conigs

Part of my everyday gear includes a Wacom. At home and my previous jobs, that would have been my personal Intuos 4. At Code 42, I received a brand new Intuos 5 which includes touch gestures, similar to a trackpad. Unfortunately, those gestures just don’t work reliably. And because of the way I use my tablet, with the keyboard above, I got a lot of accidental touch events. Here’s how I tamed them.

First, a picture of my setup…

As you can see, any time I reach over the tablet to type, that could cause problems for touch gestures.¹ To remedy that, I disabled most of the touch gestures and limited them to mostly scrolls/pans. Here’s my settings:

I slowed down the pointer speed to reduce unwanted cursor movement as I use the keyboard. I also completely disabled any clicking. Zoom & rotate were finicky at best, and don’t even seem to function in After Effects, so they were disabled as well. This leaves scrolling and navigation, which is what I really want touch gestures to be. It’s really nice to just lift my pen and use the same hand to switch between desktops, reveal the desktop, and even use Launchpad.² For custom gestures, I modified three finger tap & hold to save, and disabled five finger anything. Holding a pen, it’s not an easy gesture, especially when trying to keep the pen far enough away from the tablet to enable touch.

Ideally, I’d like to see Wacom do three things with their drivers. 1.) Somehow increase reliability of touch, but I have no idea of the engineering already involved in the current drivers. 2.) Be able to relegate touch input to a certain portion of the tablet, in my case the left side or corner. 3.) Add a customizable delay to the “Show Express View” option. This wasn’t covered here, but if you rest your finger or hand on the Express Keys, a HUD pops on screen showing you what they do. Current delay is just under a second, and I hit it a lot while typing.

So that’s what I do to tame touch on the Intuos 5. After using it this way for about a week, it’s working well so far. I still have to customize the Express Keys and customize settings for each app. But I’m waiting for my tower to come in before I do that.³

1. I prefer my tablet here, as opposed to the side where a typical mouse would be, because it feels more natural that way. ↩
2. Yes, sometimes I use launchpad. If set up right, it can work well. ↩
3. I’m temporarily on an i5 iMac, waiting for my tower to arrive with dual displays. ↩

Is there that one menu command you always use in After Effects and wish there was a keyboard shortcut? In the past, there were cumbersome methods of modifying a text file buried in the filesystem to change things. But there’s a much easier way:

System Preferences: Keyboard & Mouse.

Go to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab and click on the “+” button towards the bottom.

Then select After Effects from the Application pulldown (you might have to go to “Other…” at the bottom and browse to AE).

Type in the exact name of the menu item you want a shortcut for, then hit the keys you’d like to be the shortcut. Just make sure they shortcut isn’t already used by After Effects.

And there you go!

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).

With so many newspapers seeing decline in their physical circulation, it’s nice to see a paper like the New York Times embracing the flexibility of content that the Internet can offer.

Recently, their After Effects workflow was posted on digitalartwork.net. It’s a little rough and they fully admit they’re new to the mograph game, but it’s always interesting to see how someone else works.

Now if only other papers would realize Internet distribution offers more than digital copies of their print.

Here’s the New Your Times’ demo reel:

UPDATE: Humble pie. I already had to fix a pretty critical bug. Post Haste 1.0.1 has just been released.

One of the more tedious tasks in post, with the exception of rotoscoping, is just setting up a project. A while back, we discovered the usefulness using a template folder to keep everything consistent. Thomas Tomchak at Suite Take goes into great detail about project templates. But we were still duplicating folders, copying and pasting, and renaming multiple files before we could get started. I decided to make the write my own software to make things easier. The result is Post Haste.

Post Haste really just does one thing, but does it well: automatically generates a project folder for you. All you have to do is enter information such as project number, client, etc. and Post Haste will create a project folder with files in place and renamed. It’s customizable to allow up to five fields of information and auto-fills certain fields such as date, editor, or suite. Take a look.

Post Haste is completely free. There are no nag dialogues about how you should give me money. Really, I wrote the program for myself to make things easier. But to make things interesting, I’m releasing Post Haste as “luchware.” If you find it useful, consider buying me lunch.

I’m about to launch something tomorrow. Just a preview:

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.

For some reason, I’ve spent a lot of time perusing the Pro-App discussion forums on Apple as well as the AE forum on Creative COW. Many people on these boards are very, very helpful. When I get the chance, I try to pitch in as well to help someone through a problem.

Lately, though, I’ve noticed two possibly (probably) related trends, mainly on Apple:

1. Senior users responding with the air of “why are you wasting my time?” or “your wrong/that was stupid”
2. Novice users posting questions along the lines of “I was hired to cut this commercial and I don’t know anything about broadcast!”

I’m guessing after seeing too many of #2, you get the attitude of #1. But no one is forcing that person to post or respond. As far as #2 is concerned, I’ve gotten in over my head, too; however, there seem to be more and more of these posts.

While this seems to be a relatively new trend for video, it’s old news for designers and audio engineers. Got a copy of Photoshop? You’re a designer! Pro Tools? Hey, now you’re an audio engineer! Have FCP? You’re now an editor. Gonna by that new Scarlet for $2,500. That makes you a DP!

I made a similar observation on Slashdot back when Apple lowered the price of Shake in June, 2006¹:

When powerful software gets into the hands of the untrained, the trend seems to be that it lowers the value of the services of people who do know what they are doing. [...] I’m not saying the price drop in Shake is entirely bad, just that it will bring in more people who think they know what they’re doing, when really they have no idea.

Recently, I discovered this thread on FCP-L. The general consensus is that apprenticeship seems to be dead, at least in the video/indie-film world.

I don’t knock people for wanting to get into the biz, and learning a few things the hard way. I did too. But there is, more and more, a trend of people NOT starting out as assistants or apprentices…learning the craft while on the job and watching how it is done. People will just buy the equipment and without any knowledge go off and shoot something. [...] What gets me is when these people now go “I have a client and am making a commercial for broadcast…how do I do this[?]”

-comebackshane

I know many, many people (especially some with me in film school) who just decided since they had a camera and computer, that made them a DP/editor/director. I’ve seen sophomores at UWM drop of their “DP” reels expecting to get jobs shooting commercials. Now learning something along the way is one thing. You fall. You get back up and try again, learning something along the way. Only these don’t appear to be falls, but rather willfully walking off a cliff and asking for a parachute on the way down.

Though, those of us who have run the gauntlet² really should try and help those who need it. And especially those who ask for it. Mark Raudonis later notes that apprenticeship is not dead in his shop:

We make it a point to teach, encourage, and give people an chance to contribute to the team effort. The first mistake they make would be my fault… I didn’t teach them. The second mistake is their fault… they didn’t learn. The third mistake is their last one… at our shop.

If you come across those that seem to have gotten in over their head, be willing to help out. It may be our only chance to keep apprenticeship alive. Just be weary of those that get into these situations who then refuse to think or learn, but instead wish to have others do the work for them. They won’t learn. They don’t want to.

1. And I’ll also note that some people called me out on it. If you go up two levels, I did make a rather snide remark which made me sound like an elitist prick. ↩
2. I’ll fully admit, I’m still in that process. I’m pretty sure it never ends. ↩