Victoria Nece and John Colombo during their presentation.
Here are my notes from the evening!
It was a great evening with a full range of Adobe users from beginners to experts in attendance with Victoria Nece (@FakeGreenDress) and John Colombo (@1ResCreation) from the Adobe After Effects team (@AdobeAE) on hand to present the latests update to After Effects.
Content-Aware Video Fill
Make sure the object that you’re removing is entirely in the mask.
To start, draw a Mask and then set to Subtract.
Tip: You can work while it’s processing!
Surface Mode uses the same algorithm as Photoshop referred to as “hallucinating pixels”.
This mode guesses something that makes sense.
Edge Blend
Just pulls the edge in to fill the area.
Alpha Expansion
Adjust how big your matte is.
If the Mask is feathered, it will fill all the way to the edges.
Reference Frame(s)
- Create Reference Frame
- Feed the algorithm a still frame.
- You can use as many reference frames as you want. If lighting changes, you are very likely to need more than one reference frame.
- First frame and last frame is usually a good approach for setting reference frames or pick the frame where the area masked is the largest.
- Reference frame says “I want it to be like this”.
Guides
Guides are now external files that can be exported and/or imported int AE and/or Premiere Pro
On AE Side
View > Export Guides
View > Import Guides
Guide Scripting
Right-click the Guide in the Comp panel and give a numeric entry.
Snap to Guides
Miscellaneous Cool Stuff:
- Comp Motion Blur on automatically when Layer Motion Blur is set.
- Help > Provide Feedback to get to Adobe User Voice
- Side tip: Key Cleaner is a good way to add motion blur back.
- Layer > Reveal added to Layer pulldown which allows for creating custom keyboard shortcuts.
- Curves > Alpha now shows a dotted line sainted of black line.
- File > Scripts > Install Script File or Install Script UI Panel and these go into the user folder.
- When running a script both jsn and jsn bins show up at the same time.
- Adobe Fonts – Adobe Fonts will just sync. Period. Go!
Expressions
New Expression Editor
- Full syntax highlighting
- In Line Error Messages
- Contains many suggested fixes
Preferences > Scripting & Expressions > Expression Editor (with Live Preview)
Auto Complete knows things! Project Name. Comp Names. Effect Names. Source Footage Names.
Example: Type loop and your loop modes will show up in auto complete.
Keyboard shortcuts while using Expression Editor
- Tab
- Shift Tab
- Command D to Duplicate a line of code
Use “throw” in code to generate error with results.
Code tips:
Object vs Value
Also, on Mac use Pinch and Zoom to increase text size of code for viewing. (There’s a Windows keyboard shortcut for this.)
Caution: Names in a Try Catch will not auto-rename inside Expressions in AE.
Update Legacy Expressions Script
- File > Scripts > Update Legacy Expressions
- Fixes old javascript.
- Included with AE.
The Expression engine is quicker because it’s more modern.
Up to 5x faster
Co-hosts Mike White, Ko Maruyama and Warren Heaton share opening comments.
Special thanks to DMALA volunteer Michael Mondragon for taking the photos and posting them to social media and to volunteer Steve Toyama who helped sign attendees in.
*****And extra special thanks to Ko for battling the crowds at Costco and LA traffic to bring more pizza than one usually sees in one place to the event.*****
Find us on Facebook under DMALA (our group) and MotionLA (our page).
Next meeting is Tuesday, May 14th.
Register for events: http://dmala.eventbrite.com
Hope to see you at a DMALA meeting soon! -Warren Heaton, Co-host
DMALA 