So we've sorted some things out today and the site should be running good now. I have a new tutorial for everyone in the morning.

It figures that that my site goes down on my birthday. Well at least my wife made me a delicious cake, I saved a piece for you guys

In this frightening new tutorial we will be creating a flowing energy stream with organic distortion. It may not be Halloween but better late than never.

Watch Video

PS, I'm still jamming on this other big project and I'll be back full speed soon. If you have any questions or need help be sure to check out our forum.

In this tutorial we will be using After Effects to composite 3D and 2D elements. We'll also be adding some grunge and smoke to our final composite.

Note: Project file will be coming soon

I spent part of this week playing around with some different ideas and concepts for future tutorials or breakdowns. The first example uses some interesting camera animation techniques as well as Particle world for the fog. It was all created with standard AE tools.

If you download the second video and make sure QuickTime is set to loop it should play seamlessly. Kind of an interesting idea for making fluid videos that play through forever. The camera move is a bit wild but I don't even know what that stuff is...

First Video

Second Video

Part three of the Meteor will be out soon along with a NEW After Effects tutorial. I should also have some news about one of our upcoming products. Without giving away too much it has to do with Music...

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 interpret settings