Get Yours

It’s out. Get it. Adobe After Effects 6.5 Studio Techniques by Mark Christiansen.

The description on Amazon is stupid (as of this writing anyway — here’s a better one). There’s nothing in this book about animating type, and it’s not for people trying to learn After Effects. It’s a hardcore film compositing book in the tradition of Brinkman’s and Wright’s, but unlike those it focusses specifically on real world how-tos, with numerous examples and color plates. For film professionals (or those aspiring/pretending to be), the chapter on light and color by eLin co-creator Brendan Bolles is worth the price on its own. And there's even a fun little chapter at the end by me, which you can bleach clean and use as a handy note-taking area.

sliceaholic

I remember reading through Steve Wright's book and getting to the part about the slice tool and thinking, what is this crazy slice tool thing? What punkass comping software is this cat using? And then I wanted my punkass comping software to have one.

O-slice is a Fusion macro that lets you graph two slices through your image. You can move the graphs around and control how they look. You can scale the values of the graphs. You can even see how the alpha channel graphs against RGB.

If you don't know why you need this, Steve will tell you.

Download O-slice_v1.4 (5kb .rar file)

Props: I never would have figured out how to use Paint to create the slice lines if it weren't for Raf Schoenmaekers’ helpful post on the Fusion list.

cropCompare v2.4

Fixes a bug and adds a Scale Graphs slider.

Download O-cropCompare_v2.4 (4kb .rar file)

crop it like it's hot

For some reason I've created a new Fusion Macro. It's a tool to help match color levels across elements in a composite, and it goes by the catchy name of cropCompare.

cropCompare lets you define two zoomed-in windows on your image to enlarge, visually compare alongside one another, and even graph the values of. It's designed to assist in matching the black levels of two disparate elements in a comp, but it can be used for all kinds of image analyses.

Add the cropCompare node downstream of your comp and view it. You'll see four position controls and two little windows in the lower right of the image.

You have separate Show controls for Crops 1 and 2. For each Crop, you define its location and Sample Size and choose where on the image to overlay it and how big. Put them next to each other and maybe bump up the Gamma the Crops control to make sure your values are matching.

Or, to really make sure, turn on Do Graphs. You now have an RGB graph of the centerline of each Crop. Want to see those graphs unobstructed? Check Do Graphs and Only together.

For the graphs to look their best, please enable Fusion's HiQ mode.

Please give it a try and let us know what you think!

Download O-cropCompare_v2.2 (8kb .rar file)