Another Course of Adobe Plugin Development

I’ve grown quiet over past several months, when I decided to more actively embrace my development career in a field that is not related to film and video. However, despite quite an overwhelming day job, I managed to recently wrap up the second instalment of a course for After Effects plugin development, again hosted by my favourite vfx training site – fxphd.com.

The first part (SYS204) was a general overview of all render pathways – CPU, GPU, After Effects, Premiere Pro – and altering just individual pixels. In SYS205 I decided to take a more focused view, and this one is all about various ways one or more layers can interact with each other – blending, transformation, blurring, convolution, masking. Also, because I went quite deep in there, there was no time to spend on either Premiere Pro compatibility, or GPU acceleration. These issues face their own challenges, and each of them can be a 300-level course on its own. Essentially, what AE SDK gives you in the form of suites, you have to roll on your own from scratch when you move out of After Effects, which I unfortunately experienced myself the hard way. Well, life is hardly ever perfect.

On a good side, a few good people helped me to setup XCode in such a way that debugging on OS X is now a pleasure, not a pain. Therefore I moved most of my development to Mac, and I am not very much looking back. My Windows power horse workstation sits kind of idly these days, since I am not really doing any post-production work demanding its power.

You can see the teaser for the course on its page, and if you are interested, join the happy family of fxphd users, and enjoy the all-you-can-eat offer that they converted to some time ago.

Tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.