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How to create the dolly zoom effect without a zoom lens

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The dolly zoom, also known as the “Vertigo Effect” or “Hitchcock Zoom” can be an amazing technique to add tension or drama to a scene. It’s a process whereby the camera is dollied in toward your subject while the lens zooms out wide. Or, the reverse, where the camera moves away from your subject while the lens zooms in.

It’s a difficult technique to master, and almost impossible if shooting on your own. You have to move the camera, adjust the zoom of the lens, and try to keep your subject in focus all at the same time. This video from Lewis McGregor shows a technique to create a similar effect without doing any zooming whatsoever. But, there is a caveat. It won’t really work if your camera only shoots 1080p.

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Motion tracking in After Effects with Mocha for perfect tracks every time

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Once limited to the realms of Hollywood, motion tracking has become easily easily accessible today. Adobe After Effects comes with three trackers. There’s the original 2D tracker that AE has had for a long time and also the 3D camera tracker introduced in CS6, which analyses your footage to recreate your camera’s movement.

After Effects, however, also comes bundled with the Mocha planar tracking application. It’s a separate application, not a plugin, so it gets easily missed by many users, but it can succeed where the others fail. In this video from Surfaced Studio, you’re going to find out how it works.

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Adobe just dropped a CC2015.5 update with “Face-Aware Liquify” and a bunch of other cool features

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Today, Adobe finally unleashes an update that many users have been waiting for. As well as giving us back the Legacy Healing Brush, this update to Adobe’s CC2015 suite of applications brings some great new features to Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere and other applications.

We’re going to look at some of these new features, and thanks to the folks at the Photoshop Training Channel on YouTube, you’ll find out how they work.

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How to spawn clones of yourself in video with Adobe After Effects

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As more DSLR owners shoot video, it’s natural that they’re going to start experimenting with visual effects. In this video from Tobias at Surfaced Studio, we’re shown how to clone ourselves in video footage using Adobe After Effects.

While you might not want this exact effect in your own work, the video is still worth watching. In it, we are shown some very handy techniques for keying out green screen footage, and compositing them onto new backgrounds.

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Adobe responds to QuickTime for Windows security flaw, offers native ProRes support

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Many Windows based video users have been concerned lately regarding security flaws which led Apple to pull all support for Quicktime for Windows, with the Federal Government going so far as recommending that Windows users completely remove it from their system.

Adobe have today announced a response to this issue, declaring that they are adding native support for ProRes into their products.

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Faking the tilt-shift video look in Adobe Premiere Pro

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Since the first tilt-shift timelapses started to appear online several years ago, it’s a look that’s been attempted, copied, and improved upon quite a bit.  Tilt-shift lenses, however, can be pretty expensive, and for something that you may only use occasionally, an expense you may not be able to justify.

As a consequence, the tilt-shift look of many videos is created in post.  In this video from VideoRevealed, Colin Smith shows us how we can quickly achieve the look in Adobe Premiere Pro.

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Adobe CC Keyboard Shortcut Cheat Sheets. Every. Single. One.a

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So there a great debate out there: which method is faster? Using the mouse or using keyboard shortcuts? I was sure that keyboard would be the fastest but test results are inconclusive [pdf] (some even suggest the complete opposite). One thing that stands out on research is that if one is very proficient with keyboard shortcuts, then those shortcuts (or hot keys) will produce faster work.

Probably belonging to the keyboard camp, the folks at makeawebsitehub shared a set of cheatsheets for many adobe apps. Save, Print, Stick over your monitor and memorize:

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Understanding and Creating ‘Realistic’ Camera Shake In After Effects

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Some short require camera shake for authenticity, but are so much easier shooting on a tripod. Think about any effect where you need to cut between two shots, or wanting to shoot something quickly while still making it seems like it was shot hand held. This gets even harder if you want a significant shake.

Now of course, some will say, just get the camera off the tripod and shake it as you shoot, but if you tried that you’d realize that shooting while shaking a camera is not that trivial. There are many things to consider, like focus, framing the way the camera moves, and having the shake look realistic.

Sam & Niko share a relatively simple method for adding the camera shake in post. The secret to making it look real? They break the shake into its individual components and add them as linked NULL objects.

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How to Create Fringe-Like Titles In Your Videos

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One of the things that got me right away with Fringe is the fact that I am an uber-geek are the titles they put to note locations. Rather than doing those boring lower thirds, or the typewriter thing that note a new location, Fringe always had those hovering titles that looked like they were hovering over buildings in the perfect perspective and moved right along with the camera. Videographer and Editor Basti Hansen takes us through a step by step tutorial of creating a Fringe-like hovering title.

It is a rather lengthy tutorial but it covers everything you need to know.

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If You Have No Idea What Coloring And Grading Are, This Is A Great Intro

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Grading and Coloring are part of the creative workflow that any piece of video goes through (or at least any fully produced piece of video). It controls the overall ‘feel’ of the movie. When I started doing movies in addition to stills this is one of the things that got me on the first few times. It is a very similar concept to using curves, hue/saturation and other tonal and contrast tools on a photograph.

Colorist Rob Bessette of Finish Post gives a great introduction into coloring a video (hosted by Rule Boston Camera). It covers everything from what coloring actually is, through basic principles, setting a monitor up and ends up with a spectacular demo of coloring a commercial. If you are unfamiliar with coloring, you would be surprised at how different a movie looks once a colorist is done with it. [Read More…]

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