Very happy to see that there are still many many very high quality After Effects tutorials being put out around the web. In this roundup you'll see lots of the usual suspects as well as tutorials from contributing Aetuts+ authors Nick Campbell and Mathias Möhl.
17 Tuts from Elsewhere
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Video Copilot - DVD Authoring
Tuts have been scarce around the VideoCopilot.net site, but Andrew pumped one out a week or so ago on DVD authoring and creating menus in After Effects. If you create menus, this is a must see, and has some awesome tips for making seamless loops and cool intros. This tut uses twitch, but you could always build the effect using ProJuice's Tutorial - Building Effects.
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GreyScaleGorilla.com - How To Work Faster in AE
Nick set up a new schedule for content on his blog, and what will happen on specific days, so there will hopefully be more quicktips like this from him more regularly. This tip deals with what you can turn on and off in AE to have your workflow move faster such as using Draft3D, resolution previews, and OpenGL. This is great for those of you with mediocre computers, because you know how much of a pain it can be for RAM preview times.
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GreyScaleGorilla.com - How To Use Simple Shapes and Masks to Create and Entire Animation
The Gorilla that Nick is, created a short little animation back in 2005 called Conform Non Conform. This has since been the subject of questions on how it was created and what programs were used. Truth is it was all done in After Effects despite having a spectacular 3D feel to it. Nick's going to show us how to create cool animation like this.
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ProJuice.org - Heat Haze Effect
Nick and Arlo are back with a rad new tutorial on creating that dramatic looking heat haze effect you see in movies, when it is super hot outside and you can see the heat coming out of the ground or off of the asphalt. Very useful VFX technique that can enhance your shots greatly.
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Artbeats and Eran Stern - Crime Avenue
In Eran's latest tutorial for Artbeats.com, he uses some aerial stock footage of a city to create a dynamic promo spot. Using the PixelFarm's PFHoe alongside of AE, he matchmoves and composites the elements to create an awesome looking show open.
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RGTV Ep. 20 - 3D Picture Montage with Particular
Rob Birnholz uses an awesome little technique that I wish that I knew about a week before I saw this tutorial and animated my animation by hand. He teaches you how to use custom particles for pictures and space them out in 3D space, and move between and through them for some cool looking transitions and/or slideshows.
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RGTV Ep.21 - Text to Sand Transition with Form
Aharon's last text to sand tutorial was pretty cutting edge... like 2-3 years ago. He has since developed a new technique using Trapcode Form to disintegrate text or pretty much anything else you want in to a cloud sand, or vice versa, but just reversing the animation.
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Layers Magazine - Create a Photo Montage with only AE
In this written tutorial by Steve Holmes, it takes the above tutorial and kind elongates it for those of you that don't have Trapcode Particular and can't utilize custom particles. This tutorial doesn't even use particles, but duplicates the same photo multiple times, sequences the layer timing, and position and then in the end alt+drags to replace the photos with different ones.
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Layers Magazine - Mystery Text
There have been more and more tutorials using layer styles, a feature that many photoshop users are very familiar with, and have been using them in their After Effects productions. This tutorial actually shows you how to animate those layer style values to get a very cool animation.
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Motionworks - Shattering Glass
John Dickinson has a huge 3 part tutorial that has gradually been released the last couple weeks. It integrates Illustrator, Cinema 4D, and of course... After Effects. The final effect created is a shattering piece of glass, and teach you how to create the polygons in Illustrator, the shatter in C4D, and then create the environment, dust, and other final effects in After Effects.
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Motionworks - Working With Duplicate Text
This quick tip from JD teaches you how to use precomping instead of duplicate text layers for easy changing of text, color, and anything else that deals with duplicated objects.
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Mathias Möhl - MochaImport
This is a new script that improves the Mocha to After Effects workflow. It takes the tracking data that Mocha generates for use in After Effects, and using a custom made, dockable palette with the script, allows you to do very advanced tracking functions that used to be very complicated to do before. Mathias has also been generous enough to create a tutorial to show the versatility of the script.
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Graymachine - Text Effects with Set Matte
Harry Frank is back with another big tutorial on creating some unique text effects using the effects Set Matte, Fractal Noise, Glow and Tritone. Like always Harry uses a bunch of expressions with this tutorial as well.
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LFP Industries - Heroes Text
This tutorial by Levi Borland takes the popular Heroes Chapter Text seen at the beginning of the episodes. Starring himself, he recreates the effect in a few different scenarios using motion tracking, some 3D camera work, and rotoscoping.
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LFP Industries - Basic Color Correction
These are some very basic techniques, again from Levi Borland to correct some of your footage that may be washed out, using solids and blending modes. This technique is best used on footage that on a tripod, but you can use it with moving shot and some roto.
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Carl Larsen - Adobe Camera Raw Sequences
Venturing a little outside of video, Carl shoots some time lapse footage and wants to modify the Camera Raw Settings in Adobe Raw Converter, but the problem is that those settings don't easily import into After Effects. This quick tip over at CreativeCow.net shows you the workaround for import, and how to manipulate your image sequences with ARC, for use later on in After Effects.
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Adobe After Effects 9.02 Update
Adobe released a huge update at the end of last month, and it had a ton of essential updates in it. Read the blog post by Todd Kopriva, Adobe After Effects documentation lead and watch a video from AE Freemart explaining all of the features included with the updates.
