tips & tricks

After Effects doesn’t let you RAM preview an alpha channel. Here’s a workaround.

One of the most powerful and yet often under utilised additions to After Effects from version 5 onwards is the inclusion of expressions. While its implementation may not be as strong or as easy as using Action Script in Flash 5, it has one critical advantage.

Moving up in the effects or motion design field isn’t structured like a law office. How do you get ahead?

For project management you can easily customize nuke.

A basic tutorial on approaching Roto in FFI

Flame artist Alan Fairlie’s killer setup which allows you to use one axis to create a digital counter using expressions.

Flame 6 offers automatic background 3D tracking. In this second part of 3D tracking inside flame we examine this new feature.

Flame and inferno now have 2 different 3D trackers. In part 1, Jake Parker outlines detailed points for producing the best results using the manual 3D camera tracker.

Andy Milkis takes us through an entry-level introduction to the Discreet Tracker. This tutorial is useful for flame, fire, and combustion artists, even though some of it only applies to the effects products. Milkis is Visual Effects Supervisor and Senior Effects artist at DesignLab, the design and visual effects division of Broadway Video, NYC.

Directional blur by using simple expression.

With v5/8 of FFI, you can now benefit from 12bit rendering without switching to a different partitions. In fact, you can even use most of that 12 bit goodness without using a single 12 bit frame on your framestore.

Getting rid of the unwanted edging around sky replacements.

Use motion estimation to help with fixes.

Using 3d z space to nullify zoom.

This trick will allow you to fake 3d shadows on a ground plane for just about any 3d object or objects.

Easily adjust offsets to compensate for corner points.

Perl script for seeing who is using framestores.

A “reset all” tip for pre-v5/8 users

Use the new broadcast monitor focus hotkey to make multiviews even more useful.

One of the biggest changes in workflow in version 5.5/8.5 is a new “Scan Mode” flag which is saved with each clip. This way, the software knows whether or not the clip is a F1, F2, or Progressive Clip. While this is effective for mixing various formats (such as HD and SD interlaced clips), it [...]

Mike Seymour shows a jet plane fly by using mixed resolution features of 5/8.

Here’s a way to create a mosaic effect using action and expressions. This will work very fast because its processed with graphics hardware and also without having sparks.

If using 4.7.2 with dve’s etc. & a camera move, you may find that using or importing the same set-up / scene into other action nodes within batch doesn’t work.

This is a simple workaround to allow you to edit garbage mattes, with their shape releative to the scene rather than just on the full 2d plane.

Here is a quicktime using mixed resolution projectors to achieve camera distortion.

There have been numerous changes in effects version 5/8. We’ve broken down some of the changes by module, in hopes of letting you avoid some of the pitfalls we ran into when first running the software. Thanks, also for the contributions from Rich Bobo.

With the new integration of action in batch, considerable changes were made to batch workflow and navigation. fxguide has created an introduction to version 5/8 batch.

Adjusting the offsets of a bilinear is difficult because you cannot interactively adjust the offsets on the image while viewing the result of the manipulation in action. You can use the channel editor to adjust the values, but this is sometimes problematic.

There are a few handy wipe shapes built into the mask section of the keyer, things like circles, diagonals, stars… and the ever handy heart wipe. Here is how to access them.

I get some cool tips from browsing Opengl/Gaming books, and I found an easy technique for rendering 3D objects with the cartoon look.

A tip that removes most of the blurry and the double edge look of the field merge while keeping most of the definition of the image.

Instead of re-digitizing your footage through an analog connection why not try this…

Animating layers to audio in Action.

A tutorial on setting up an enhanced batch status web page, as well as tips on how to remotely start batch renders. Stay at home, have a few cocktails, and get that high resolution render done without being chained to your inferno!

This is an easy way to blur 3D text without using expressions. It works because you never change the color of the 3D geometry and instead use a texture layer for the color. Normally, when you change the color of a geometry node under a matte source node, you lose the matte (it becomes transparent). This tip works around that bug. [note by John Montgomery]

A simple trick for whenever you can’t hold focus – such as photographing miniatures.

Here is a simple way to blur 3D text in action.

Before the color warper there were many tricks to do selective color correction, we have a tip on using the keyer curves as another tip here. The color warper, new to Inferno 4.0 / Flame 7.0 makes this so much easier and provides more flexibility

Using the new 4.6/7.6 selection order expression entry tool, as well as the new “LookAt” function.

Fxguide, Discreet and their distributor in Australia, Future Reality, recently held a training session with Martin Heile.
This tip covers a range of small and hopefully useful tips that came out of that session, which we have called Stupid FFI tricks.

For those without access to the Color Warper, here is a method to do selective color correction using the keyer.

I need a particle generated in the following way: the particle is generated and as long as lifetime passes the particle should fade in size to make it soft at the end, or particle generator would create a hard particle stream. What I mean is the following: in the real life as far as you go from the emitter as soft you get the effect. Imagine a smoke from a jet fighter that is strong near the exhaust and fades away with distance to a point that it is very soft… so that was the problem.

Sometimes you need to move your bilinear offsets closer to your subject, but once you exit the EditOffsets menu, you find that your controls points have resized to the corners of the screen and have distorted your subject. The trick inherent in this tip is to get your subject back to it’s original size and shape while retaining the offsets. (I can’t take credit for this, Chris at Method is the clever guy who figured this out)

Various methods to make a quick and easy grid of any size.

Creating a page turning motion in Action.

Here’s one of those shortcuts you may have missed when it was added to the interface!

While tracking an object manually, use the axis’ vertical size to fit a particular feature of an object.

In general, night is all about brightness ratios, and having something of orange color to contrast to the blue fill of the night. (Actually, moonlight is pure daylight bouncing off of the moon, but we think of it as blue since most ambient light in the city is tungsten or sodium which has a markedly [...]

This tutorial explains how to track one moving clip to another moving clip using one point tracking.

March 2nd 2000

Here is a sample setup to take two mattes and combine them using source nodes

This technique will give a result closer to a true optical film mix than any other method available using Discreet tools alone.

How to add blood stains to multiple “drive by victims” (producer wanted more blood)

This technique will add motion blur to objects that have no axis movement (rendered 3D animation, cel animation, etc.)

Using Action to split out an image into separate RBG channels.

If you don’t have a scanline spark, this is an easy way to create a scanline effect.

This is a very generic trick we have been using for a long time. We used this even when we were using Harry. The classic Betacam SP dropout problem.  Many broadcast type Analog Betacam VTRs have a board to loop the last line, if it is not able to read the coming lines from tape. [...]

In this tip, Professor and Dean Mike Seymour shows how to use Flame’s 3D compositing work space and tools to add extra realism to a package shot using black wrap and a bottle of milk. This simple 5 min quicktime shows a combined use of flame’s displacement maps, source nodes, expressions, extended bicubics in action.

Professor and Dean John Montgomery walks you through creating a reusable, customizable camera shake node from scratch. The technique involves some commando shooting, animation massaging, expressions, and even a bit of manual editing of setup files to create the end result. Thankfully, that end result can be reused many times over and over again — [...]

Sometimes a scene looks like it will track and stablise perfectly but shots like ocean horizons filmed from a boat or open spaces can sometimes just fail to have anything to lock on to horizontally. It seems like an easy track but the shot just wont track. Professor and Dean Mike Seymour shows an easy [...]

Here is yet another way to list the contents of your directory sorted by size and without using either awk or ls

Reformating file lists using different unix commands

The previous entries in the tips section really won’t produce a valid, sorted list of files in the current directory by size descending. Here’s an improved version….

Ever worked all day on a few different jobs and ended up writing files to the wrong directory? You see the result of your render named in your library, but the setup is gone? Unix has a find command to help.

Stephane Harnois : foreach f (“`ls -1`”) set file2 = echo “$f” | nawk ‘{print $1$2$3$4$5$6}’ mv “$f” $file2 end Kevin Tengan : Tested with perl 5.004 … It will change all the spaces in a filename to a “_”. #!/usr/local/bin/perl5 -w use strict; my $dir = $ARGV[0] || die “usage: $0 <directory>\n”; opendir DIR, [...]