Despite working on some TV shows, I don't actually get to watch very much television. Something you may not know about me is that I am a big Law & Order fan, mostly of the older cast but some of the new stuff is pretty good. Lucky for me, the cable network TNT plays tons of reruns all day long.

So, earlier this year I noticed network graphics had changed, and the new ones were simply amazing. It seems the design studio TROIKA created the incredible work that very much inspired me. After playing around with the concept, I realized there were a lot of great techniques that I thought would be useful to share. Although the original design seems to use a lot of 3D, I'll be using just After Effects with a little bit of Particular in the upcoming tutorial. Release date will be soon.

Even the metallic ring is built in After Effects.

View Sample Video

The music and sound FX are from: Pro Scores and Designer Sound FX.
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The mobile version of Video Copilot is now online! It's not going to change the world but it may give you something to do while you're waiting around town.

One day I was sitting in my doctors office and realized the blog and forum were a bit slow to load over a phone network. I talked to my developer Patrick and said "Let's make a mobile version of the website!", he promptly asked "What's a website?" After sorting that out we moved forward.

The challenge was to make the blog and forum easy to read and load quickly from mobile devices. Our forum is currently set up with PHPbb and there isn't a mobile template available so we had to "recreate" the layout and port the information. We brought over essential buttons and function but left out some of the clutter. Same goes for the blog.

The tutorials are really secondary because of the practicality of following along on such a small screen and load times are inevitably long. I decided to select 10 of the shorter tutorials plus the entire Basic Training Series. We may add additional tutorials in the future if things pan out.

Just type https://m.videocopilot.net from a mobile device and your in!

Here's a fun project file that adds an anamorphic stripe and star around the standard AE lens flare. The layers are linked to the position of the Flare, so everything moves together. You can change the color from the "FLARE" solid effects control to create a golden sun or even a red sun. Have fun, just don't look directly at it.

Download Project File (AE CS3)

In other news, I feel much better and I won't need the computer speech program after all.

Although I've been a little under the weather this week, I still spent a healthy amount of time developing content and ideas for the site. 2009 is going to hold many surprises and more tutorials than any other previous year. Not to mentions the products in development will blow your mind! Possibly in a literal sense... wait, that's too obvious. Oh well.

Now if my voice doesn't come back soon, I'll have to type everything up and use one of those computer speech programs. Not a bad idea...

There are definitely more interesting things going on around here (can't say more) but here is some cool news for people with internet phones or within walking distance of Radio Shack. Our web developer Patrick is finishing up a lite version of your favorite video website so you can check us out on the go. We plan on offering some of the shorter (10-20 min) tutorials in a smaller iPod format but mainly it will be a great way to check the blog and possibly forum, if we can sort a few things out first.

I'll let you know more soon.