What's on the CD? Professional tools produce professional results, and the Adobe After Effects 6.5 Studio Techniques CD-ROM has what you need to add new dimension to your work. The disc includes demos of more than a dozen plug-ins and programs, including After Effects itself. Not simply glorified ads, these are test-drivable versions that let you experiment with your own footage. Check out what you get: After Effects 6.5 (Adobe): Shows you what you've been missing with earlier versions. SynthEyes (Andersson Technologies) Provides fully automatic, as well as user-controlled match moving for single or batch-processed shots; a stand-alone program that exports to After Effects. eLin (Red Giant Software): Converts clips between linear color space and either video or film color space, enabling you to work with the linear color model in After Effects to produce more photorealistic effects and lighting. Particular (Trapcode): Designs 3D particle systems that simulate air resistance, gravity, and turbulence; provides real-time preview, as well as controls so you can freeze time and manipulate a camera in the scene. Lenscare (Frischluft): Includes two plug-ins: Depth of Field produces depth-of-field effects using a depth buffer; Out of Focus creates a blur with a constant radius over the complete image. Knoll Light Factory (Red Giant Software): Includes such pre-built lighting effects as lens flares, sparkles, glows, and more; also provides individual lens components so you can create your own custom effects. Primatte Keyer (Red Giant Software): Extracts keys from any background and includes controls to handle uneven lighting, difficult shadows, light spill, and more. Lux (Trapcode): Simulates light reflection, using After Effects' built-in lights to create visible light that corresponds to your layers' lighting schemes. Shine (Trapcode): Produces a 2D light-ray effect that closely resembles volumetric light; includes controls for coloring and shimmering lights. Composite Wizard (Red Giant Software): Optimizes composites and automates color correction, blurring or feathering of edges, artifact removal, and more. Magic Bullet Suite (Red Giant Software): Manipulates digital video to look like film with tools for 24p conversion, mimicking film artifacts and damage, creating film-like cross dissolves, removing DV compression artifacts, and more. 3D Stroke (Trapcode): Creates organic shapes using paths from masks and renders volumetric strokes that you can manipulate in 3D space. Starglow (Trapcode): Produces an eight-pointed star-shaped glow around a source's highlights; enables you to assign each direction of the star an individual color map and streak length. Sound Keys (Trapcode): Generates keyframes from audio energy; enables you to select a range in an audio waveform, then converts the frequencies into a stream of keyframes.
You'll also find stock footage from Artbeats that you can use to practice your techniques. Finally, because sometimes the best way to understand something is to see it, the CD-ROM includes example clips and images for many of the techniques discussed in this book, including light wrap, relighting, morphing, and more. |
