I'm a lifelong learner that really enjoys learning new technology, namely technologies that allow us to communicate more effectively like Adobe Premiere and After Effects. This is a learning journal that helps me archive and reflect on my growth.
I haven't done loads with After Effects in my career, but I've done my fair share in the last 5 years. My talent lies more in Premiere which I use almost every day. After Effects was always that expensive toy that I couldn't get my hands on let alone learn very well. With that being said, up to this point if I ever wanted a title sequence or something I made in After Effects, I would "simply" render it out and then bring in the file to Premiere. I've been doing this for 3 years only to find out today that it was a waste of my time. Thanks again to ECAbrams, I learned something awesome in this tutorial on workflow between After Effects and Premiere. Here's the tutorial:
THE biggest thing I learned from this tutorial was that I didn't have to export clips from After Effects or Premiere to go from one to the other, I can just import the project file! Unbelievable! I vaguely remember hearing something like this when I was drooling over the Adobe CS5 roll out videos 2 or 3 years ago, but it must have faded since then. Thanks ECAbrams for a great tutorial. This tutorial alone will save me a ton of time in the long run.
This has me thinking now. If I went for 5 years doing something inefficient for this long, there has to be something else I'm missing as well. If you're an experienced editor/graphics animator and you can think of one of those aha moments you had like I just did, post it in the comments below. Workflow shortcuts are so essential to our work. Maybe we can save each other some serious time by citing all the seemingly obvious things that some of us just plain miss. Take care and happy editing.
Today I came across a tutorial by ECAbrams about using the repeater. It took me about two hours to play with it and actually make something of good use, but I really feel like I have a better understanding of it now. With a bit more practice, I should be able to manipulate the repeater to do quite a few handy tricks for transitions, logos, and anything else that pops up in my grey matter. The thing that makes the repeater so powerful is that it doesn't just allow you to repeat; it allows you to manipulate the scale, position, and rotation of these shapes AS THEY REPEAT...What does that really mean? It means that I can take a rectangle, turn it into a slim little bar, and then make its repeated duplicates fan across the screen and change their scale in the process (see it here). All in all, it finally made sense how animators can make all those superb transitions from scratch. There's still much more to learn like... How does the alpha channel play into this? When I bought a transition pack once, it said it came with an alpha channel so that the user could color the transitions any way they wanted to. How do I add that? Also, how do I do circles? I tried for 30 minutes and got stuck. I suppose each shape is a bit different to animate.
I've played with noise removal tools like Audacity before, but I'd never had access to Adobe Audition. Look at how pro the interface looks.
Audacity is GREAT for being free, don't get me wrong. At the same time though, Adobe Audition is simpler to use IMHO. The way the interface is designed helps you make sense of the noise removal process a little more. Audacity offers many of the same controls, but when tweaking things, you don't necessarily see how it's affecting the audio track. In Audition, the interface shows a graph 24-7 that gives you a live visual of what your tweaks and changes are doing. All the studio shooting I do is from a small room next to our stage and the central air fan is ALWAYS on, can't stop it. In this video, I have a clip of audio with some of the fan noise at the end. Watch closely as I select the noise at the end, take a "noise print" and then remove that noise from the rest of the audio track. Piece of cake!
I generally learn tutorials pretty quick, but every once and a while my head gets stuck on something that I have to stare at for at least 20 minutes. After I finally get it, I feel like and idiot but then I just turn around and want some more! Sound familiar?
Today's brain stretching adventure... the graph editor. I did a simple tutorial on how to make a ball bounce. It was good review on keyframing and an introduction to easy ease keyframes, but it also challenged me to work around in the graph editor which is something new to me. The graph editor shows visually the intensity of the effect, whatever that effect might be. Shoot, it doesn't even have to be an effect. It might just be something like position or scale. Regardless, the higher the line goes, the more intense the effect and the lower the line goes, the less intense. That gets a little confusing when the ball I'm animating is going down but on the graph editor, the line is going up! Why do you do this to me After Effects? I was already backwards when I had to learn how to work in Z space but now backwards lines in graphical forms too! My brain is growing so much right now. After Effects I hate you now, but I will love you later... I'm sure of it. My struggle now will make it easier to relate to the high school students I teach this to eventually ;)
Anyway, straight lines show a constant change in the effect while a curved line shows an accelerated change or decelerated change. Slope also plays a big factor as well. A steep line indicates a fast animation while a gradual line indicates a slow animation. I only animated Y in this bouncing ball thing (the green line above), but I could have also animated X (red flat line, no change). It's amazing how much control you can have with this program. Unfortunately, I have little to no control at this point. After Effects is an animal I'll just have to tame as I move forward. Here's the graph editor and the infamous bouncing ball.
I just opened up After Effect CC for the first time and was please to see that it asked me if I wanted to import settings from the cloud. Seeing that I don't have any settings saved yet, I didn't need to click yes, but what the heck, I did it anyway! Looks to be a great feature that allows users to retain all their favorite shortcuts, layouts, and presets. Looking forward to actually utilizing it at some point. I've walked into an editing suite before only to find that all my shortcuts were gone! Who would have thought, saving them to the cloud... Great stuff Adobe.
