As many of you know I have a video podcast I co-host with Ken Hunnemeder about craft beer. Its main purpose is for Ken and I to share our love of craft beer with the world and highlight some of the great stuff that is happening in the industry. After almost two years of doing the Hop Cast with Ken Hunnemeder, I’ve finally re-done the graphics for the show. This is just the opening title animation, the entire show has a whole new look. The first episode to feature the new graphics will be episode 90 and should be on the Hop Cast site later in April.

In this video I see if rendering with the caps lock key pressed really does save you time.

In this tutorial / tip I show you how to save use animation presets in After Effects.

Using the hotkeys in After Effects is a great way to work, you end up working a lot quicker and you look oh so cool when you bust off some keyboard magic. Now these 5 aren’t the basic hotkeys like hitting “o” to expose a layers opacity property or “r” for ration. Nope these are a tad more advanced, you might not have used them before or perhaps you’ve forgotten about them. I work on a mac so I’m sorry if these don’t transfer to the windows environment perfectly but you should be able to figure them out.

Fit To Composition
Option+Command+F
This hotkey will scale the layer to fit to the size of the composition. This works great for when you need to scale an oversized image or pre-comps. I use this one a lot when I need to take a high definition pre-comp and render it out to standard definition.

Jump To Key Frame
Press j and k to go back and forth by a keyframe at a time. This is a pretty simple one but really useful.

Toggle Mask On / Off
Shift+Command+H
This is very handy when doing rotoscoping, sometimes you want to see how the footage is looking without that annoying mask getting in the way.

Swapping Footage
There are two ways to do this and it is a really personal thing because people I have worked with over the years have done it both ways. The way I usually do it is by clicking on the new clip, image or comp in the project window and then clicking the layer I’m going to replace in the timeline and pressing Option+Command+/ . The other way is to select a layer in your timeline. Then grab a clip, image or comp in the project window and while holding down the option key drag it to the comp window and drop it. All parameters of the previous item will still be there including effects and keyframes.

Go Full-Screen
Command+\
It is great to take advantage of all the screen real estate you can when working in After Effects. Instead of manually resizing the window which is a pain, you can just press Command+\ . This then resizes the application window or floating window to fit the screen.

For even more After Effects shortcuts check out the forum on mograph.net called The ever growing AE shortcut keys & tips thread!

I recently had the opportunity to work with Gertrude Inc to help them “breath new life” into Binaca. Gertrude Inc is currently rolling out an integrated ad campaign for Binaca, with revamped packaging, print ads, guerrilla marketing and television. This final step is where Gertrude Inc called on me to help them launch this breathtaking spot. You can check out the spot in the motion section.

Just finished a new 30 second spot at Daily Planet. The Daily Planet team used only photos to create this high energy spot for the Chicago Sky. Check out the spot in the motion section.

Took some time today to put together a submission for Greyscale Gorilla’s 5 Second challenge themed, “Hero”.

For more information on the five second projects check out greyscalegorilla.com

For this 5 second animation project I was inspired by the cooking show “Jamie At Home”.

For more information on the five second projects check out greyscalegorilla.com

Based off a comic strip I saw the other day, figured I’d bring it to life. I made some adjustments so the story wasn’t lost and that it would fit within the theme of Square vs Circle.

For more information on the five second projects check out greyscalegorilla.com

For this five second project I wanted to try out tracking with PF Track. I have a project coming up that is going to have a good deal of tracking so my goal was to do a test with the software before we jumped into the job. Once tracked I brought that data into Cinema 4D and added the text and balloons. The text is the same style as the text from my Coffee and Triangles project. After adding some animation in Cinema 4D I brought the render into After Effects where I added my original footage back in. I decided to just make the footage black & white rather than the entire scene.

For more information on the five second projects check out greyscalegorilla.com

Nick Campbell has started these five second animation project. The theme for this weeks project was “Coffee and Triangles.” My goal was to do something that was hyper-colored and contained 3D type.

For more information on the five second projects check out greyscalegorilla.com

In this After Effects tutorial focus on two simple expressions. The two expressions used are; loopOut(); and Wiggle(2,2);

For more information on expressions in After Effects check out AE Enhancers and the tutorials by Harry Frank over at graymachine.com.

Working with Joel Kapity of Dreams On Screen I helped with compositing and animation for many of the shots in the music video for DJ Morph’s song Can’t Break Us. You can check out a clip of the music video in the motion section.

For more information on the “Five Seconds and Orange” project check out greyscalegorilla.com

This is my first After Effects video tutorial so please take that into consideration. In this tutorial I go through the basics of how you add an expression in After Effects. I focus on setting up a simple counter expression using an expression and the slider control effect. Here is the expression used;

val = effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”);
numDec = 0; // digits to right of decimal
numDigit = 2; // digits to left of decimal
if (val < 0) sign = "-" else sign = ""; s = Math.abs(val).toFixed(numDec); while (s.length < numDigit + numDec + 1) s = "0" + s; sign + s

For more information on expressions in After Effects check out AE Enhancers and the tutorials by Harry Frank over at graymachine.com.