The Master of Color Manipulation

3D LUT Creator

I learnt image color correction in several stages. First was of course playing in RGB with scanned pictures. I used shareware Paint Shop Pro back in those days, which at some point was acquired by Corel. And it was cool, levels – or actually auto-levels – was all the buzz, as well as Hue and Saturation. Curves felt almost like magic. Then I took a desktop publishing course, read a few books, and learnt about CMYK and prepress. That was the first time I heard about color models, working with channels, as well as various issues that arose from incorrect conversions between various CMYK and RGB profiles.

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My 48 Hour Film Project Experience

48hfp-exp-fi

In the previous article I wrote how I prepared for this year’s 48 Hour Film Project in Warsaw. Here I want to tell you what actually happened and how the situation unfolded from my point of view. However, before reading further, watch our short, so that I can safely write about it without spoiling it for you.

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PEV05 – Ben Gill on Performance Enhancing Visual Effects

pev05_fi

Update: Ben has published a new tutorial that I added at the bottom of his interview.

This interview is part of the larger series about Performance Enhancing Visual Effects. Ben Gill is a filmmaker and designer, author of the split screen tutorial which I attached to the end of the first post about PEVs. Since he represents “the new blood” that comes to the craft of editing, I thought I would ask him a few questions as well. Enjoy.

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Creating Thumbnails Has Never Been Easier

One of the byproducts of my work on THAT Studio Panel extension for Premiere Pro and After Effects has been an After Effects script that would generate a massive amount of thumbnails for video files. The initial idea to use it to prepare Panel assets did get scrubbed along the way, and we never got to using it in our automated workflow, but I believe it was too valuable to go to waste. Therefore here it is – name any way that you want to generate frames from your After Effects compositions or video files, and Master Thumbnailer will do that for you.

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Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects Plug-in Development Course on fxphd.com

sys204

I’m happy to announce, that this term I’m teaching plug-in development for Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects on fxphd. I’ll be covering the basics of C/C++ and Adobe After Effects SDK in a bit more detail, as well as GPU acceleration for Premiere. All these will be illustrated with a simple vignette effect that we are going to create during the course with the students. Believe it or not, any similarities to the very first effect that I wrote are coincidental. see more

Layer Stripper – It’s Not What You Think It Is

CI Layer Stripper

As I’m getting ready for this year’s NAB, I think it’s great time to release a new nifty tool for After Effects – CI Layer Stripper. This script deftly removes all unused layers from your project – the ones that are not visible, and not referenced by other layers as parents, track mattes, or even simple expressions. This will allow you to trim and collect these items in your project which are actually being used.

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Finally a Viable After Effects Archive Solution

Trim N Collect

While developing Conform Studio I stumbled upon an application of the CS Extract script which I considered interesting, but did not have enough time to code and test properly. It was only a matter of time when other people attempted to use the Studio in this manner, therefore I even included a note in the manual about it. see more

Simplicity Overdone

simplicity-feature

I was hoping to bring you something more than my ramblings about the user interface overhaul in the latest Adobe release, but unfortunately it looks like the interview with the User Experience (UX) team will not be forthcoming, despite initial positive reactions. My impatience has caught up with me, and therefore I present you with the reasons for my vocal criticism of the new UI. see more

Move That Anchor!

move-anchor-feature

Being a casual After Effects user I find myself sometimes creating an animation path only to find out that I need to later reposition the anchor point of the layer to add rotation or scale. To my surprise, even with the abundance of AE Scripts on the market, I could not find a simple tool to remedy this problem. So I wrote one myself. see more