tool

Come join me on Thursday, February 18at 7PM – 9PM at Adobe Systems Inc in Seattle for a talk about some cool toys I’ve been building inside After Effects. Organized by After Effects Seattle, in this three-part presentation I will demonstrate how to push After Effects to do things it was not designed to do – building your own unique rigs and effects.

As I shift my creative focus away from traditional 2D/framed media and towards 360° video and VR, I find myself in need of good ambient sound more and more frequently. In the world of traditional motion design and film, good music was king. Adding a catchy tune to a piece could make or break its success, and entire careers were built on the ability to sync up visuals to the rhythm and sounds of the audio track.

Now, with the advent of Virtual Reality the priorities have changed. Establishing audience's sense of presence is the key component of crafting a successful experience. Generally speaking, it is a good practice to take your time immersing the viewer in your world - and well-crafted soundscape is as important as the visuals in establishing the believably of the virtual world.

While nothing will substitute a good audio track created by a professional sound engineer, Ambient Mixer is an online service that's ideal for rapid prototyping. It comes in extremely handy whenever you need to lay in a basic atmospheric sound, but still want to customize it to fit your particular needs.

To simplify the process of converting the stereoscopic images from one layout to another, I created a series of Adobe Photoshop Actions named QubaVR Stereo Swapper, that will allow you to re-arrange your frames with a single (or at most double) click.

Topographix is a cool new tech I have been developing for the past few days. It will most likely eventually make its way to the QubaHQ tutorials, but not before we make something new using it with my team. The tool is still in early alpha, but already kicks some major ass and se should start doing some testing early next week.

Formatting text for dynamically generated numbers in After Effects just got a whole lot easier! In this episode I will introduce you to the uberNumber() function I designed combining numerous smaller expressions, to create an all-in-one number formatting tool.

In this tutorial I will show you how to quickly simulate stop motion aesthetic using my After Effects Stop Motion Kit. This collection of presets will allow you to easily add subtle imperfections to the movement of objects in your scene, emulating animator errors that are a staple of stop motion animation. Using 6 different expression sets, you will be able to apply and control glitches in movement, rotation and timing of your objects as well as simulate changes in camera position and exposure.

Knoll Light Factory's most popular look - Chroma Lens 2, reproduced as a preset for Video Copilot Optical Flares.