What’s on the DVD?

Books are great for in-depth learning, but it’s always good to investigate hands-on examples as well. Although this book is designed not to rely on tutorials, many of the techniques described in the text can be further explored via the dozens of projects and accompanying footage and stills included on the disc. Wherever possible, HD (1920 × 1080) clips from Pixel Corps, Artbeats, and fxphd are incorporated; other examples use NTSC footage and stills if that is all that’s required to get the point across.

Additionally, the DVD includes demos of more than a dozen plug-ins and applications. These demos are similar to the real software for everything but output, allowing you to experiment with your own footage.

• Duplink and Merge Projects (redefinery): Two scripts have been created specifically for this book, available only via this disc. Duplink allows you to create “instance” objects of existing ones, which are linked to the source so that anything you change in it, changes in them. Merge Projects is for After Effects users who like to use a specific and consistent directory structure in projects; it automatically places content found in nested folders in an imported project window into folders with the same names in the master project. More information on these is included as comments in the scripts themselves (which can be opened with any text editor).

• SynthEyes (Andersson Technologies): Provides fully automatic, as well as user-controlled matchmoving for single or batch processed shots; a stand-alone program that exports to After Effects.

• ZbornToy (Frischluft): Enhances what you can do with RPF format files in After Effects, including relighting a 3D render that includes a normals map in After Effects.

• 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.

• Knoll Light Factory 2.5 (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): An alternative to Keylight. Extracts keys from any background and includes controls to handle uneven lighting, difficult shadows, light spill, and more.

• Colorista (Red Giant Software): Adds 3-way Lift/Gamma/Gain color control to After Effects, allowing you to individually style the colors of shadows, mid-tones and highlights.

• 3D Stroke (Trapcode): Allows you not only to add a visible stroke to a layer’s mask, but to manipulate, offset, distort and repeat that stroke shape in true 3D spaces.

• 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.

• Key Correct (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 24 p conversion, mimicking film artifacts and damage, creating film-like cross dissolves, removing DVD compression artifacts, and more.

• Instant HD (Red Giant Software): Provides higher-quality up-conversion of footage than is possible natively in After Effects.

• Film Fix (Red Giant Software): Full-featured restoration software; restores tears, removes dust and dirt, stabilizes footage transferred from film.

• ReelSmart Motion Blur (RE: Vision Effects): Procedurally generatesmotion blur for moving elements in a shot which lack it (or lack enough of it); After Effects’ built-in motion blur is available only on animated elements.

• PV Feather (RE: Vision Effects): Adds a features long missing from After Effects and available in comparable packages such as Shake: the ability to control per-vertex (or per-spline) feather of a mask.

• RE: Flex (RE: Vision Effects): Brings intuitive morphing and warping to After Effects.

• Echospace (Trapcode): Creates any number of instanced objects whose animations follow those of the master object, but can be offset in time and space.

• Erodilation and Copy Image (ObviousFX): Not demos but freeware, these plug-ins allow for quick manipulation of matte data and quick production of stills, respectively.

• 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.

• 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.

• Dozens of After Effects CS3 project files demonstrating techniques described in the book. These range from simple demonstrations of single concepts to completed shots.

• Live Action, effects and graphics footage from Artbeats: four full-length professionally shot HD clips presented exactly as they would if licensed from Artbeats, free for us according to the terms described in the End User License Agreement (EULA) in the Artbeats folder.

• Effects footage from Pixel Corps; nearly a dozen HD clips, predominantly blue screen and green screen shots taken with a Sony F900 HD camera; they are presented on the disk as uncompressed QuickTime files. They can be found within individual source folders for each chapter in the Examples folder.