SFMOGRAPH October 16th Meeting

FIRST LOOK AT ADOBE CS4

SFMograph hosts a first look at Adobe Production Premium CS4 featuring Adobe After Effects. Our favorite software company, Adobe, will be on-hand to demonstrate the recently announced Creative Suite 4 (CS4) Production Premium.http://adobe.istreamplanet.com

Matt Silverman, Creative Director at Phoenix Designs (and sfmograph co-host) will break down the motion graphics stinger his team created for the Adobe CS4 launch. Created in collaboration with Nando Costa from Portland design studio Nervo, and Barcelona's Vasava, the piece explores the CS4 Master Collection as we travel through the Nervo and Vasava artwork. Phoenix completed this heavy AE project in After Effects CS4 (along with Photoshop CS4, Maya, and Cinema4D), and will go over some of the new features which they used to complete the animation including 3D model import and separate X/Y/Z transforms, as well as go over an interesting use of 3D transmission layers with falloff lighting using Buena Depth Cue. Bring the kids for this one... it's going to be swell. A QuickTime of the stinger can be seen here: http://www.phoenixedit.com/html/gfx_spts.html

"Plug-in of the Month" for October is MochaAE. One of the biggest shortcomings in After Effects has been it's motion tracker. Instead of trying to re-invent the wheel, Adobe turned to Imagineer Systems to license it's industry leading planar tracker for CS4. Planar tracking is a revolutionary way to track objects. Instead of tracking four individual points points which are all independent of each other, MochaAE looks at these four points as the corners of a 3D plane, and can not deviate the shape of this plane over time. The result are rock solid tracks, even if one of the corners becomes obscured. There is no other tracker in the world that comes close to the power of Imagineer's planar tracker (even the big guys can't compete on million dollar systems). We'll show how to track in MochaAE, move Corner Pin data into After Effects, and extract stabilization data for scale and rotation based on the corner's points using some fancy expressions.

Now you may be saying, "MochaAE is not a plug-in... it is an application!" This is true. So in the spirit of "Plug-in of the Month", we are going to show a first look at a brand new Red Giant plug-in, "RG Warp". RG Warp comes with a few killer plug-ins, most notably RG Corner Pin. This advanced corner pin filter is the perfect complement to MochaAE. It provides high quality filtering and anti-aliasing (including super-sampling), "to" and "from" pins (like Nuke), offset channels (like Flame), secondary transforms, and MochaAE import. It is a must-have for anyone interested in using MochaAE to it's fullest potential. RG Warp also includes some other killer plug-ins which we will detail at the event.

Finally, we are working hard to gather a bunch of great prizes for the raffle. We'll provide more details as we get closer to the meeting and post updates on our site, sfmograph.org.