I sometimes make comps at 24 frames per second instead of 23.976 inside of my tutorials but some people have asked, “What is the correct frame rate for film?” Well, there are a lot of various situations to consider but here are a few good rules.

• The frame rate for digital film work is 23.976 so you should use this if you are making a cinematic commerical or movie about robots.
• Some video editing applications abbreviate 23.976 as 23.98 but AE requires the more specific frame rate.
• Film or not, you should work at the frame rate of your source material.
• Non-standard frame rates such as 12 and 15 are great for creating animations for the web or even flash.
• If you have multiple fps sources try to conform things to your output format.

The reason I sometimes use 24 fps instead of 23.976 is probably because I’m lazy and web video can be non-standard without many problems. Of course, it is probably good practice to use standard frame rates so that you can easily author to DVD or Blu-ray. Hope this helps but be sure to investigate your specific workflow, so that you don’t run into problems in the middle of a project. Remember PAL & NTSC standards may vary.

More info on Frame Rates... READ MORE

I stumbled upon a recently published list of Tips for motion graphics folks by Computer Arts. There is tons of great advice I’m sure you will find useful. So I started thinking, without restating any of these tips (intentionally), I could make a top 10 list, maybe even 20. So here it is! -5 more.

1. Make Proxies of Elements

Designs can be complex, often times an element is used or reused that can be very heavy on rendering. For example, this circular element contains a heavy radial blur that renders very slow. Other parts of the design still require work and you should not have to waste extra time. So I created a full resolution proxy of the element I could output as well.

In the render settings, there is an option for the proxy use, to use none or current settings. Of course if you really need to change the design element, just disable the proxy and have at it. This is also a great idea for pre-comps and things that are somewhat “finished”.

2. King of the Kaps lock

Have you ever noticed how fast you can move around in After Effects with the Caps Lock on? It’s because rendering is disabled however, you can still do almost everything. In big compositions (even small ones) this...

Sometimes during my work in AE, I solve little problems and add them to memory without telling anyone. Well before I forget, I want to make a short list. You’ll probably see more posts like this now that I have an outlet. These may be simple but I found them to be quite useful and allowed me to break certain routines.

1. Fade in Fade out Adjustments:
So you have a video element that has 2 keyframes in the beginning that fade the clip in and 2 more at the end to fade it out. Now you want to lower the opacity but you normally have to adjust both keyframes. Instead I just add an expression by alt clicking the stopwatch and typing value*.5 this cuts all values by 50 percent.

2. Helping Failed Renders due to image buffer errors:
Often times HD projects will fail on render due to image buffer errors or all sorts of things. Here are a couple things to try during clutch situations.

• Change the AE secret preference to purge after 1-4 frames. (hold down SHIFT while accessing the edit menu/preferences. The “Secret” menu appears.
• Another thing to try is render to an image sequence like PNG or TIFF, this way if the render fails when going to a QuickTime, you still have good frames that you...

Film grain is a necessary part of visual effects and used commonly in motion graphics to add a more natural look. After Effects has great tools for adding film grain that are based on real 35mm film stock. The only problem is that it renders very slow! There is an alternative plug-in called noise that creates nice random but somewhat sparatic grain that can look a bit ‘digital’. The add grain is a much more fluid formula. Only problem is that it renders very SLOW!

What I like to do is create a grain video loop that I can place on top of my video with the overlay transfer mode. Similar to our free fast film grain preset found here, except the quality of the grain is much better.

Quick Tip:
When matching grain of CG elements with Live Action footage it is sometimes hard to see grain detail in dark areas for accurate matching. What you can apply a temporary adjustment layer to the top of your comp and add the equalize filter. This makes it easier to see the grain frequency more clearly. Yay!

Steps:

1. Create a new comp that is 150 frames
2. Apply Add Grain and adjust the settings to your taste
3. Render the video out to quickTime PhotoJPG
4. Import to AE and set the loop to 10 in the...