And no, I'm not talking about Video Copilot fans, although we have our fair share :) Actually, I'm talking about my Indiana Jones Costume! Well it wasn't easy but I managed to finally put together an Indy costume that I wouldn't be ashamed to go outside in.

The hat is from Disneyland, I even had to buy a woman's purse so I could use the buckle for the army bag strap. Sure the real Indy didn't have his logo on the outside of his hat but that's ok.

I used to make fun of all those Star Wars fans that would dress up but now I know how they feel... but that doesn't change my thoughts about those desperate fanboys. It just makes me a hypocrite and I'm plenty fine with that.

Still working away on the new stuff, stay tuned, just keep your radios down.

Well we are approaching tutorial number 50 and I figure I'd better make it a good one. With the Halloween on the way, I think I'll be doing an effect where a bug or something creepy is crawling under the skin. It will be all done in After Effects so I'll need some more time to experiment and get it right. We'll probably go shoot some footage of Sam getting infested today or tomorrow.

Here are 7 of the 10 free Design Templates that will be included with our soon to be released product Evolution. All of the designs were created using only Evolution and hopefully this will give you an idea of what is possible with this new product.

We have also created a very in-Depth animated gallery page that makes finding the right element fast and easy.

Of course these are just a few of the great features of Evolution that will be launching soon. And yes I could post a video of these designs but I want to wait for the promo.

A friend of mine just released a new training series for After Effects and the plug-in Zaxwerks ProAnimator called "Making it Look Great".

The author, John Dickinson is a real life broadcast designer with more than a training background. When he's not fighting kangaroos, he produces commercial and promos for a major station in Australia. Needless to say he does quality work and I recommend his series if you're using Zaxwerks or are interested in this 3D plug-in down the line.

Watch his Promo Video
Product Page

While I'm on the subject of plugging products for friends... Another talented guy, Harry J. Frank has a superb series on Expressions. So if you want to learn more about using them in After Effects this is a great and in-depth series. I think he's working on another series that should be out soon, so keep your eyes open. Check Harry's Expression Training Series.

Of course if Video Copilot has a new product out, I'll probably forget I know either of these guys because you know me I'll sell the shirt off my back :)

How to compress for the web? That is the question. Well, there are a lot of options out there but the main consensus is that you don't want to use your creative programs like Premiere or After Effects to do it. Although you can use great formats like MP4 and H.264, the handling of the compression is not very good.

I use Camtasia Studio to record and export my tutorials in the FLV format (flash video) and the results are great but require some tweaking. The new camtasia studio has some great features although some important ones still missing... Another good standalone app is shown above called Sorenson Squeeze which allow batch processing of many great formats but some need to be unlocked to use them. The one think After Effects does well is exports to Flash Video, but you need to have some flash experience to embed the video for the web.

Our good friend Aharon Rabinowitz has a pretty cool training DVD that covers how to properly compress video using a bunch of different software. He is like that magician on FOX that gave away all of the secrets and he was smart and wore a mask but then he took the mask off and that wasn't a good idea because all the other magicians killed him or made him dissapear. I think that is what happend... anyways.

Check out his DVD if you ever need to that kind of stuff it is good one :)

UPDATE: Here is a link to one of the lessons:
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/ITKVS.php