conigs

As a designer/editor who often develops scripts & utilities to make work easier, I can really appreciate what Andrew Hake has put together. I’ve covered AERender before, but realized I never posted a link to his R&D page where he hosts all his useful utilities.

Some of my favorites are AEae (opens multiple instances of After Effects), AERender, difference, and projector (pairs nicely with Post Haste, eh?).

If you have the means, I highly recommend throwing a donation his way. I know from experience these utilities were probably born out of his own needs and frustrations, but it’s nice to know others appreciate your hard work.

AERender is a nice little “dropplet” app to launch AE renders in the background by just dragging a project file to its icon. No need to launch After Effects. It’s a nice complement to the BG Renderer script. It comes in both CS4 & CS3 flavors.

Last week I was working on a retail spot where we needed a product that wasn’t shot on-figure. But we did have a shot of a similar product. It just needed a little work. This is what I mean by “a little:”

I’m pretty pleased with the end result. It was a fun task to work on, though I hope I don’t have to do it too often…

If you’ve worked on commercial project, you know there’s only one constant: change… especially at the last minute. One of the things that seems to frequently change is color choice. If you have a complicated AE animation and many layers that use the same colors, this can be a royal pain. You can reduce this pain if, from the beginning, you set up a color control layer.

[Note: this really only works well if you're working on vector animations with single-color objects.]

First, set up an adjustment layer and add the “Color Color” effect found under “Expression Controls.” Do this for as many colors as you want.

I recommend naming the controls for the layers you will be coloring rather than the color itself.

Then, apply the “Fill” effect under “Generate.” Here, you can option-click (alt-click on PC) and drag the pick-whip (that little spiral button) to the color control in your color control layer.

Now, when the client comes back to you with the comment “The trees should be purple,” you won’t be cursing under your breath (as much).

Being a Mac guy who works with After Effects, this news really bothers me. Keven Schmidt at Creative Mac benchmarked renders in After Effects CS4 on Mac OS X and Windows. The result? AE still renders faster in Windows, by roughly 1.2x. Now, AE has traditionally rendered faster in Windows, but now that we’re on v9 and OS X has been around for 8 years, you’d think there would be significant improvements. Kevin about sums it up:

Either Adobe isn’t tuning After Effects on the Mac at all, or tuning the buhjeezus out of the Windows versions. Hell, even single process rendering on Vista generally spanks multiple processes on Leopard, for the love of Pete.

This, coupled with the continued sub-par performance of Flash on the Mac really makes me doubt Adobe’s commitment to the Mac platform.  Are they still bitter about Final Cut Pro eating into Premiere sales back in 1998 & 1999?

As a side note, the other takeaway from the post is that enabling multiprocessing in AE doesn’t save much time in either platform. For longer renders, it may help, but for those intermediate small batches, you may be better of sticking to single processes. This is something I’ve suspected for a long time, and I’m glad to see some numbers on this.

Andrew Kramer posted another tutorial in the Meteor Crash series. The best piece of advise from the tutorial:

Now, if you don’t have Particular, what you can do is go in your back yard, and get a pile of dirt together. Put it in your hand, along with a grenade… No, along with like, a small firecracker. And then… light it. And when your hand blows off, what you can do is sue the company that makes the fireworks. Take the money from the settlement, and then buy Particular… so we can do this tutorial together.

Really, he doesn’t get into Particular until part 2, though.