Adobe TV

Watch them here.

John Dickinson shows you how to use Boris Continuum Complete‘s 3-Way Color Grade and Film Glow filters to rescue a dull clip in After Effects.

Learn how to create a Laser Security Sweeper like this one. CS6 not required!

Red Giant TV latest tutorial comes from Seth Worley (of Plot Device fame). Inspired by an effect in Ridley Scott‘s upcoming Prometheus, Seth shows you how to build your own Laser Security Sweeper in After Effects. He uses the Foundry‘s Camera Tracker, Particular and more.

Felt Tips takes After Effects CS6‘s new 3D Camera Tracker and Ray Traced Extruded Text for a spin. Watch as he tracks footage of sidewalk, automatically creates a shadow catcher (wow!) and extrudes some ray traced text making it look like it was really there. Lots of parenting tricks are provided. He also talks about performance while working in a ray traced comp.

Note: the audio levels on these two videos are very low; you’ll need to crank it up.

In his second vid, Felt Tips talks about his favorite new feature, the Global Performance Cache.

“Adobe After Effects CS6 has lots of new and enhanced features in many areas of the program, from importing and compositing to effects and especially 3D animation. In this free course, Adobe Technical Support Lead Todd Kopriva walks you through all of them, including extruded text and shapes, the ray-traced 3D renderer, the 3D camera tracker, fast previews, and variable-width mask feathering. You’ll also learn about changes to performance and the user interface, and how these can affect your workflow.”

Check it out here.

(There’s also a course on Premiere CS6.)

The new Mask Feather Tool. If you’re familiar with Adobe Illustrator‘s Variable Width Tool then you’ll feel right at home using this new feature.

New: Create Shapes from Vectors. (Trust me, this one is beyond amazing.)

The CC Environment Effect and the new Environment Layer.

I also asked John for some random clarifications. Apparently the new 3D layers will cast proper shadows on regular 3D layers and regular 3D layers will reflect onto the new 3D layers. In case you haven’t realized this yet, this means AE CS6 now more or less has built-in shiny, reflective floors like Motion does. Also, if you collapse a precomp with the new 3D layers contained in it, it will “unfold” and behave the same way the regular 3D layers would. And perhaps most exciting of all is that you can mix the new 3D layers with regular 3D layers. For example, you have a 2.5D “postcard” animate in front of and behind one of the new 3D layers, something that’s not possible with the 3D plugin alternatives.

Flomotion shows you how to use Mocha to blend in your green screen footage with a moving background plate. He also throws in  touch of Keylight, motion blur and lens blur.

Eran Stern reveals how to create a 3D Captain America shield intro using only After Effects… and FreeForm Pro, and ShapeShifter AE, and a little Magic Bullet and touch of Trapcode. If you don’t have all of those you might take a look anyway to see if these plugins should be in your tookit.

Click here to watch the tutorial on Eran’s website.

And you can download the project file here: mettle.com/freebies/Cap_Am.zip.

And if you care to have a go at it in AE and Cinema 4D instead, check out John Dickinson‘s walkthrough tutorial here.