The last week or so has seen much activity on the Premiere side -- before the deluge of FCP X -- but there's also plenty of After Effects news on tutorials, plug-ins, and related design ideas.
Tips & Tutorials
The After Effects Apprentice course by Chris and Trish Meyer continued with videos on Type and Music and Parenting. For more on Parenting, see the AEtuts+ mini-roundup, Parenting: Basics + the Jump Parent.
Kevin McAuliffe has a few new video tips: Quick Tip - Cleaning up messy projects, Auto-Creating Compositions, and 2 lessons from his new intro series After Effects From The Ground.
Mathias Möhl has a new intro lesson video on Mamoworld, Guru Lesson 2, on applying effects and working with keyframes.
AE Portal at PVC notes Pixel Benders for grading, shortcuts & tiling, What’s New and Changed in After Effects CS5.5 (on new free Videobrain training by Todd Kopriva), Todd Kopriva collections on Changes in expressions & caching in AE CS5.5, and Warp Stabilizer for object removal (a video from AE PM Steve Forde on using Synthesize Edges as content-aware fill in After Effects. Here's Steve:
AE CS 5.5 Warp Stabilizer - Synthesize Edges & Object Removal from AE Product Manager - Steve Forde on Vimeo.
AE Portal also features a meaty survey of resources in Animate a character in After Effects, which notes the new series of video tutorials by Ryan Boyle of Sketchy Pictures.
Todd Kopriva points to tutorials on obscuring a face with the Track Matte Key effect for both Premiere and After Effects. Here's his precise but more difficult method:
Plug-ins
Yanobox Nodes was upgraded to version 1.2, for Mac (Final Cut Pro, Motion and After Effects).
Red Giant released Sports Graphics for Trapcode Suite (25 unique templates in 5 action based themes) awhile back. The tutorials may pull you in. For more on sports graphics see Graphics Mafia.
Lori Freitag of RE:Visionfx explains details of their noise reduction plug-in in DE:Noise Part 2 - Beyond the Basics.
Scarab Star Filter plug-in for After Effects comes in 2 Windows-only flavors (it's similar to filters in other packages).
Color Rules from Digital Juice is a plug-in for After Effects that creates swatches and guides you in choosing color schemes based on established principles of color theory.
GenArts wondertouch shipped particleIllusion for After Effects (pIAE) for Mac users.
DarkroomFX has some tutorials on Freeform (which ships with After Effects), Freeform 101.Basic tweaking,working with handles and workflow options and Freeform 202. Displacement maps and 3d mesh. Here's Andre on the basics:
Premiere & Audition
Jarle Leirpoll launched PremierePro.net, a blog and effect presets & template resource.
Premiere Pro: Frequently Asked Questions is a free video FAQ from Todd Kopriva.
Chris and Trish Meyer discuss some workflow tips for the motion graphics artist looking to also improve their sound in Using Audition with After Effects. Todd Kopriva covers some of the same ground in Editing Audio in Audition from the free Videobrain course What’s New and Changed in After Effects CS5.5.
In Audition: Made for Video, Elaine Montoya uses experience in webinars to advocate for a complete roundtrip audio workflow solution for those in broadcast, film, vfx, and motion graphics.
Andrew Devis looked at Audio Problems: Balancing Speech Levels in a new video.
Jan Ozer added new tutorials on Roundtrip pro audio editing with Adobe Audition and Premiere Pro CS5.5 and on some new capabilities of Adobe Media Encoder CS5.5. Todd Kopriva detailed these changes on his blog and in a new video tutorial at Video2brain, Adobe Media Encoder Improvements. Here's Jan:
Colin Brougham looks at the promise and reality of Native Format Editing in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Clint Milby considers a highly regarded AE slo-mo filter in Using Twixtor in Premiere Pro.
Clay Asbury looks at Automating audio keyframes in Premiere Pro CS 5.5.
Oliver Peters has been Playing with Epic frames in Premiere and finds that common filters like Magic Bullet Looks, Colorista II, Mojo and GenArts’s Sapphire have a much-improved responsiveness. GPU acceleration for those filters makes a big difference too.
Scott Simmons says that it’s still far from perfect, but as a time-saving tool it saved quite a few keystrokes in Adobe’s Speech Analysis is still chugging along in Premiere Pro CS5.5. At least one cranky person found better results with Dragon on the iPhone.
Rolling Shutter fix in iMovie ‘11: The feature Final Cut Pro users have been waiting for? found some attention -- even in a comparison to AE by OnQ Media -- as did the AE plug-ins, Warp Stabilizer, and the no plug-in rolling shutter fix in After Effects. Here's an iMovie demo from Phillip Bloom:
Interface
Colorist Josh Petok looks at The Cheapest Colorist Control Surface EVER! on The Tao of Color Grading. Be sure to catch the great Tao of Color newletter if you're into color. From The Tao of Color:
Mark Coleran spoke about the The Reality of Fantasy at UX Week 2010,
Switched featured Sci-Fi Movie Interfaces: Why Transparent Screens Are Miserable to Use and featured this presentation,
