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How to create a Mandalorian light blaster effect in After Effects

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The whole web seems to be buzzing with talk about The Mandalorian right now. After finally watching it, and realising it wasn’t a show about a “Half man, half Delorean“, I can see why. I’m not going to post any spoilers here, but if you haven’t seen it, and you’re at all a fan of Star Wars, you should. It’s probably the best thing they’ve done with it in a while.

One effect of Star Wars, that’s pretty much as old as the Star Wars franchise itself is the iconic blaster. They’ve been shot by everybody over the years, so it’s no surprise they show up in The Mandalorian, too. In this video, Yannick at Cinecom shows us how to easily make them in Adobe After Effects.

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Five top tips for pulling better keys from your green screen footage

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Green screening (also called chroma keying) is a very useful skill to have when shooting video. Even if you’re not using an actual grey screen, it can be handy to know how to easily mask out a particular colour, and composite something else in its place. In this video, Jordy at Cinecom walks through the top five things he’s learned when it comes to getting a good key.

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Adobe is cutting availability to older versions of some Creative Cloud apps

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Adobe has posted a short but to the point blog post stating that many older versions of Creative Cloud applications will be removed, limiting availability to only the two most recent major versions of each (except for Acrobat – which will only allow the latest version) and their minor updates. This is an attempt, Adobe says, to help keep users updated with the latest features as well as ensure critical bug fixes and security updates are applied.

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Adobe talks Content-aware Fill for Video, Freeform View in Premiere and GPU performance boosts

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The latest Creative Cloud update from Adobe brought with it a lot of new features, changes and fixes for the whole suite. Three of the biggest are content-aware fill for video in After Effects, Freeform view for Premiere Pro and some pretty massive GPU performance upgrades. DIYP spoke with Adobe at NAB 2019 about these new updates and what they mean for users.

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Adobe After Effects now has content-aware fill which lets you remove objects from videos

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Adobe has announced today a groundbreaking addition to After Effects: content-aware fill for video. The feature is powered by Adobe Sensei, the company’s AI platform which helps to remove various visual elements automatically. This feature has been available in Photoshop, and it makes it much easier for photographers to remove unwanted objects from images. But now, the same feature is coming to After Effects, making life easier for video editors, too.

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5 simple camera & editing effects you should definitely try

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Coming up with new and different camera & editing techniques for your videos is challenging. There are millions of them out there, that Hollywood has been using for decades. But now they’re accessible at home, with just a little crafty camera work and some editing. But it’s easy to overuse the same handful of techniques.

Well, Jordy at Cinecom is here to show you 5 cool camera & editing tricks you might not have tried before. They’re straightforward techniques that anybody can master with enough practice, but they may require a little planning ahead.

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The beginners guide to creating hyperlapse – the easy way

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Timelapses have become so common now that they’re almost cliché. Like every other type of photography or filmmaking, they’ve gotten to the point where creating something, anything is quite easy. But making ones that really stand out is the challenge. Hyperlapse is like Timelapse on steroids. Not only are you speeding up time, but you’re moving your camera through space, too.

Doing them well is even more difficult to pull off than a great timelapse. But they’re not that difficult to get started with. In this video, professional hyperlapse photographer (yes, that’s a real thing!) Matthew Vandeputte shows us the easy way to shoot hyperlapses. Handheld without any kind of tripod, gimbal or any other support system.

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Learn Adobe After Effects with this new free course for beginners

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After Effects is probably my favourite tools in the Adobe Lineup. Essentially, it is for video what Photoshop is for stills. It has a whole lot of very powerful features to let you animate, composite, and otherwise manipulate your video footage. It also lets you do motion graphics, camera tracking, and a host of other cool things. But it can be a little overwhelming at first.

This new course from motion graphics artist Roland Hartmann (graphicINmotion) will help to introduce you to the application gently. It guides you through the whole process from first loading and setting essential preferences to rendering out your final video. And, it’s completely free.

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How to stabilise shaky footage without using warp stabiliser

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It’s funny how things go around in circles. The Warp Stabiliser was added to After Effects and Premiere to eliminate the need for techniques like the one shown in this video from Matti Haapoja. Introduced with Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 in 2011, it was supposed to make our lives easier and our footage perfect. But, as more and more people take to shooting video, the more and more its failures become apparent.

Although the Warp Stabiliser can do some wonderful things, and sometimes does its job perfectly, there are still times when it just doesn’t get it right. It’s a good video, and very useful information to know. At one time, this was just “the way”, but now it’s just one technique in our ever-growing arsenal.

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How to make it snow in your photos and videos using Adobe After Effects

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Well, ’tis the season. Although some of us might be living in a winter wonderland, that’s not all of us. So, perhaps our videos need a little artificial assistance to give them some of that “Christmas spirit”. Well, this short video from Adobe shows us how we can add foreground and background snow to our scenes in just over a minute using Adobe After Effects.

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