Stu at Prolost has a great article on pimping out After Effects, what settings he uses, and some must have scripts.
On the scripts, BG Renderer is a must, at $29.99 it allows you to not only render in the background, but also to e-mail you when a render is done, so you can walk way, and know right when it is ready continue.
And of course Stu’s own DV Rebel Tools are also another must have.
I honestly thought with them moving to Adobe that the old plug ins were gone for good, but it seems not as Automatic Duck has released all their old plug ins for FREE!
I already owned Pro Import AE 5.0, which allows you to import either Final Cut Pro 7 or AVID Media Composer sequences into After Effects. You use Free XML exporter for FCP and it works almost perfectly. A must have.
Pro Export FCP 5.0 is for FCP X and is to allow OMF export.
Pro Export FCP 4.0 lets you export either OMF or AAF from FCP to AVID, and I previously owned this.
And their is Pro Import FCP 2.0 which allows you to import an AVID sequence into Final Cut Pro.
And they are all FREE. So download them now. Sure they will not be updated again, but free is a huge price drop!
Check out his plug in at Foolcolor. For $89 it will move your FCP X project into After Effects. He is also working on one to export audio to FCP 7 so you can export an OMF and to export FCP 7 Sequences to FCP X and FCP 7 Projects to FCP X.
Pretty awesome that he is doing this, especially with Automatic Duck possibly out of the picture!
Pro Video Coalitions After Effects Script of the Week, will let you change the Render Location for multiple items in your render queue. Very cool, but there is currently no link to it, so hopefully he will add it later.
FCP.CO has an article on the beta of a new app called Foolcut AE to export video from FCP X to After Effects for $89. Impressive considering I paid $500 for the same functionality from Automatic Duck from FCP 7 to AE, though the same functionality is free from Premiere Pro to AE.
There is a teaser trailer for Project Sync for syncing After Effects Project changes between users. It looks like a very cool plug in, that someone should have come up with sooner.
Check out the page on Vimeo, or I have embeded the video below.
Project Sync Teaser from Roe Media on Vimeo.
Trapcode is sharing an excellent Smoke Project. Download it here.
The Pro Video Coalition has an article on a joint NVIDIA Adobe research project on doing ray traced 3D within After Effects, and it looks amazing. I just hope it will work with my GeForce GTX 285, or that NVIDIA will come out with a new better CUDA card available in Mac. I would consider a 4000, but it barely work with Lion or Apple products at this point, and is already a generation behind.
Let’s hope this gets integrated into After Effects soon! Realtime 3D would be amazing.