Thursday, August 13, 2009

Firefox Web Developer Plugin

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

Scientific Visualisations

AFTER EFFECTS

So in after effects and with the use of some plugins and some presets this stuff is possible

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.



I'll be mucking around with Particular and some other plugins packs I have for After Effects - the Art School doesnt have these... yet.

the lines are done using 3D stroke with an expression of wiggle on the time remap setting for the animation. The particles could be done in trapcode particular. back plates I think are all still images with the effects matched in perspective. add the wiggle to the position for the precomp to get the desired effect of handheld. incase u want your backplate filmed. you need a 3D matchmove software to extract the camera data out. Boujou, Syntheyes, PFtrack, PFhoe for 3D tracking.

the shaking of the lines would be animated at normal speed in AE. then using Time Remap + wiggle expression to get it shaking. Check out andrew kramer's Twitch Preset. that should do the trick. The birds eye view shot of the magnetic field is just Fractal noise, animated masks and scales.

more to come...

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

This is for Ted... and anyone else interested in playing external movies (say from Vimeo) on their website

Ted wanted to do it in flash, but im not that flash so I have thought of something else. I find flash for this kind of thing too restricting, and I get lost at the preloading of media files and all the rest...

Anyway, so with a mix of the following : HTML (Dreamweaver), Photoshop/Illustrator, Javascript Lightbox2 and Flash, we should be able to make something here.

http://pliggmods.com/story.php?title=automatically-embed-videos-using-the-video-plus-module

sorry when i make something a link is disappears? so copy and paste the above url

This is an example of just clicking a thumbnail and opening a video. So you could do this on your blog pretty easy if it will let you add this kind of code, sometimes there are big restrictions on what code you can use in blogs etc - I need to test this!

If you had a static site you were working on yourself in dreamweaver the above link would be perfect.

An Image map (this is for you Ted) is where you make one big image, and you can make a hotspot on that image in Dreamweaver (very easily) and THEN it would open that video for that particular hotspot.

Or you could make a flash swf. And in this you would make an animated button, and add the code in there for the link to open the lightbox and so on. Heres a link

http://www.bram.us/projects/flashlightboxinjector/

and this one too - flashlightbox! whodathunkit

http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox/ - scroll down to 'Modifications' - in that list is the flashlightbox stuff. Great.

This guy has it working - click on images in his header. Its just about getting videos into the lightbo at this point instead of just images.

http://www.lagrafica.co.uk/web_multimuedia.html

So in short, we can test out this week / next week.

Will be updating this as we go

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Flash Video Player

http://www.photoshopcafe.com/tutorials/flash/videoplayer/videoPlayer.htm

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Compressing your full res video with Compressor (for DVD, web etc)

Here is a link on the basics of using Compressor

http://www.ehow.com/how_2077571_export-video-using-compressor.html

Basic Final Cut Pro Editing

Here is a link to a nice pdf on the basics of editing in Final Cut Pro:


And you can find some links on File formats in the right hand menu on the main page of this blog >

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Making your own site

http://www.speaklight.com/
then you get:
http://your-site-name.publishpath.com/

LightCMS / Sign up for a free account - its only 10mb so you need to host any videos and files externally, and embed the html code into your website.

I suggest setting up a vimeo account for video and other files - www.vimeo.com

Say you have all your videos in your vimeo account, Vimeo automatically makes you an 'RSS Feed' - these are great for dynmically updating posts etc... If you go here:
http://www.feedsweep.com, you can look into ways of displaying your rss feed directly onto your website you have just set up, this outputs javascript, which you copy and paste just like any other element - when you are setting it up, take your time and read through the options, theres lots of stuff you can customise - ask me if you have any q's

Flickr for photos of your work - www.flickr.com
You can then link into your website by copying code after you have poked around HERE: http://www.pictobrowser.com/ - take your time to look through this

These are free hosts for files, so you dont have to pay for hosting.

You can buy your own domain online (www.discoutdomains.co.nz is a good one) and use that for your website by linking it all up - ask me about doing this, or look it up.

What you would be aiming for is making your own design for this online cms, this will require for you to learn some basic html and css.
When you are adding content to your site - you can flick between design and html views to pick up the basics of html.

We will get more into html and css next week.

Please add to this post if you have any ideas or things you have come across.

Just sign up and muck around - see what you can do

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Mac Video Workflow

Final Cut Pro - editing

'Send to Color' - Grade your footage, edit should be solid, though you can send the project BACK to Final Cut to edit it more.

From FCP you can 'Export for Soundtrack' - adding music, foley, tidying up your already recorded sound etc

Export your final render.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Using the Maclab

Using the maclab for video

Final Cut Pro and Color - editing and color grading your video work

Soundtrack Pro and Logic - Audio for your projects, Soundtrack Pro is great for foley etc as you can see the video in realtime while playing and editing sound as you would in any high end Audio Software (such as Logic)

After Effects and Shake - Compositing software, though after effects also doubles as Animation Software.

These are all great software tools! USE them!
Any questions of course ask me - I am in the labs Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.

- e

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Write on Effect

Heres the write on effect - this is just one tutorial on youtube, you can google search any effect as long you mention After Effects, and the effect you are going for

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3fqcLQE_GE

Friday, May 22, 2009

EA Short Courses - After Effects

Starting date: 25th May 2009
2 sessions, 10am 25th May 2009 and 10am 1st June 2009 - Otago Polytechnic School of Art.
A crash course in Adobe After Effects as a follow on from previous short courses in Illustrator.

First Session [10am 25th May 2009]
The After Effects Work flow and layout, Compositions and Project, Basic Animation, Importing and Exporting.

Second Session [10am 1st June 2009]
Working with video, Colour Grading, Basic Compositing, meetings with students who are interested in using After Effects in their work.