Prolost

HDR Tutorial on the Cow

There's a cool new tutorial on creativecow.net about 32bpc comping in AE7. Check it out, as it quickly and effectively demonstrates the fundamental idea behind HDR and a couple of things is does really well.

I just have a couple of technical notes on Andrew's tutorial. Andrew shows how to extract an HDR from a camera raw file, and he does this by taking Exposure, Brightness, and Contrast down to their lowest settings. This is fine for Exposure and Brightness, but you want to set Contrast to zero, along with Shadows, as we discussed here.

The second note is that Andrew keeps reaching for the Gaussian Blur effect, but we know better, right?

Anyway, it's still a great intro to float, and it's cool to see others taking up the evangelism cause.

Stu Write Book Good

The DV Rebel's Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap

So yeah, I'm writing a book. Hey, pre-order it now, because we expect to sell, like, literally several of them.

It's a book about using digital video and visual effects to maximize production value in low-budget films, with a particular slant to kinetic cinema, AKA action films. I'll cover a bunch of effects stuff both practical and digital, as well as techniques for maximizing production quality using only off-the-shelf tools. A DVD insert will contain a bunch of sample footage and After Effects 7.0 projects.

I'm still working on this thing, so if you have suggestions or reviews of other books on this subject (a few are found to the right), please post them here!

Creative Workflow Hacks

Creative Workflow Hacks is a new blog about under-the-hood tricks to help you do nifty things in your favorite post-production apps. There's a section specifically about After Effects.

On that subject, if you haven't tried out the scripts from redefinery.com, you may not appreciate just how powerful scripting can be in After Effects. Check it out!

My hope is that, in the future, scripts and other user enhancements to AE will not be ghettoized to a submenu, but actually allowed to be a button or palette or menu item just like a plug-in. Sort of the Maya MEL-button shelf idea.