Link: AFX tutorials

By Andrew Kramer, there's like 60 of them! For both Motion Graphics and Compositing. Some require specialty plugins, contact your local hacker for details.

Here you go.

Tips: Lipsynch and Facial animation

A buncha great lipsynch info here

And charts...

FCP/shooting tip: Avoiding timecode breaks

Any chicken who uses Final Cut or is shooting DV should receive this important information.

1. Run tape before your first shot, or add bars and tone

2. When taping, make sure you record a few seconds after all the action you want captured has stopped

3. If you stop or take out the tape, make sure you roll back a couple of seconds and record over that extra few seconds of footage instead of blank tape. Recording over blank tape will cause your timecode to break.

4. Look in the viewfinder before shooting. If it says this: --:--:--;-- you're going to have a timecode break. If it has numbers, you're fine.

5. Some people like blacking out a tape before recording (recording through a whole tape with lens cap on to stamp timecode). I think it just wears the heads and wastes time - but it's an option

6. If you already have a problem tape, import the scenes in chunks into your editing system or you can turn off "Abort capture on timecode break" on Final Cut Pro

7. If it still refuses to import, get another camera and make a clone of your tape by playing on one and recording on another. This will give the new tape a fresh timecode

Excerpted from the DV guru's How to Avoid Timecode Breaks, http://www.dvguru.com/2005/11/08/tip-how-to-avoid-timecode-breaks/

Links: Shake Tutorials

3D Multipass Compositing in Shake

Download the files used in the 3D Multipass comping Tutorial here

Advanced 3D & Shake

A whole page of Tutorials here
http://www.fxphd.com

Keying Tutorial Download

Shake Tutorials for purchase here

Links: Free greenscreen footage!

look what i found! free greenscreen footage!!
http://timelinegfx.com/freegreenscreen.html

you just have to email them at FREE@TIMELINEGFX.COM to get a link to the downloads, which are huge. please use the ones that are not pre-keyed to practice your keying skills.

xo,
TeacherPants

Links: Post-production houses

Motionographer: lots of links on the left-hand side.

Those that are not listed on Motionographer, I'm including below.

Buster Design
Mograph: Community of motion graphics, job listings etc...
Designinmotion: Tells you what's new in the land of MoGfx
DesignOMotion: a studio with a misleadingly similar name
Smuggler Studio
fluid studio
artichoke
beehive
hornet
Park Avenue Post
editional effects
Point of Origin

Maya and AE Tip: Color Settings

A former student o' mine asked me the following question:
I have problems exporting my senior project from After Effects. I render my images
in maya and then import them into after effects. While I work in AE everything looks fine, however when I render movie from After Effects the quicktime result comes out darker and more red (more saturated). I export it with animation compression set to Best with Millions of Colors. Do you know what it might be?

The solution? Color settings in After Effects.

My answer:
in AE check your File/Project Settings.
2nd area up is called "Color Settings"
Set these to your photoshop working space or if applicable, Maya
working space, or if neither one applies, to the working space of your
computer monitor.

Also, evidently the color picker in Maya sucks. It does some weird translation. For best results when jiving Maya colors with Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop colors, rely on Hexadecimal values. Take that, faulty color-picker!

Shake Tip: Expressions

Here's some info I gleaned from the interweb. In addition there's a DVD by Gnomon Workshop called "Expressions and Scripting with Matt Linder." That guy is a genius.

Any parameter can be an expression. You just type the expression into where the number would go, and you get a little + sign which you can expand to show the text of the expression.

the noise() function is a good one for you here. It takes a parameter, which should be based around the time...

So for something to vary between 0 and 1, put:

noise(time)

To slow it down to half the speed, use:

noise(time / 2)

To make it between 0 and 5:

5 * noise(time / 2)

Or between 5 and 10:

5 + (5 * noise(time / 2))

To find out what functions are available to you, find your shake install folder, and look in the "include" folder in there (if you're on OSX, you may have to do "Expand Package Contents" or whatever it's called)

In that folder, there should be a file called 'nreal.h'. This has the definitions of all of the functions that you can use in Shake. This includes both functions like noise() and also nodes (which are actually just functions that return an image). This'll give you a good idea of what's available for use in expressions.

Also, the Shake manuals "Expressions and Scripting" section is rather helpful and much more complete compared to many other applications out there.

Links: Music Videos

Doc Copenhagen's Top 50 Music Videos of 2006

Pitchfork Best of 2006

Spike.com's Best of 2006

Coffee and TV by Blur

Pitchfork Best of 2007

Director File Best of 2007

Regina Spektor

Director Stephane Sednaoui