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Q & A

Lesson 12 from: Adobe After Effects

Jeff Foster

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Lesson Info

12. Q & A

Lesson Info

Q & A

But we do have some questions that were good sort of our general questions from throughout the day um the first that we have here is from duke in park city he asks can you talk a little bit about your top level workflow where does after effects come into a project for you and um do you edit down a project in premiere than move teo after effects are they all separate or do you start and after effects he just keeps he's got a ton of questions that's great you know what that's he uh he's probably going to find to my workshop next week well answer almost all of those questions because it's all about work flow it's thie its after effects and premiere in that in the whole work full of working together on some real world projects I'm going to show a few things in the next couple days here of some of that work flow just show basically some of the end product but it really depends on the project which one I start in typically if it's like for a commercial piece or uh video production for corpor...

ate work or whatever we'll start with our rough edits of everything and then depending on how tight the storyboard is well no ok we need to animate this here we need to animate that here we need green screen here and really it's the workflow depends on what level of production you're involved with if you're involved in the early stages where you get to help plan the production and you're working with the director and the producer and the camera guys and everything then you can help dr that process and say I need this I need that I need this shot like this and we're going to plan to do this and so if you're in the planning stages then that's the best you know uh but so much of the work it just depends on the project you may not know that you need after effects until you get stuck or you may start with okay I'm going to do this much and after effects then handed off to the editor too insert into a video production yeah so we do have another questions if you're ready for him so thomas in austin who by the way has been very active in the chat throughout the workshop so thank you so much for participating and providing us with some awesome questions hey does ask another one that says are there third party effects and presets that can be downloaded and added teo a are there any that you would recommend? Well I I'm quite font of anything that red giant makes they have no light factory they've got so many effects packages go to red giant software dot com I believe or just google for red giant software they've got so many great effects and colorizing filters you know realistic lens flares really some great stuff they also came out with a little plug for a giant butt it's great stuff ah bulletproof which is a stand alone software package for dslr shooters to be able to ingest organize their footage on dh then ah course boris it's not cheap but it's good stuff boris continuum complete aton of filters all in that package and you khun google them too for for boris effects okay great um we also have a question from powell yes is there an easy way to center the text on the scene both horizontally and vertically um yeah actually if you just uh create a text later say if I was to just throw one in here it's a new text I think by default it just jumps on there so if you want to make your guides I kind of covered that when we dealt with the text um content earlier but uh this is text no text there we go ah and then if I center justify it uh there we go so that should be um by the baseline that will be covered so if I turn on my uh rulers our rulers all right for some reason my rulers aren't showing up here view rulers so really there we go on then I can see where my baseline is now that's actually going to be the center hit my alfa are my anchor point and drag that so that it's centered and that's that's snapped in right there. Great so your cakes asks, how can I add extra placeholders for video into my after effects template? Extra placeholders? I'm not quite sure so they're looking to make I have a template, but add yes, I think what they mean is they say they have a three minute video and then they want to either bookend it with text or additional video that they want to edit eyes their way to include three minutes of basically nothing teo be able to insert that video, you can use any layer basically, you could just use a j paige damage, just as on I do that all the time too. If I have to have something, I'm gonna be animating over. I know this is going to be video later or I need to match my graphics to a screenshot of this piece of video I've got locked off video with a talking head and something in the background, and then I know I need to make my lower third or whatever. So instead of bringing in all that video or they haven't shot the video yet or the video hasn't been edited for be handed off to me just give me a screen shots, I can frame it up and then I can build everything around that j peg image do all my animation and then turn off the j pig rendered out and dump it back into premiere and that's how I would handle that workflow instead of trying to render three minutes of video with book ends you know, in in after effects we've also got from pool bath asking, can you talk a little bit about the difference between after effects and apple motion? Are they essentially the same type of tool or are they used for totally different types of work? Um similar but very different I'm not an apple motion user per se when it first came out, I got it played around with it and put it away and never went back to it, so I'm not going toe bash it because people use it and it's you know, they do some great stuff with it, but after effects is such a different tool it does some similar things but it's such a different tool that it's really kind of hard to do and apples to apples type of comparison with it thank you and last but not least we have polly joining us and he asks, are there any other resource is that you can recommend maybe a book that's a great guide to help us along in addition to all the great video instruction that you're providing well, I'd say the first go to place that that I do something six sometimes I just you have a brain fart, and I can't remember a simple, simple command or simple. Something I haven't used for a couple of years is to just go to the adobe forums and the user forms and help forums. They're all online. You can access them directly from the website. Uh, the user forms adobe tv. They're kind of connected together, so dopey tv is a lot of little how to videos and how to do a specific thing, or how a specific tool works. So that's, a great resource, that's all free and then in the forums, you can also ask questions. It's. You know you could bring up a question if you can't find something, go ahead and ask in the community for him. Say, you know, I'm trying to figure out how to do this, and somebody will jump in there. And, you know, they've got adobe people who are right on it, and they get in there and the community is a great community as well.

Class Materials

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Keynote 1
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Ratings and Reviews

jackflash
 

Jeff Foster seems like a great, knowledgeable guy. But this course is so disappointing. The classes are disorganized, convoluted yet shallow, and waste an awful lot of time. And they’re just lectures — you’re just watching him do stuff — no lessons where you can work along with him to really absorb what’s going on. My biggest complaints are 1) It seems like he didn’t prepare very much, so we end up watching him go through features one by one, sometimes just to try to find the thing that’s going to illustrate the point he’s trying to make; and 2) he’s unnecessarily confusing. Here’s an easy example. In the “parenting” class, which hinges on one layer’s relationship to another, he created identical layers and named them identically. So he’s explaining that “blue solid” is the parent to “blue solid.” And then he proceeds to discuss the layers, which are numbered #1, #2, #3, by calling them “the first layer” (#3), “the second layer” (#2), and “the third layer” (#1.) After Effects is complicated enough! Maybe I’m spoiled by having learned Illustrator with a wonderful Creative Live course. This is not that.

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