[Antoni Jones]

I don’t have Illustrator yet but you can create outlines for 3D stroke in AE. Simply create your text and right click on it, in the menu that pops up select “Create Outlines”. This creates a new layer with the name “ Outlines”, turn off the eyeball in your original text layer and apply 3D stroke to the “outlines” layer. The outlines layer contains masks for each individual letter of the word. A tip is if you want to stroke the text in order (start from the first letter to the last) then make sure “Stroke Sequentially” is ticked.

-Regards

[Antoni Jones]

The Liquify effect with careful use could make her smirk but as for wink I don’t know.

-Regards

[Antoni Jones]

Hi,

Select the layer of your band. Go to Effect/Color Correction/Hue & Saturation. Bring the “Master Saturation” property down to -100 (drag slider all the way to the left), this will give a black and white image. Bring the “Master Lightness” property down to around -78, this gives the appearance of a silhouette. Then goto Effects/Color Correction/Levels. You can then crush any black in the image by dragging the appropriate slider (usually the left hand slider) you can see how much black is in the image because it will show a graph under the black part of the spectrum. If you don’t want the image totally black you can bring some definition back by fiddling with Levels also since all the details of the image are still there.

-Regards

[Antoni Jones]

The best one that I have seen as a video tutorial is Total Training’s After Effects 7 Professional features. This guy goes into ALOT of stuff about animating the camera, lights and the 3D environment aspect of After Effects, if you can afford it I recommend you get it:

https://www.totaltraining.com/prod/adobe/aftereffect7pro_pro.asp

-Regards

[Antoni Jones]

The DVD format is mpeg2. VOB (Video OBject) files found on DVD’s are in fact mpeg2 files usually containing AC3 (dolby digital) audio. If you intend to create a DVD out of your projects then you could create mpeg2-DVD complaint files by adding your comp to the render queue and clicking on the Lossless property and choosing “mpeg2-dvd” next to the Format drop down box. Doing this creates m2v (mpeg2 Video) and mpa (mpeg audio) or wav if you choose to export the audio as PCM format elementary streams which you can then use in applications like Adobe Encore to create your DVD and include menu’s etc. Encore will then take the finished DVD and convert it to VOBS to burn to DVD using your favorite burning software. If you don’t have encore then google m2v to DVD etc..

-Regards

[Antoni Jones]

Hi,

These Photomontages look like they use various techniques that can be done in After Effects. Some of them look like they have been placed in 3D space with lights and camera’s. The the camera’s have been animated to whiz passed the photo to another photo further back in Z space. You might want to look at tutorials focusing on the 3D aspect of After Effects, if you can afford it Total Training’s After Effects 7 Professional Features series gives you all you need to know on 3D and MUCH more, you look up that here:

https://www.totaltraining.com/prod/adobe/aftereffect7pro_pro.asp

CreativeCow also has a very informative article here:

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=2&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/sjostrom_bjorn/3d_ride/index.html

The other techniques used show the photos on background movies footage of cars whizzing by etc. Look at creativecows Podcasts on After Effects to learn basic stuff like this. If you have rendered out all the individual scenes already you can put them together using After Effects by adjusting the layers in the timeline but if you have a NLE is probably best to do it in that.

-Regards

[Antoni Jones]

A Macintosh alternative is Screen Record:

https://www.macgold.co.uk/products/10555.shtml

Or Screenography:

https://www.verticalmoon.com/products/screenography/screenography.htm

-Regards

[Antoni Jones]

Camtasia is great software for capturing screens and exporting them to a
movie in lots of different formats. Camtasia Studio also lets you edit your video, zoom in an out of sections, add captions etc from within Camtasia itself. It’s not free though but I would say definitely worth it if you’re planning to do alot of tutorials. A freeware software called Camstudio: https://www.camstudio.org/ is also available, this is pretty good for free software but your going to have to edit your finished tutorial in a NLE or even in After Effects itself. Camtasia Studio is available here:

https://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp?CMP=KgoogleCShome

-Regards

[Antoni Jones]

Thank you for the quick response. I don’t understand why not so many people were using it, for me it proved a big help after all anything to speed up rendering and previewing certainly is always nice. I shall really miss this option from CS3. Maybe it will give me the incentive to buy a new graphics card and stick another gig of ram in my PC.

[Antoni Jones]

For things like this you should be using your NLE, something like Premiere Elements or Final Cut Pro (Mac Users). After Effects is NOT video editing software but honestly sometimes I wish some elements from NLE software would be included as AFX doesn’t work to well with long clips.