New website for 2010! Video tour and welcome for the new year

Enjoy!

Don’t forget to comment and let me know what you think of the new site!

This is a cool little effect I’ve seen done all over the palace and a LOT in small flash adverts usually for computer games like Dragon Age, World of Warcraft or some similar RPG/MMO. I’ve seen it before on TV and it when done really well it can make your head go “whhooaa” Like your Keanu Reaves and you’ve just seen something cool.

This is also a cool little introduction to the world of cameras! Cameras can make some cool dynamic effects and this tutorial is an easy way to learn the basics!

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been playing with motion tracking and wanting to learn how to do a really cool eye effect but I was finding it hard to make one that wouldn’t be a direct rip off of a tutorial that already exists. Then I remembered the bad guy from Last Action Hero had a smiley face in his eye and though it would be a cool idea to try and imitate that in after effects!

So here’s my 2 part tutorial on Making a smiley face in your eye!

Part 1

Read the rest of this entry »

This tutorial follows on from my Importing Photoshop brushes into After Effects tutorial which I’d suggest you watch before this one!

Download the Blood splatter Photoshop brush pack here

Read the rest of this entry »

5. Copernicus
This is a very neat application I found on my hunt for free software. It’s small and compact, runs in the background and becomes active when you call it up with a set key function. Now at first this annoyed me because the default key setting was already in use by my Mac, it’s the play/pause button, but it is very easy to change this to something more useful. It is primarily a screen shot application and allows you to capture the whole screen or an area but it is capable of recording video.

Though having said that it doesn’t not have the ability to record sound which rules it out for some people. The file size of recording to RAM seems to be very high and the option to record to Hard Disk seems to make a smaller file size but the frame rate is reduced significantly making videos seem a little jerky.

It depends what you want from a screen capture but Copernicus is a good place to start specially as it’s completely free. There is no branding over the output and no trail restrictions, just good old fashioned shareware!

Official Website

4.Screenium
This is a very nice video screen capture software I found on the Apple website. It’s very simple to use, in some ways too simple, I ended up recording a screen capture with out realizing what I was doing first try! But once I’d figured out what all the buttons do I was away capturing screen videos all over the place! With Screenium you are presented with the application panel which holds all the settings. You can select which screen you want to capture, what audio you want to capture and even do the web cam with in the capture feature which is really cool! You can apply mouse effects which is pretty neat and “hot text” which allows you to add text to your video during the capture! Just hit the appropriately mapped hot key and your text will appear in the location you selected. Fantastic!… Well kinda not. It’s ok If you have everything planned out and just need to annotate a couple things but it wont make you titles and unless you know exactly how long the recording is you can’t have the text appear the whole capture.

It’s a nice video capturing tool but some of the features need a bit more thought. Also Screenium costs for the full version so you might want to think about other software before you dive right in.

Official Website

3.Jing
Now jing is a “Free” piece of video screen capture software. Well It says it is free and if you don’t mind the Jing logos on the end of your video and don’t mind only exporting in .swf file format that’s fine. Unfortunately this may not be what you want. Jing looked so promising when I finally found a “Free” piece of screen capture software but then my heart sank when I realized the inbuilt flaws in the free side. Of course these can be rectified easily buy paying for it which will remove the logoing and let you export in .mov format but that’s NOT free like it said it was ¬¬

That said it is still a very nice piece of software! Once run Jing will appear as a “sun” in the corner of your screen, this sun has 3 points which you use to access Jings features. The recording selection is very flexible and easy to use so you can select exactly what you want to record. You also have the ability to publish directly to YouTube or one of the other video sites at the click of a button. If you are just looking to capture a video for yourself and your friends to put on YouTube and don’t mind the logoing and don’t want to edit it much Jing could be the way for you! Though if advertising other peoples software on your videos isn’t your thing *cough* then maybe it’s not the way for you.

Official Website

2.iShowU
iShowU is a very clear useful piece of software. I particular like the viewer where you can see the desktop you are capturing. Though with desktop capture you expect that to be obvious but I think it’s a neat little feature that it shows this real time. I also like the multiple desktop feature that lets you slide from one desktop to the other in the video. It’s a well presented screen capture utility that lets you capture video how you want. You can select the size/area you wish to record, the video output you want to export as and a few other features like being able to show keys pressed and having mouse effects.

iShowU also has a HD counter part which means you can capture in very high quality! This is going to be more for the corporate market, maybe if you are making a DVD or something where you need to show off a bit. Though It is still a very easy to use piece of software that makes excellent quality videos for any output.

Official Website

1. ScreenFlow
I still Like screen flow for it’s simplicity and ease of use. The fact the whole screen capture process from capture to export is kept in one neat little package saves so much time. There’s no messing about with file formats so your screen capture is the same format as your editor, there’s no worrying about loss of quality due to compression the video more than once. They have taken video screen capture just one step further and created a piece of software that does it all.

ScreenFlow is the only screen capture software I’ve found yet that contains an editor as well. The editor is where ScreenFlow excels, making it unique compared to other screen capture software. That’s why ScreenFlow is my software of choice when it comes to needing screen capture software.
Official website

Also see…
My ScreenFlow Review
My ScreenFlow tutorial

As I refreshed my memory looking over some of the content out there on the web it shocked me how much it has come forward in production value. From the past stereotype of the DIY lo-fi productions you expect from the internet damn they got good at what they do :3 Makes me happy to see not only internet content getting better but more that more serious people taking the internet into their sights. So I compiled this short top 5 web series list!

5. The Black Dawn
This is a pretty serious web series that got me hooked. After the first episode I was like “Holy crap what the hell just happened!?”. Not so original as I’ve heard those stories before and anyone who has seen the BBC series “Survivors” might recognize a lot of the ideas but it’s still worth a watch.
http://webserials.com/

The 4. 21 Conspiracy
This is another interesting series that shows that it’s not all comedy out there, this fairly indi looking piece from Australia got me hooked at the first episode, I just HAD to watch the rest! That’s what a good web series does, they are like little tit bits of awesome wrapped up in a 5 minutish package, just enough to swallow in one go and not enough to satisfy you so you have to go back for more! Though I thought the ending a little meh, the whole set up was brilliant. It’s hard to conclude something like that well, and though I think it was done well it was just a little depressing and not really “OMFG WOW”. Maybe The best way to keep a secret like that is not to tell it?
http://21.spaceboy.com.au/

3. Karma Kula
OK so this is a very slow moving epic web series I stumbled across recently. It’s kinda… not so engaging and quite hard to get into. I think it’s a very good example of how maybe the big screen still holds the the key to master drama and epic scenes. It could be due to the ficle nature of watching web TV, maybe if you have a few minutes to sit back and really watch something this would be more engaging. Oh but it has THE coolest fight scenes EVER in ANY web series EVER in the history of TIME >_>
It reminds me of the old spaghetti westerns with the long pauses but that could be said of a lot of the eastern “kung fu” films too. The score seems very western though, it takes me back to Ennio Morricone, and the cheesy one liners are kinda appalling in a western way =p

I’d like to note that on later watching this series when I have a bit more time I was able to appreciate it more. Maybe epic drama can be done on the web?
http://karmakula.ign.com/

2. ask a ninja

Not much to say here, it’s the simplest preset for a video series. An enthusiastic ninja answers your questions awesomely. How could it fail!?
http://askaninja.com/

1. The Guild
This is a personal favorite of mine being a big WoW fan myself, it is pretty much true to the word what it’s like. I am totally Zabu, Airina is totally Codex
Felicia Day <3
http://feliciaday.com
http://www.watchtheguild.com/

Well I hope you liked my top 5! I hope to make more soon.

:3

So I haven’t had much time today to finish my post with galavanting around and such so I have decided instead of posting a half researched meh blog I’ll give it another day and instead let you know what I’m posting about the next week or so.
Well tomorrow I hope to release my top 5 internet video series. Now these will be reserved only for live action series. I will make a top 5 animated, mechinma and other genera in the weeks to come.

By the end of this week (hopefully Friday) I will upload a video tutorial of how to strip an audio track from a video file.

Next week I hope to do a review on some of the pro video editing software I’ve used.

Do a video tutorial on compression settings, what the all mean, whats best for the web etc.

Compile a list of the top 5 video sites to upload to.

There’s just a few things I hope to do in the coming blogs, hope you find them worth coming back for.

P.S. I’ll update this blog with links to the blogs as I make them, and if you have any surgestions for any of your top web series let me know!

:3