The new animation preset will now include a built in wiggle function for adding smooth random movement to the camera in addition to precise camera control. I've also added more locations for each target for a total of 10 (instead of 7). The name of the preset is SureTARGET and a video sample will be online Tuesday afternoon with the tutorial coming out this week. There is more happening but I'll let that unfold as the week goes on. Talk soon.

Only a few days of the new year and we already completed a big promotional video for an awesome client, just in time for CES. The shoot on Friday went really well, we had our shot list and everyone was on time. Unfortunately there wasn't a folding chair with my name on it but what can you do.

We decided to shoot at 3K, 16x9 so we could get the 47 fps to use for slow motion in post. What happened to the extra frame per second is anyone's guess... The lighting was excellent and that RED really does make nice images.

Post Production:
We processed about 15 minutes (at 47fps) of 3K footage in roughly 7 hours which isn't too bad if you know what to expect but also enough time to watch Titanic two times and cook a roast. It seems Adobe and Red have a new plug-in for native Red footage support but it is only for CS4 and I imagine it would be pretty CPU intensive.

Using RED's software, I exported to QuickTime with the Pro Res codec at half resolution since you can't down-res an image sequence and full resolution 3K would have been overkill for a 720p project.

Once in After Effects the keying was incredible, especially if you know the hassles of DV or HDV compression. After a month or so I may be able to show you what we came up with. I also used my animation preset for some of the camera moves too, you'll be able to get your hands on it soon enough!

Seems Video Copilot was recently featured in a cool segment on animation over at the G4 network. Needless to say it put a big smile on our faces.

Check it out!

Well actually it is finished, I just need to create a new tutorial for it. The new preset will make it easy to animate the AE camera in 3D space from one spot to another without the hassles of traditional ae animating and the precision of Robocop.

It's difficult to explain without the video but imagine being able to automatically navigate a camera to any spot in 3D space by simply keyframing a slider from 1 to 2. By selecting two or more 3D layers, the preset will take you to each location as you animate the slider in increments of 1. You can slow down the animation, pause it and of course use ease keyframes for perfect stops and starts. It accepts up to 7 locations with the option to reuse it as needed.

This should make animating big 3D scenes a breeze and require substantially less work than used to animate the camera in Video Copilot promos such as the Basic Training and Evolution.

Preset will be available for AE 6.5 and up. I hope to show you other cool uses too.

Hope everyone had a nice holiday and maybe a bit of relaxation. I know I did. We've got some great things coming out this week and some cool projects to discuss.

Have your After Effects fired up because we're going to take it for a ride!