After Effects Spotlight Effect

*Update*

I highly recommend you check out a much more recent tutorial I did that illustrates how to use After Effects’ built-in 3d spotlights.

——————————

Sometimes you really just want to emphasize a particular area in a screencast which means if you’re like me its time to dust off your favorite compositor (After Effects in my case) and add a little visual magic. This short screencast (2:40) gives you a leg up if you’re chasing this technique. (more…)

Auto-generate XMP Markers in After Effects

Turns out that After Effects will generate markers automatically based on XMP, but you must toggle this feature on in your global preferences.

This would allow you to import a Premiere Pro file with speech-to-text transcription and get markers automatically generated.

Day Two MAXies

Only one presenter gets a golden star from me–Michael Coleman’s (an After Effects Product Manager) efficient, yet droll session on After Effects expressions left me quietly humming. Expressions eliminate the tedium of keyframing and drive some seriously wicked effects.

I had high hopes for a session called “Next-Generation Flex Skinning,” but Ely had covered most of the salient points in his Gumbo talk so this one sort of fell flat for me. If you haven’t seen Ely or you’re looking for skinning examples built on top of Gumbo then it’s probably worthwhile. However, it was encouraging to listen to someone UI nerdy enough to argue over beer about whether a radial knob (a range scrubber) fits under the same component framework definition as a slider (a range scrubber). Ultimately the Gumbo team’s answer was no, but those nerds are my kind of people.

The Sneak Peaks were also a big winner. Due to some smart tactical decisions (yay beer) this was a fun event. Nice work Ted.

Must Kill Interlacing: Getting Quality h.264 Screen Video Out Of After Effects

While converting a Jing swf to h.264 with AfterEffects I was really struggling to get video that looked reasonable using the h.264 profile built into AE. I was massively ramping up bitrate settings without any noticeable improvements. Strangely things looked ok when played back in QuickTime, but not so great in Flash Player. After a few false starts I finally realized that by default After Effects was interlacing the video.

Interlacing delivers half the lines of vertical resolution per frame. This is never a good thing for computer / web based video and was especially noticeable at the low framerate (10 fps) the Jing swf was recorded at. After switching to progressive (no interlacing) and taking the bitrates to the floor I got the pristine quality and small file size that h.264 is known for.

Its bizarre that interlacing is on by default and the encoding options dialog in After Effects isn’t exactly Adobe’s best UI experience ever, but at least the option is there and visible if you squint hard enough. Hope this saves someone else the frustration.

After Effects CS3 SWF Export Bug

Anyone know if After Effects SWF Export feature is broken? Every time I try to export a SWF file I just see this:

Any insights would be appreciated (I’m talking to you Steve Kilisky :) ).