XELER8R

Just a heads up - if you’re thinking of upgrading your shop - or your personal computer power pc - it might be high time to get ‘em up on ebay before they’re worth next-to-nothing. I’m sure you can find other uses for them as above.

Micheal Coleman has announced that CS4 will support the newer Intel Macs only.

The new After Effects will support workflow enhancements, new creative options and small refinements that will make you’re 18 hours a day more effective - but only if you’re on an Intel Mac.

Good move? I think so… In web design I add a hefty extra fee if the client wants the site to work in older browsers. Sometimes it takes more than twice the amount of time to make everything work for every possibility.  Things need to move forward - and they need to move forward quickly.

What do you think?

Filed under: Announcements on August 20th, 2008 | 3 Comments »

I’ve been doing a lot of 3d compositing lately…

This is a bit of a dream come true. Sign me up!

Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene from pro on VimeoI can thinkof about a thousand uses for this… One of them is making movie playback graphics like those in CSI a little more believable…Project page: http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/videoenhancement/videoEnhancement.htm

// jayse

Filed under: Cool Stuff on August 19th, 2008 | 4 Comments »

From tech to retro… all art and design has roots and inspiration. I love seeing how things develop, change and get recycled…

Check these out. Chances are you’ll recognize a lot of these recreated by modern designers.

Here’s the whole book of ‘vintage’ logo designs: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_carl/sets/72157604144345854/   It’s awesome!

Now when a beginner designer shouts “rip!” of TDR, YWFT, ISO50 etc. for the 10 thousandth bloody time, you can send them here for a little history lesson and slap them into place like the spoilt lil-child that they are. (The astute among you will even notice something veryyyyyy similar to the ywft logo in there.)

So yes, my good friends… It’s time to admit that we artists and designers are quite inspired. Most designers in other fields have no problem with it. Architects I work with promote their inspirations - Type designers love to show what master their latest font is based on. Product designers do it too (check out how all the apple products you love had ‘former lives’ as Braun products in the 50’s )

All great and beautiful stuff.

Now, dear art directors and graphic-kids, go design for the love-of-designing why don’t ya!

Filed under: Design Technique on May 7th, 2008 | 6 Comments »

Hey guys, just a quick note to let you know that I’ll be hanging out at the GridIron booth on Monday the 14th and Wednesday the 16th showing people both Nucleo Pro and the soon to be released Flow (as seen below!)

Come by and say hi if you get a chance - some great new things to consider.

// jayse

Not to be a commercial - but I do love the guys at GridIron

Here is more information about Flow released today:

GridIron Flow Showcased at NAB on Mac OS X and Windows

Award-Winning Software For Creative Pros To Be Priced At $349

NAB 2008, LAS VEGAS, Nev.,– April 14, 2008 – GridIron® Software
today announced that GridIron Flow software is now undergoing
beta testing with a select group of creative professionals and
is being demonstrated this week on both Mac OS X and Windows at
the NAB Show (booth SL6220) from April 14-17.  Flow is a
revolutionary new approach to workflow management for creative
pros that dramatically simplifies the design process for print,
web, film, and video projects. This award-winning software will
be available later this summer and will be priced starting at
US$349. Creative professionals interested in finding out more
about Flow and participating in the beta program are encouraged
to register at www.gridironsoftware.com.

“Since launching Flow in January we’ve received tremendous
interest from creative pros in every segment of the market,”
said Steve Forde, CEO of GridIron Software. “We are excited to
be getting it into the hands of professionals for some
real-world testing and look forward to making it broadly
available later this Spring.”

Flow automatically tracks your work allowing you to instantly
see the relationships between all your assets in your most
complex projects—all without changing the way you work.  Flow
uses sophisticated Real-Time Asset Tracking technology to record
all Import/Export, Save/Save As, and Copy/Paste actions in a
project. It understands the file formats for virtually all
creative professional applications, including those from Apple
and Adobe, and maintains the relationships between stills, movies,
sound clips, fonts, plug-ins, and color swatches on all local,
network, and removable storage devices.  Flow provides an
intuitive user interface to display this information and delivers
a rich set of features including:

* Workflow Maps—show the files used in a project and how they are
connected to one another as they move from application to
application including all related assets, fonts, color swatches,
plug-ins and even internal file structure like comps and layers.
They are updated in real-time as you work.

* Visual Search—searches for internal file details such as layer
names, plug-ins, fonts, or colors, and Flow will instantly
highlight how and where those elements are used in your workflow.

* Project Time Tracking—automatically records how much time was
spent creating one file, a series of files or an entire project.

* Project Packages—provide a point in time snapshot of any
project and capture everything that went into its creation,
including media files, fonts, color swatches, applications and
plug-ins. Project Packages include a Workflow Map showing how
everything fits together so that everything needed to hand it
off and reconstruct it later will be there.

* Visual Versions—automatically tracks versions of files,
including thumbnails and metadata, as a project evolves allowing
users to easily revert to a previous version of a file anywhere
in their workflow.

* Tags and Annotations—add customized tags and annotations to
assets or projects to support your own business processes.  View
existing file metadata with support for metadata standards like
DICOM, EXIF, IPTC and XMP.

* Flow SDK—offered to tool vendors to easily create custom
extensions to support their file formats and add new functionality
to the Flow environment.

Pricing & Availability

Flow will be available this summer for Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard
and for Windows XP and Vista for US$349 per seat. Volume pricing
will also be available upon request. The Flow Beta is currently
available to a select group of professionals and will be made
broadly available from the company website later this Spring.
For more information and to sign up for the upcoming public
beta visit www.gridironsoftware.com.

About GridIron Software
GridIron Software is a leading provider of workflow solutions
for creative professionals. We build powerful tools that enhance
the creative process by eliminating the drudgery that creative
professionals associate with design, video and web workflows.
For more information visit: www.gridironsoftware.com.

Filed under: Announcements on April 13th, 2008 | 3 Comments »

You may have noticed that as a designer - you’re constantly fighting file management. Fonts are missing. Images changed but not updated - “Why are the links to media broken again? Oh yeah - that .aep needed THAT missing plug-in!”

It’s kind of archaic isn’t it?

Well get ready for something entirely new. The good folks at Grid Iron have been feeding me enticing hints at this revolution for over a year now - and now ‘Flow‘ is finally unveiled.

Flow keeps a visual record of your projects. Their assets, the timeline and revision history, and the relationship between all related files.As you build up your project, Flow’s Real-Time Asset Tracking System automatically tracks your workflow and maintains the relationships between your pictures, movies, sound-clips, fonts, plug-ins, and color swatches on all your local, network and removable storage devices. By understanding the file formats for all popular creative professional applications and tracking all Import/Export, Save/Save As and Copy/Paste actions on both Mac OS X and Windows, Flow can show you how your files are related regardless of where they are stored.

The best thing is that it does this all behind the scenes - you don’t have to tell it to do anything.

Here’s some full screenshots

download a pdf about flow

PS: if, like many others, you think that Flow’s interface kicks major ass… it’s because my good friend Mark Coleran designed it. You’ve already seen his interface work in films like ‘The Island’, ‘Tomb Raider’, ‘Blade 2′ and ‘Mission Impossible’. Now his work finally comes to us on the desktop.

Depending on my schedule, there’s a possibility that if you’re at NAB in April, you’ll find me showing a few things at the Grid Iron booth (SL6220) - so be sure to come by and say hi.
// jayse

Filed under: Announcements, Design Technique on January 23rd, 2008 | 5 Comments »

The future of research - faster and, more importantly, fun.

1. Install the new browser plug-in called PicLens
2. Restart your browser
3. Go to google image search and search for your favorite artist or model (my good friend, designer Daniel Palacios, suggests trying his favorite model ‘vida guerra‘ if you can’t think of anything else)
4. click the new ‘play’ icon on each thumbnail.
5. Enjoy

Credit to Danny for showing me this thing… It’s become my new favorite way to search since it’s so fast. Many more technologies from these guys coming soon that will revolutionize the way we research and interact with images.

// jayse

Filed under: Design Technique on January 16th, 2008 | 6 Comments »

E-mail from Javin: “Hi jayse, I notice you have an excellence sense of unique color harmony in your work. Can you please share with us how you learned this? Or is it just from birth?”

I believe we’re all artists from birth, and it’s always good to learn as much as you can about everything else. Knowing your basic color theory is a must for any designer and any self-respecting visual effects artist. It’s both a learned skill and an innate ability.

Intelligent color choices can REALLY improve your design, compositing and sex-life.

Here are my main areas for inspiration and knowledge.

1. Fashion - I like looking outside ‘graphic design’ for inspiration as much as I can. The fashion industry LOVES color. They have the best exotic names (Where else can green become ‘Ice’d Glass’, or a soft-blue become ‘Innocence’?). Fashion designers are always predicting the hot colors for the new year - so that always makes for a good read. For those of you with girlfriends like mine who love shop for clothes - now you have something to keep the designer in you busy: notice those colors.

2. House-Paints - pick up free combination cards from Hardware-store paint sections - These have more useful/descriptive, less-emotional names than fashion like Lemon-Grass, Java, and Navajo-white. (which also happen to be the interior-colors of my house.)

3. Books - there are many color-books - but only a few greats.

One of my favorites is called ‘Color Index‘ because it has color schemes based on genres such as ‘Art Nouveau’, or artist such as ‘Monet’ - or moods such as somber, etc. No images - but a huge array of unique color combinations. Definitely a good reference - and a great way to learn from the master-artist.

My other favorite is Pantone’s Guide to Communicating in Color because it is context based and explains the psychological effects of color (this is good for expaning your color choices to clients etc.) Not to mention it gives many real-world examples of great design with the colors mentioned. (something lacking in most color books)

4. Sites

Some of my favorite sites are community based - and have some interesting combinations. Two faves are:

colourlovers.com

The new Adobe Labs’ Kuler: kuler.adobe.com which allows you to pick a base color and select buttons to immediately generate four additional colors as analgous, monochromatic, triad, complementary, compound, shades etc. This is one of my favorite play-toys for color combos.

There are, of course, many others - but these resources should give you a really good foundation to start building your preferred palettes.

Filed under: Design Technique, Uncategorized on January 7th, 2008 | 4 Comments »

From ‘Mastering 3d Cameras in After Effects’ by Jayse Hansen
Class Preview at Post Production World Israel, Nov. 2007
Here is the code that Dan Ebberts wrote that I demonstrated in class for spreading out 3d layers proportionately using one slider control. (Thanks be to Dan!)
Basically the steps are:

1. Import your psd in layers, or create a bunch of solids as I did in the example above.
2. Turn them all 3d
3. Add a null, apply Effects>Expression Controls>Slider (make sure this null is named ‘null1′ In other words - just don’t rename it.)
4. In the Position Property of each 3d layer, add an expression by alt/opt clicking the Position StopWatch and pasting the following code:
   position+[0,0,(index-1)*this_comp.layer("Null 1").effect
("Slider Control").param("Slider")]
   
5. Set your view to a side view (Right or Left)
6. Drag the slider on ‘Null 1′ and watch your layers spread like magic.

Here’s a sample After Effects Project FileSome notes:

You may find that your layers look larger as they move in z space towards you. A quick fix would be parenting all the 3d layers to a null and scaling it down.

If you need more precision and want to scale and separate at the same time so that the layers appear to remain the same size even while being moved in z-space, (very useful!) check out Zax’s excellent new plug in ‘Z-Distribution‘ in the Layer Tools set.

Hope that helps,

// jayse

Filed under: After Effects on December 3rd, 2007 | 8 Comments »

Internet Killed the Video Star: A Guide to Creating Video for the Web

My good friend Aharon Rabinowitz has just released an excellent new DVD training through the Creative Cow Master Series.

This is the first in depth video training to tackle high-end video compression for the web in a straight forward, non-techie way.

As usual Aharon makes even tedious tasks and explanations fun and entertaining. This is the kind of stuff all web developers and motion artists need to know in order to display their work properly on the internet.

I highly recommend picking this up.

// jayse

Link

Filed under: Other Training on September 10th, 2007 | 2 Comments »

Here is the PSD file for a simple image created entirely with vector shapes and custom layer styles. The benefit of setting up your files this way is that you can now insert any photo (or video) into this image and the grunge scratches and reflections will appear over the photo, integrating the whole. You can also resize this file up to print size - and it will scale beautifully.

clean-style

Grunge-style

Included are both the gunge and clean versions in separate folders inside the psd.

Hope it helps!

Download PSD

Filed under: Design Technique, Photoshop, Tutorials on September 5th, 2007 | 9 Comments »

Welcome to the new Xeler8r. Enjoy.

Filed under: Announcements on July 19th, 2007 | 5 Comments »

Class notes PDF for how to deliver motion graphics that clients want, without sacrificing your artistic vision.

Download PDF

Filed under: After Effects, Design Technique, Photoshop on March 10th, 2007 | 2 Comments »

Tips and techniques for creating artwork in Photoshop.

Among other things, learn how to finally conquer the pen tool and how to put the under-appreciated layerstyles to work for you.

Download PDF

An example of a more complicated layer style applied to regular text.

Filed under: Photoshop on February 10th, 2007 | 3 Comments »

A pdf of tons of tips and tricks to speed up not only your final rendering, but also your workflow.

Download PDF 

Filed under: After Effects on January 10th, 2007 | 2 Comments »

Just the sample files for one of my classes showing how to take motion graphics generated in After Effects and put it to use in Flash.

 Sample

Source Files

Hope they help!

// jayse

Filed under: After Effects, Flash on September 10th, 2006 | 2 Comments »

After Effects Video Tutorial on making flourishes grow by Jayse Hansen

“In this After Effects video tutorial, Jayse Hansen demonstrates how to create graphic elements that will grow in After Effects. This question comes up in the forums all the time. Now we have a step by step tutorial. “

Filed under: After Effects, Photoshop, Tutorials on July 10th, 2006 | 25 Comments »

Video Tutorial by Jayse Hansen

Find out why this incredible new stand alone application from Adobe will dramatically improve the way you work with your design files. This one is worth learning a lot about.

Filed under: Adobe Bridge, After Effects, Photoshop on September 10th, 2005 | 2 Comments »

A Video Tutorial by Jayse Hansen

By far one of the greatest improvements in Photoshop, EVER. See why this unrecognized Photoshop update may change the way you work forever.

Filed under: After Effects, Photoshop on September 10th, 2005 | 1 Comment »

PDF on some unusual uses for transfer modes (blend modes) in After Effects and Photoshop.

http://xeler8r.com/downloads/class/NAB2005/AE-Advanced_Transfer_Mode_Tips_05.pdf

Filed under: After Effects, Photoshop on May 10th, 2005 | No Comments »

Tutorial by Jayse Hansen

“In this tutorial, Jayse will show you how to take Illustrator artwork and import it into After Effects 5. For the final touches, he will show you how to use DigiEffects Schematic Grid to enhance transparent ’scoreboard’ screen. “

Filed under: After Effects, Illustrator on August 10th, 2004 | No Comments »