We hear CS5 has some special romance with Cinema4d. Simple techniques to export your Cinema file to AE, 64 bit memory addressing capability. There are many features which offer special performance that overlap with one another.
You need to have a 64 bit OS to address more than 3 gig of memory but 64 bit has been around for a while. Faster rendering comes with the cuda Nvidia cards but Badaboom has been around for a while too. And the marriage of cuda with the Mercury engine lets Premiere Pro do ‘real time’ editing and rendering in incredible reduced windows.
Yeah, many of these contributors have been around for a while but with CS5 rewritten for 64 bit, and the release of the Mercury engine, they all play nice together. It will be great fun to see the new creations but some of my greatest excitement will remain in the cutting room -
the movie will be just as creative as it was before … or not … the output will be quite similar and the viewing experience too. But the time editing and processing will be shattered ….
which should make for a happier, more creative crew. Let’s see !
Layer Styles and some interesting possibilites … in After Effects
Applying layer styles lets us endow our text and our layers with special qualities, bevel, gradient luminance. I thought I was cool when I could import Photoshop layered images and import as layers, taking advantage of Photoshop features. However I encountered the layer features watching a tutorial for Red Giant Form plugin, an amazing special effect plugin for After Effects.
The quick technique I saw was creating or dissolving your object – text, video, graphic, into particles of sand … like a cosmic creation. With that simple inspiration, I made my first.
You do need the form plugin for this effect but all the trapcode/light factory and various assundri cousins are well worth the investment.
Well, beginning with John Knoll Light Factory, and Red Giant Trapcode, we went for the Christmas Special – got the Trapcode Suite which includes this really cool app called ‘Sound Keys’. And guess what it does ….. well yeah – it maps your animation keys to … sound.
Where do you get the sound ? While there are gillions of places, you might be surprised what incredibly cool sound you can create on your own, with Acoustica Mixcraft.
Mixcraft offers a variety of remarkable instruments, controls, loops, and perhaps most remarkable, this matching temp, key feature that let’s you blend and experiment with different instrument and ensemble combinations that, while it isn’t perfect, get’s you into production on your first trial.
One of the friendliest keyframe assistants in After Effects is the ’sequence layers’ tool that will essentially create a slide show for you, spacing your images, creating an overlap/fade and aligning all the layers for you. You set duration, overlap time and After Effects creates the perfectly timed sequences for you.
A good habit when you have a frame sequence like this is to take advantage of the ‘easy ease’ tool which eases between transitions instead of having an abrupt change. In this case, since it is opacity you are animating, fading one frame out, framing the next in, simply choose all your layers, enter ‘T” to display their opacity attribute, then enter ‘F9′ to apply easing to all your layers. In only a matter of minutes you will have a very attractive slide show. After Effects does all the Math.
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