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After Effects Wiggler tip

(Click the screenshot above to see it full size)

One of the tips that got the students really excited in my class yesterday was that of using The Wiggler in After Effects to simulate bad shock absorbers on an old truck as it drives down a dirt road. The trick is to use empty keyframes. Specifically, you want to:

1. Select the body of the vehicle

2. Set two empty keyframes for the Rotation property
(Set the first keyframe like you normally would by clicking the stopwatch, but set the second one by clicking the "add a keyframe" diamond located at the far left of the layer between the two arrows)

3. Select both keyframes and choose The Wiggler from the Window menu.

4. Change Noise Type to: Jagged // Frequency: 10 // Magnitude: 2

Watch the Magic!

My NAB After Effects and Premiere Seminars

It was a long one for me today... I taught almost 8 straight hours (including setup and all of the Q&A's after class). I only had 2 seminars today, but they were both longer than 3 hours each.

The first one was on After Effects and I had a full classroom with attendees at all skill levels. They were a great group with real inciteful questions and very eager to learn. I used the beta of AE CS3 and was able to touch on a few upcoming features including my favorite one (so far) called Brainstorm. It's basically a new user interface that offers variations based on selected design and animation parameters. Choose which properties and effects you want to explore, and Brainstorm will propose animated variations. Very cool. Instant creativity booster at the touch of a button!

My second class was on Premiere Pro and I also decided to try and use the CS3 beta. It was a CRASH fiesta! It turns out that I had the good fortune (or is that bad fortune?) to discover a major bug in the beta in front of the entire audience. While the program works fine on your machine by itself... when hooked up to a projector the demand on either the video card processing or video RAM is just to great. My timeline would stop playing, my program monitor would stop updating, and I would eventually have to Force Quit and relaunch the app. I went through this a few times and finally decided it wasn't worth it. Luckily I was using my Mac Pro so I was able to boot into Windows XP and run the current version of Premiere Pro 2. Not as cool as running the new version that no one had seen publicly yet... but at least I was able to finish the class. C'est la vie.

NAB 2007 Starts Today

I'm at NAB Expo again this year and today was the first day of training at the POST|Production conference. The conference is run by Future Media Concepts which is headed up by Ben Kozuch. Ben is an ex-Israli Commando and it shows... he runs the conference, which has over 200 classes in 10 tracks, with the precision of a military operation. I ran the Digital Video Production Workshop (DVPW) for NAB for 2 consecutive years a few years back, and that was only with 3 tracks of DV insanity across 2 days. I can't even imagine 10 tracks across 6 days. Better you than me Ben! ;->

Check out the full conference schedule here:
http://www.nab.org/nabshow/conferences/ppwc.asp

My New Blog!

Welcome to my new Blog! Today is my birthday and so I thought, "What better day to start a blog!" My buddy Scott Kelby has been after me for more than 2 years to start a blog to share with my extended friends and family all the stuff that I usually share with him (mainly because he's sick of hearing it). I think if he never has another conversation with me about codecs... it will still be to soon! :-) So I'm going to do my best to post all of the tips, tricks and insider's info that comes my way, so that I can at least have a record of them before they evaporate into the ether that is my brain's memory.

BTW, this picture of me was taken by Dale Lorenzen who was a student in an Adobe Lightroom class that I moderated/proctored at the Digital Technology Center in Sarasota, FL in February. The class was taught by Scott Kelby and he used me as an impromptu model in the class. I noticed it on his monitor and told him that it looked pretty cool and he graciously allowed me to have a copy... and now I'm going to use it as my "About Me" photo on this blog. Thanks Dale!