Monday, July 5, 2010

Close Encounters of the Third-Party Kind

MediaMover FCP is here!  I didn't even know they were working on a version for Final Cut Pro.  The original version for Avid has been around for years and has been a God-send.  This tool will bring much needed order to the Lord of The Flies Final Cut Studio ecosystem.  I'm curious to see what workflows will emerge using this, Xsan and Final Cut Server.  Time will tell.
And bringing order to After Effects is Zorro the Layer Tagger.  Great name and even better function.  According to the creator Lord Alvarez:  Zorro makes selection and isolation sets easy and possible in after effects by adding  tags to layers. Similar to the way you would tag photos in Flickr, you can tag layers in your comps and then select or isolate those layers in groups by using the tags.  I can't believe I'm just now using this script - it's been around for a while.  Be sure to check out the other scripts on the site while you're there.

But why stop at tagging layers when you can even create your own effects to use on them.  At least in FCP.  Using FXScript you have the power built right into Final Cut Pro.  Ok, so this method is getting long in the tooth and most developers are using Quartz Composer nowadays - either way, real-time visual programming is here to rescue us from bad glows and page turns.



 But sometimes you just gotta spend the money for 
the sexy plug-ins and that's when you get Trapcode.  
You hopefully already own these peerless plug-ins but 
you may not know how to get all the magic out of them 
that is possible.  Not anymore.  Red Giant has recently 
- the developer of Trapcode.  You can stream them or download
but either way it will now be easier to shake the pixie dust out of
your fingers and on to the screen.


And Finally, Eran Stern of Creative Cow demonstrates how to create a jumpy and squishy animation using the power of expressions.  Like a wise clown the tutorial is both funny and enlightening.  It will put a swing in your step and your animations and possibly make you look 20 years younger.  And who knows, you might even get the courage to become an After Effects scripting/expressions guru by trying out all of the code over on Dan Ebbert's legendary site Motion Script



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