After Effects is the software from whence a new art form, motion graphics, was born.
Motion offers many advantages and disadvantages to AE. The two can work together, AE users can use Motion to generate layers for their AE compositions.
Owners of both, before starting many projects, will have to pause and consider which program to use.
So when would you use Motion?
- projects involving interaction between elements (attracting, repelling, orbiting easier in Motion)
- users needing something cool-looking quickly without having to create it from scratch (because of the large library of text behaviors and textures (particle emitter presets) - LiveType also good for this
- particle
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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 …
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 …
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If you’ve had any problem with After Effects and Intel Macs, this article might help.
For the light rays (and you can see them in the demo movies here), we used After Effects and a plug-in called Shine. Check it out here.
This is a common question and there are several answers:
1. First, the Final Cut Pro Canvas has a low quality playback engine that will not show the original quality of the clip. (Why? On slower machines, you can play layers, title overlays, real time filters etc. a lot better.) So, the Canvas will always show titles and graphics more pixelated and lower quality video than it will be on final output. Here’s why. Render a title and play it on an NTSC or PAL monitor (TV) before you panic!
More info on monitoring here: http://www.dvcreators.net/tag/monitoring/
2. NTSC is not a perfect …
When moving footage is not available, don’t forget about still photos! You can animate still photos with motion and scale, crop them, apply filters (like sepia, B & W, color tint) and sometimes stills can fill empty spots in your timeline as well or even better than a video clip. Also, many stock photos are automatically HD res!
Here is a monster list of sites with free photos:
Wikipedia Commons
Stock Exchange
Morguefile
Image After
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