We are collecting your banner design submissions to be featured at the top of Video Copilot! Is that a good thing? I don't know.

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BTW: This is not a contest but depending on how everything goes we may consider some challenges in the future. Your reward for the trouble is knowledge and maybe bragging rights to small kittens! We'll check them out and publish them on the site from time to time, we're probably not going to announce ones we publish, so keep your eyes open.

Also, the font I commonly use is called Century Gothic, not required but I like it.

Deadline for this round: This Friday, sept 11, 2009

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Back in 2008 when we made it to tutorial # 65 a DVD was produced to let people take the tutorials with them. As a bonus we produced this unual interview based on questions from the community. Most of the answers just lead to more questions... but we had some fun.

Once we get to 100 Tutorials, we'll have to make a Series II DVD with some more special features... we'll see!

Series One

If you have ever made a Bar Graph, you know they can be a bit tedious to manage especially when your statistics change and require adjusting all of the bars! (And they will) Well, if that made sense to you, I feel your pain. For everyone else the picture will get much clearer when I take you through a practical use of expressions involving Time-Remapping. I will be using a bar graph chart as the example but these expressions are versatile and will likely give you ideas for your own projects.

One of the key benefits here is that I have rendered out my 3D Bar scene (that was designed for this tutorial) and it took about 5 hours but inside of After Effects I can control each bar individually eliminating the need to perform additional 3D rendering to adjust the bars.

Harry J Frank has a cool little tutorial from back in the day (AE 6.5) for building your very own pie graph in After Effects.

I know expressions can be a little tricky so I want to make this tutorial easy for everyone, stay tuned.

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In a high-tech Skype interview, I had the pleasure of sitting down (remotely) with John Dickinson of MotionWorks to talk about Video Copilot and some fun stories from the past few years.

Looking back was fun for me and also reminded that I should also thank everyone here for your dedication and support, none of this would be possible without you. Here is to all the exciting things of the future!

Watch Video Interview Part 1

Part II should be out next week or so, I'll let everyone know!

I never thought I would be linking to College Humor but they posted a pretty cool montage of some of the most iconic visual effects from the last 100 years.

Watch Video

When did you first gain an interest in the world of visual effects? Was it a movie or even a TV show? For me seeing some behind the scenes work on James Cameron's Terminator 2 was brain-busting. The scene when robert patrick passes through the jail doors always rattled my processor. I also credit the first Matrix movie because it was rather exciting watching how they did some of the amazing shots on set.