Video Link As we get closer to the release of Optical Flares, our new lens flare creation studio, I wanted to show you some cool examples of Optical Flares in action. This reel includes actual productions by some of our beta testers and some tests I did internally. I think this reel has a nice variety of how lens flares can be used but I’m sure you could think of many more! Motion graphics or visual effects… be ready for Optical Flares: January 25, 2010.
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Optical Flares In Action
I was playing around with Particular 2 and came up with this particle swirl using a couple of smoke images as particles. I love that Particular 2 reacts to the lighting as well as fake shading to make the particle seem more volumetric. Here is what I did, in Particular 2 custom particles are called Sprites, so once you select this as your particle type, the texture slot becomes available to use my smoke video that is included with the project download. I stretched the particle area and rotated the world transform to make it look like a twister
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Illuminating Particles
The online video of the moment is Alex Roman’s The Third & the Seventh — so much so that Roman’s own site, which I was going to link to, is down due to bandwidth excess. (It redirects to the Vimeo video below, but rather than watching here, go to Vimeo and resize to HD and see it full-screen.) The video is described by Roman as “a FULL-CG animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces.
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MOVIE ART AND ARCHITECTURE: ALEX ROMAN’S THE THIRD & THE SEVENTH
In this tutorial we will create a reflective orb using only built-in After Effects plug-ins.
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NEW TUTORIAL: Glass Orbs
To help with your holiday graphics, Save 40% on our design collection Evolution all this week. Just use the coupon code: SNOWDAY at checkout for your instant 40% savings on the Evolution collection! Evolution is 100% downloadable and available after purchase! For those customers who own Evolution, please enjoy this free project file for After Effects CS3 and CS4. The title design uses only 1 of the 155 elements and all you need to do is relink the one missing file with your Evolution collection. You may also need this font and possibly a snowcone. Be sure to check out our other great products and gifts from the Video Copilot online store at everyday low prices! Your support keeps this site going and might also keeps Sam Loya off the streets (Maybe).
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Holiday Title with 40% Evolution Sale
At Video Copilot, we do a lot of project-based tutorials but our goal is to provide useful techniques and tips that you can use on future projects as well. I received a nice email from a customer regarding our Dynamic Bar Graphs Tutorial: __________________________________________________________ I found you guys by watching your tutorial about creating dynamic charts in After Effects. I did a set of animated charts last year for one of our clients without a slick method like yours. Instead I created a dozen different 3DS animations. It was so painful… I am about to start on a new project which will be LOADED with charts. Your technique will come in VERY handy. Thanks Again.
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Off the Chart Feedback
The IFP has announced its line up for the 31st annual Independent Film Week, taking place in NYC Sept. 19-24. In a release the organization has also announced the expansion of its strategic relationship with the Sundance Institute; and new partnerships with B-Side, the four-year-old tech company which runs websites that handle ticketing and mine audience response data for 250-plus fests in North America, and The Good Pitch, a forum produced by Channel 4 BRITDOC Foundation which brings together inspiring social-purpose film projects and a group of expert participants from charities, foundations, brands, government and media to form powerful alliances around groundbreaking films.
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IFP ANNOUNCES 31st ANNUAL INDEPENDENT FILM WEEK LINE UP
In a press release sent out yesterday the fundraising/promotion site, IndieGoGo, and the documentary film site, SnagFilms, announced a partnership where select IndieGoGo works-in-progress are featured on the SnagFilms site. Three works have been on the site since mid-July and according to the release have received over half a million impressions on SnagFilms and promotional partner sites. Those three projects are: Connected, by Tiffany Shlain – Connected takes audiences on a stream-of-consciousness ride through the interconnectedness of humankind.
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INDIEGOGO & SNAGFILMS JOIN FORCES
In order to realize our dreams we must find creative ways to accomplish them. Computer visual effects have given us great opportunities to create amazing cinema but we should not forget to combine the past with the present. Perhaps then, you can afford to buy a fancy new car! Dream Video Tease
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Big Dreams
One of the primary techniques in the recent Light Casting tutorial is the ability to add multiple lights in your scene. These additional lights will automatically interact with the surface based on intensity, distance and color so you can worry about more important things like building robots. Watch the 2009 Light Race! HD 720p
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More Lights!
In this jam-packed tutorial we will build an energy ball that emits natural light onto the road’s surface. Plus, we will be utilizing ‘reverse-tracking’ to lock the 3D effects in-place, while maintaining the original camera movement in the exciting final shot. Video Sample Video Watch Tutorial TUTORIAL NOTE: The displacement effect at the end uses the Energy Wipe tutorial: http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/energy_wipe/ I also added some camera shake with the AFTER SHAKE preset: http://www.videocopilot.net/presets/after_shake/ Oh Yeah: Today and tomorrow are the last two days to receive free shipping on the 2K version of our new stock footage collection, Action Essentials 2 . Of course the 720p version is still available at the great low-price of $99.95 so be sure to show your support by using it to blow something up PS: We have all new discs and every package goes out within 24 hours! Check out the features and Trailer!
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NEW TUTORIAL: 3D Light Casting
As promised here are some shots from my trip to NYC. The weather was great all day on Saturday and so was dinner. I shot everything with the Sony EX-1 on a tripod as well as some hand-held stuff. I used Premiere CS4, even though it would hang during editing and crash occasionally. I’m sure they will work it out. Please
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Start the Montage
Our press release announcing our annual “25 New Faces” feature has just gone up at Indiewire, and you can read our profiles of the selections on our site here. As I wrote in the editor’s letter for the upcoming issue, we looked at a lot of work this year — maybe too much work, actually — and could easily have made a list of “125 New Faces.” Of the people we finally chose, every person on the list was championed passionately within our editorial team, and each person also seemed to us to be approaching their roles as filmmakers, dps, editors, actors, etc. with a broader recognition of the particular challenges and opportunities of this historical moment.
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FILMMAKER’S "25 NEW FACES"
We are still actively addressing a disc-read issue that has affected some customers who purchased Action Essentials 2. Our team has been working hard to provide downloadable files as well as arrange replacement discs for those who need them and new customers will automatically receive new Discs. Obviously this is a unique business, my name is at the top of the website and I feel a strong dedication to every customer that visits, as well as every product we create.
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Action 2 Thanks!
Filmmaker Julian Grant, who is a tenure-track film professor at Columbia College, Chicago, is making a “fiercely independent” ultra-low-budget, dialogue-less horror film entitled The Defiled, and he’s reporting a very detailed blow-by-blow of its production on his blog. He describes the film as ” a story of love and survival against a horror that is cataclysmic and…entirely possible.” Grant is shooting on the Canon HV20 with a cine-adapter and Nikon 50mm lens. He’s in the middle of week two, so if you’d like to follow from his production, head over there now.
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THE DEFILED’S "FIERCELY INDIE" BLOW-BY-BLOW
The National Film Board of Canada has produced a documentary called Capturing Reality: The Art of the Documentary, and the website is incredible, featuring over 160 interview clips. Here’s their description of the doc: Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary is a film about contemporary documentary cinema and features some rock stars of the genre, including Albert Maysles, Errol Morris, Alanis Obomsawin, Michel Brault, Nick Broomfield, Kim Longinotto and Werner Herzog. Thirty-three filmmakers from 14 countries share their passion for documentary and talk about the artistic and ethical choices they make in their craft
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ERROL MORRIS DISCUSSES ROBERT McNAMARA IN NEW DOC
Back to more AE experimenting… this string-like energy ball is created with standard plug-ins like vegas and polar coordinates. It works in 3D space and the depth of field is from the AE camera. I’m trying to work this in to something more useful and then I’d like to release a project file or maybe a short tutorial.
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String Energy
With these tips you are well on your way to making better videos! We’ll talk about most important tips for making a good quality, but cheap video. Use these along with the tools detailed on the free video editing website and you could be the next Spielberg, Scorsese or (if you’re really ambitious), James Cameron… Plan your shots in advance so they edit together Garbage in – Garbage out.
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Great Tips For Making Home Videos
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Nik Sharpener Pro 3.0 For Adobe Photoshop [del.icio.us]
Like a film camera, a camcorder “sees” the world through lenses. In a film camera, the lenses serve to focus the light from a scene onto film treated with chemicals that have a controlled reaction to light. In this way, camera film records the scene in front of it: It picks up greater amounts of light from brighter parts of the scene, and lower amounts of light from darker parts of the scene
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Charge Coupled Device (CCD), heart of Camcorder
You only need a few items for getting started with video editing and you can be producing quality movies at home that you will be able to enjoy for many years to come. Maybe even produce a hit Hollywood movie. The basic items you need are a video capture card or DV card, the video editing software to edit, your computer, storage space on your computer and a camcorder, VCR, or you can display your movie on your computer screen
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Getting Started Video Editing