There comes a time when all good things must come to an end, and "Have It Your Way" Week is no exception. But we aren't just gonna kick you to the curb, I got a roundup all the Custom Effects I could find from around the web for you to download, test out and dink around with yourself. Go nuts!
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RGB Split
Jorrit Schulte is one of the main Custom Effects creators in the AE scene. He posts most of his stuff at AEnhancers.com, making them easy to find. This CE though, gives you the ability to split the red, green and blue channels of an image or footage with a range of different parameters.
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Pie Chart
One of Jorrit's latest creations, "Pie Chart," does exactly that... makes pie charts for you. Maybe you work in a corporate environment? Well this will help you! YOu can animate the charts on, have up to 10 values, there are some shading options, and it render pretty quickly too.
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TV Noise
This is a pretty cool little preset. Instead of screwing with a ton of fractal noise settings or using some stock footage, you can just apply this CE and have some good looking noise for television sets or monitors, complete with scanlines, tracking lines and obviously tons of noise.
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Distance Calculator
This little utility is pretty cool and could definitely aid in some complex animations. For example, if you were ever trying to find the exact pixel distance between two 3d nulls... Interesting, none the less.
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Deinterlacerator
Even if you don't have a use for this today or next week, download it. Because you are going to need it eventually. This is a great alternative to all the other free deinterlacing presets out there, and is even pretty comparable to some pro pluginss like Fieldskit which costs $89.95. Only downside, is this only works with CS4.
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DV Keyer
This is collection of effects made into a CE that uses Channel Combiner, Channel blur, and Keylight to make it a little easier for you to key DV footage, because we all know how much of a pain it can be.
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Shine
I'm sure you guys remember Jorrit's tutorial on how to make a CustomEffect where he showed you how to create this Shine CE. Basically it's a free alternative to Trapcode Shine... rad!
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Rebel CC
Ahhh good ol' Stu Maschwitz. You guys might remember this Custom Effect from his book "The DV Rebel's Guide." This is an awesome, easy to use color correction CE, that also has a tutorial hosted over at ProLost.
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Muzzle Flashes
Gotta love gunfire. Quite possibly one of the most used elements ever. They just make everything look cooler! These elements come in two different volumes for Mac and PC, but they use a Custom Effect to drive the CC Particle World effect that makes them up as well as transfer modes. Oh, did I mention that these are 3d too?
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CE ColorCorrection
Another one of the big dogs in the Custom Effects scene is Maltaannon, aka Jerzy Drozda Jr. This CE is a wrapper around the Adobe Color Balance plugin where you can color correct poorly balanced footage to restore original colors and correct those. You can use this along with the other color correction effects as well like Curves, Levels and Hue/Saturation.
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CE ShapeExtruder
Finally a *free* way to extrude shapes in After Effects. Although you can't really orbit this stuff around because it still acts like a 2d layer, it makes for making some 3d text effects a lot simpler instead of using a render-intensive Zaxwerks, or jumping to and from a 3d program.
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CE PixelSampler
This is a freaking awesome Custom Effect, and probably the one you are going to be beating yourself up for not using it sooner. What it does, is lets you select a range of pixels using the parameters. I know my description doesn't do it justice, but check out Maltaannon's tutorial that goes along with it to get the full understanding.
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CE TimeShuffle
Basically what this Custom Effect does is takes the normal time of your footage, precomp or whatever, and time remaps it so that it jumps around within a range of frames that you specify.
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Markers Leaks
Eran Stern has a sweet tutorial and Custom Effect that lets you trigger an action for a layer marker.
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Clockworks
This is an awesome tool that I could have used a few weeks ago actually. No longer do you have to code your countdowns with expressions, nope those days are over. Just make a text layer, choose your font, and apply clockworks and you got yourself a clock, or a countdown timer with fully functional switches and parameters!
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Distributor
This is a pretty sweet little utility, what it does is takes your layers and seperates them in 3d space... simple enough. I am sure you can see the possibilies of using this with animations like slideshows or anything else you need to move through 3d space in.
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Vignetter
Yeah, you can argue that "how hard is it to add one adjustment layer and an oval mask and a curves effect" right? Well think about doing that 200 times on some projects. This might seem like a blah, simple preset, but those one or two minutes add up when you are repeating tasks over and over...
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