Charles Yeager at the Beat blog at PremiumBeat has an article 10 Underrated After Effects Plugins, Scripts, and Presets. I already use Neat Video which is by far the best noise reduction plug in out there. Color Vibrance from Video Copilot is also good and free. And I use Decompose Text which makes working with text in After effects so much easier.
Lewis McGregor at PremiumBeat's The Beat blog has a very interesting article on Adding Volumetric Lighting in After Effects Without a 3rd Party Plugin.
OK, so not always the most thrilling subject, but after arguing with a post super about this, I wanted to give my 2 cents on file and sequence naming conventions, and for some of the reasons behind why I think the way I do. So first off is spaces, and I am a firm believer that there should be no spaces in your file/sequence names. I know that modern computers mostly deal fine with spaces, but to be on the safe size I think you should use underscores instead of spaces. Now file names should start with the job identification and name that your company specifies that you should figure out, and as much identifying info as you need. So lets say you are doing a short Star Wars commercial that is 2 minutes long and is job 040477, and it is titled Millennium Falcon Kessel Run in so I would say it should be SW_040477_120_MFKR_ to start. And a quick note, 120 for 120 seconds, and you would do 060 for a 60 second. And then as shown in my earlier posts about using PostHaste to set up sequences, I use STRINGOUTS, ROUGHCUT, OFFLINE and ONLINE as the nomenclature for the sequence. Now I have been told by a post super from television that they only use the job name, info and title and a version number, nothing else, but at least for commercial work, bts works and short films I have worked on, I totally don't agree. Personally I think if you can do it, ROUGHCUTS are for internal distribution mostly and the OFFLINE is when it starts going to the client, and should be much more finished, and have a decent audio mix, color correct, graphics, as much as you can get so you don't end up with the I don't know how to watch a rough cut lady. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MNg3sSZ9F8 And I think you need ONLINE to designate the final exports, so you can keep track of them, as sometimes you go back to Ofllines and keep working then make new ones, and just version numbers can be confusing. Honestly I have had 3 or 4 Onlines at times, because you can't guarantee the client won't come back. Now this is something else that I think should be in your filenames, especially with remote work, and that is Initials of the editor/graphics artist. And even more so because with the job I am on, we have a graphics guy, who has been doing the graphics, but not only is too busy, but the ProRES 4444 takes a long time to upload and download, so he has been handing off his After Effects Projects, and After Effects projects are big and unwieldy, and hard to break down into individual comps. This means different people are rendering out graphics, and to make changes, it would be easiest to have initials in the file name of the graphics. And our Online editor also prefers initials in the file name, so…
This is an article on the design firm Perception that is the go to company for designing futuristic user experiences. They use Cinema 4D and After Effects, which are already integrated.
As always it is full of videos and a great watch if you have some time. And yes I know I am almost a month late, but nothing is time sensitive here.
It is well worth checking out for any beginner editors out there.
I am setting up a project for a short film that my wife, wrote, shot and directed (I gaffed, key gripped and ACed) and decided to try ingest once again. Now I have already converted the iPhone footage to ProRES to get it 23.976 instead of variable frame rate, but since she is using it on an old computer decided to use the Proxy workflow and thought, why not try Ingest again. I knew I shouldn't but I thought I would try. Now I went for the ProRES Proxy LT codec, as I refuse to have any H.264 in my Porject, but of course halfway through compression Media Encoder locked up and I had to force quit. This of course messes up the whole INGEST thing and I ended up with some shots linked to the proxies and some linked to the original media and some without proxies at all. You can easily re-attach proxies and re-attach full resolution media as well here. Of course if the file names are the same, it is pretty easy to link between the files, but of course it didn't do files in file name order, so I had to figure out which files had a proxy, and then start the proxy creation again. In my whole career I don't think I have every had Ingest work all the way without a crash. Now I should have tried the new Beta and the Ingest settings, but since my wife is editing on an old version of Premiere I decided against it. And the fact that Media Encoder balks at any shot over 60 FPS, which they claim is the limit of Professional footage, it just won't work. So any slow mo you will be using full resolution.
Scott Simmons at PVC took his new MacBook Pro M1 Max for a spin with the new Premiere Pro Beta which is more optimized for the new chips, and the results are good.
Head over to No Film School and check out this interview with Commercial Video Editor Lauren Dellara who is cutting on Adobe Premiere Pro. Always great to see someone cutting something big with Premiere instead of AVID. I have grown to really love Premiere over either AVID or Final Cut Pro so I love seeing it used in commercial settings like this. Especially with Productions, the stability has improved so much.
I have to admit I haven't been watching the Beta forum or the beta features recently (busy on edit jobs, and not even using 2022, actually the lead editor refuses to move above 2019) but I just saw this at the Beta Forum at Adobe User Voice. So all Premiere Pro & AE Mogrts will show up in the Graphics tab, and you can use spell check and Search and replace, which is huge! Wow, this is super powerful. And you can focus on specific tracks, so if you organize like you should... Now you can double click to CHANGE ANY TEXT! And Spell Check in 2 places! My only problem is that I have had issues sharing Mogrts with people, especially when not on the same Adobe Account or sending it manually. but for built in Premiere Graphics this is amazing. I have wanted a spell checker forever, now we need one After Effects! And if the other feature this could really use, would be a batch change for graphics styles. I would so love to be able to select multiple text instances and change the style on them all.