the ABC affiliate in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Through the years, one thing has remained constant: Adobe After Effects has been in his video toolbox. Dave describes his introduction to After Effects and how it helped him turn an also-ran into the leader of the pack.
Feature, People / Interview
Dave LaRonde |
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Adobe After Effects basics
AE Basics 65: Expression Controllers PART TWO
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AE Basics - A Creative COW series for new users of Adobe After Effects. Lesson 65: In this second follow-on tutorial, Andrew Devis continues to demonstrate how to apply a color Expression Controller to one part of the production and then how to quickly apply it to other parts of the same composition. He then goes on to show how to separate out parameters to two different control points of one Expression Controller finishing by controlling parts from different areas of the shape layer as you would in a composition which has multiple layers.
Tutorial, Video Tutorial
Andrew Devis |
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Adobe After Effects basics
AE Basics Extras: More Repetition PART TWO
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AE Basics - A Creative COW series for new users of Adobe After Effects. In this second 'Extra' tutorial in the AE Basics series, Andrew Devis shows how to create shapes from text, how to rotate that shape into a circle, how to move the circle into a line and finally how to create other very interesting looks with the use of the repeater tool - including how to create spirals, make the shapes seem to come out at you from the screen and how to move and control these exciting options, all within the one layer.
Tutorial, Video Tutorial
Andrew Devis |
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