Some of you may be wondering what we’ve been up to lately. Well, we have many top-secret projects cooking up in our lab, buried deep within the Hollywood hills (yes, we’ve taken over Dr. Evil’s lair after his retirement).
One thing is that we’ve collaborated with the great Stephen Schleicher on the world’s finest After Effects hands-on course. Final Cut Pro editors have delved into LiveType, then Motion, but many are finding they are still seeking an industrial-strength motion graphics and compositing environment. There are many great reasons After Effects continues to be the …
I spent a little time working with Color over the weekend and can’t say I’m as impressed as I thought I would be.
I feel as if a fabulously wealthy friend just bought me a brand new top-of-the-line bulldozer for my birthday. Gee, it’s super nice… but where am I going to put it? It’s too slow, too powerful, not the right vehicle for the daily LA commute.
Color certainly has a lot of cool features and awesome power, but many problems, primarily the workflow. It’s possible that Colorista/Automatic Duck or Color Finesse is better integrated with Final Cut Pro at this …
Have you ever found yourself changing the file names of a whole folder of clips, graphic or other files on your hard drive one by one? Here is a Warp Speed Workflow showing how to change hundred of files names in one click.
| Downloads 528
Click here to ask a question about Final Cut Studio workflows.
A frequently asked question by new Final Cut users is about creating titles and not being able to see changes as they make them. This movie shows how to see changes while editing your title, all in real-time! Wa-Hoo!
Click here to ask a question about Final Cut Pro.
| Downloads 454
Here is a packet of freebie FX from the DVcreatorsFX labs… a snowy blizzard!
Just add a windy sound effect from Soundtrack Pro and you’ll want to huddle around the fire.
These animations are each a minute long and include an alpha channel so you can drag it right into Final Cut Pro (or Motion) over your video to add swirling snowflakes to any scene.
They utilize OpenGL and CoreVideo so they play in real time on most recent systems!
We’ve included versions for many video formats:
blizzard DV-NTSC
blizzard DV-NTSC 16:9
blizzard PAL
blizzard …
Meet the new hub for your video production studio. With one simple plug-and-play FireWire connection, the V3HD turns your Mac or PC desktop or laptop computer into a powerful HD/SD video production workstation equipped with all the video and audio I/O you need.
Connect all your gear, from SD camcorders and CRT monitors to today’s latest professional HD cameras, video decks, LCD reference monitors and plasmas — all at the same time, with no cable swapping. Choose your input source, then log and capture HD and SD …
To separate a subject from a background, you can either:
1. shoot in front of a greenscreen/bluescreen, then key out the background in postproduction
You can also key out a background that is much darker or brighter than your subject, but it usually takes a little more work, because often your subject will have pixels that are darker and/or lighter than the background, so there there will be holes in your subject that must be “patched” with a garbage matte. If your subject is not moving much, this is much easier than if you have to do a lot of keyframing on …
Free morphing software for OS X here.
50 Point Bezier Matte is a filter for Final Cut Pro (and Final Cut Express) that lets you create a garbage matte with up to 50 points. Unlike the 4 and 8 point garbage matte filters that come with Final Cut Pro, 50 Point Bezier Matte lets you create curves between the points instead of straight lines. This allows you to easily create a mask to extract almost any element you need.
http://homepage.mac.com/tomhenderson/beziermatte/
ArtRage is a painting package designed to provide a realistic and fun simulation of using paint on a canvas, along with pens, pencils, crayons, and other tools. ArtRage is available for both Windows and Mac OS X. It can be used with a mouse, but works better if you have a graphics tablet, or even better on a Tablet PC where ArtRage takes advantage of the unique interaction of pen and screen to produce a realistic painting feel.
Windows-only free app:
Gloodle is "doodle with globs" — drawing using 3D shapes to create 2D images with a lot of richness, complexity, and depth.
Gloodle is a simple app that shows some hint of the immediate feedback that makes particleIllusion so fun and useable: in Gloodle you just draw on the window and cool things happen. Not much thinking required. There are plenty of controls to experiment with, and (like particleIllusion) a lot of power hidden under simple controls.
Gloodle is now available for free!…
Maya Personal Learning Edition is a special version of Maya® software, which provides free access to Maya for non-commercial use. It gives 3D graphics and animation students, industry professionals, and those interested in breaking into the world of computer graphics (CG) an opportunity to explore all aspects of the award-winning Maya Complete software in a non-commercial capacity.
Photoshop is the old standby, but I don’t like it for video graphics. Someone as simple as grabbing an element and moving it is problematic. I much prefer FireWorks, or even Motion for still graphics, which has some nice layout functions.
Flash is also an option for "PowerPoint" type slides, as well as Keynote.
GIMP is a free, open source graphics program very similar to Photoshop. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It …
Latest Comments
RSS