ProVideoCoalition on using OpenEXR format in After Effects

Chris Zwar has an article at ProVideoCoalition on using OpenEXR format for rendering in After Effects.

OpenEXR support has recently been updated to include compression, and it is a stll format in case of crashes, you save your renders (though have to also render out audio if necessary). EXR is a format developed by VFX Proffesionals for the purpose.

Chris Zwar at ProVideoCoalition on After Effects Binning, and layer rendering order

Chris Zwar at ProVideoCoalition has an article on Bining and After Effects Rending order in the public beta of After Effects. The embedded video is about 45 minutes long, but well worth checking out. And you should also check out his 18 part series on After Effects and Performance which I have talked about before.

The video goes into 2D layers and precomps (rendering from the bottom up), and then 3D layers which is where Binning comes in, which connects all 3d layers that are next to each other in the timeline as a single render so you don’t get motion blur issues of individual layers in a created object. The new beta includes labels to show you how 3d layers are binned in the timeline, which will prove very useful to anyone who does a lot of 3d within After Effects.

It is funny, he started on After Effects 3, and I believe I started on version 4, though he is certainly more of a master than I am.

Adobe updated After Effects to 2022, October 2021 version 22 at Adobe Max

So at Adobe Max yesterday Adobe upgraded After Effects to version 22, October 2021 release, of course this is now the unified version number of the video suite, so after effects 22 works with Premiere Pro 22.

New Features are

•Fast Previews and Renders with Multi-Frame Rendering which has moved over from the beta

•Reimagined Render Queue with Remote Notifications via the crative cloud app on your phone, tablet or even watch

•Composition Profiler, which will help you see which layers and effects take the most time

•Speculative Previews, After Effects will now render when you have been idle for a set period of time

•Export faster with Adobe Media Encoder using mult-frame rendering, and you can continue working

•Improved 10 Bit HEVC playback

•Enable LUT Interpolation method selection, either Triliner or Tetrahedral

CURRENTLY IN BETA

•Scene Edit Detection using Adobe Sensei

Adobe Updated Media Encoder to 2022, October 2021 Release version 22.0 at Adobe Max Today

So Adobe Updated Media Encoder to October 2021 release version 22 today, and unifed version numbers of the video apps, so you can tell the version it works with by the version number (if only each version number had it’s own icon or color to tell them apart).

It’s new features tie into the new features of After Effects and Premiere Pro, most excitingly with COLOR MANAGEMENT FOR H.264 and HEVC on Import and Export! WOOHOO FInally working around Apple’s fucked up color on the mac, and like DaVinci before it, letting you export compressed video with proper metadata tags so that it will display correctly whoever is looking at it! I literally have problems with this every single day, so I can’t wait to give it a try. This is game-changing if it works!

Also included is Color Management for Sony XAVC-L-HDR and Faster Rendering for After Effects with multi-frame rendering, should be 3x as fast! Woohoo!

Creative Dojo has a video tutorial on Dynamic Auto Resize & Auto Scale text

This is very cool, and very useful for making templates, especially in commercial, direct response and web video advertising. Make sure to subscribe to Creative Dojo on YouTube.

Expressions are amazing, and I wish I was better at writing them instead of just using them, and this goes through the expressions so you can get some information about how it works.

PremiumBeat with 5 tips for Organizing your Compositions in After Effects

Charles Yeager at Premium beats has this article and the above video on organizing your After Effects Compositions.

Yes yes yes, cleaning up After Effects Projects is a must, and sometimes I wish that Template makers spent more time making theme easier to use and modify as I basically never use them exactly as intended. Anything to clean things up so if another graphics artist comes or even you after a break will be able to quickly figure things out.