Month: February 2020

Oh my God! I love this free plugin!

Posted on by danigriffin_fho7l4

Oh my God! I love this free plugin!

In my more than 25 years being a Video Editor, Post producer and Motion Designer, I haven’t been able to choose the best plugin to recommend to my colleagues, friends and students, but  Mr. Horse’s has come up with such an amazing product that there is no way I can’t recommend  Animation Composer for After Effects to them.  It has become part of my “essential items” and It is worth every of my hard-earned pennies. It’s super useful, easy to use and customize. I use it in my daily work at the advertising agency I work for as it is a high-speed production environment where we need to deliver things for yesterday and with the highest possible quality. The best of all is that there is a Free version!

I am not the kind of person that usually buys every plugin that comes out to the market, and I really don’t use many plugins on my daily work because most of the time I have to share my projects with other animators, but since Animation Composer creates animations based on scripts if the other user doesn’t have the plugin he will not have any problems using my projects. If you are thinking in the one and only plugin you should spend your money, this is the one.

I started using the free version and after using it for a couple months I fell in love with it and bought some of the expansion packages they offer. In my case I bought “The Most Handy Motion Presets” (a must have!) and afterwards I bought the “Shape Transitions Package” and “Shape Elements” pack.

Here’s a list of some of the expansion packages they offer are:

 

  • The Most Handy Motion Presets
  • Text Presets
  • 3D Motion Presets
  • Filmmaker’s Transitions
  • Shape Elements
  • 2D Special Effects
  • Titles and Lower Thirds
  • Textures
  • Shape Transitions
  • Backgrounds
  • Animated Illustrations, and
  • Essential Sound Effects

This plugin is now being used by 70,000+ motion designers around the world and the number keeps growing. Give a try, check it out @ mrhorse.tv you won’t be disappointed.

 

Red Giant’s Universe 3.2 update has launched with a wonderful set of new features

Posted on by danigriffin_fho7l4

red giant’s universe 3.2 update has launched with a wonderful set of new features 

This update introduces 5 new tools and an update to finisher plus over 100 new presets to improve your motion graphics and videos. These are the new tools that are included in this update:

 

  • Typographic: Makes easy to design intricate shape and text animations for broadcast, social media and other platforms.
  • Reframe: It makes it simple to create picture-in-picture compositions with control of animations, image borders and more.
  • Warp Transitions: An awesome tool for building beautiful transitions with distortion and aberration and also warping and color separation.
  • Multitone: An essential tool for stylizing your images by using a colorful duotone or tritone effects.
  • Socialize: A useful utility for referencing common aspect ratios for social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

In addition to these new effects, Universe 3.2 has an update to Finisher which now has 16 stylish color filters inspired by social media apps and film stocks and popular photo filters.

And as always, a huge set of new presets with over 100 fully customizable presets that will help you get started with all the new and improved tools.

Universe 3.2 runs on Windows and OS X, and includes over 80 tools that run in:

 

  • Adobe After Effects CC 2017 or later
  • Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2017 or later
  • Apple Final Cut Pro X 10.2.3 or later
  • Apple Motion 5.3.2 or later
  • Avid Media Composer 8.2 or later
  • Magix VEGAS Pro 14 or later
  • Davinci Resolve 14 or later
  • HitFilm Pro 6.0 and later

For more information about Universe 3.2 check out this video:  https://youtu.be/HI51TxR7S9g

Or jump to Red Giants webpage: https://bit.ly/3a6tSU1

 

Motion Array’s Free Extension

Posted on by danigriffin_fho7l4

Motion Array’s Free Extension

Motion Array, the video maker’s best friend has released a Free Extension to access their unlimited library of video templates, stock video, royalty-free music, and more.  With this extension you will be able to download their assets directly from your Adobe Application; Photoshop, Premiere or After Effects.

Simply install the extension and log into your Motion Array account, search and browse for assets compatible with your software, then download and import them with just one click.  Find the perfect video clip, test multiple music tracks, or check up various title options without leaving your program.

Although Motion Array is a paid service, they have loads of free assets for you to download.

If you would like more information about Motion Array and this extension, jump to:

https://exchange.adobe.com/creativecloud.details.103068.motion-array.html 

Just to mention, I don’t have any relationship with Motion Array and I don’t receive any money from promoting their products. My sole intention here in this blog post is to share useful information I find on the internet to share it with you my friends.

Can’t afford Photoshop? No problem! Photopea to the rescue.

Posted on by danigriffin_fho7l4

Can’t afford Photoshop? No problem! Photopea to the rescue.

Can’t afford  to pay for Photoshop? No problem, try Photopea!

Whether you need some quick adjustment to an image or maybe you can’t afford to buy a Photoshop subscription, there is this new cool web-based alternative called Photopea. I was really impressed. It looks a lot and works almost like Photoshop with the difference that you don’t need to download the app to your computer.

Main features:

 

  • Layers – to split images into several parts
  • Layer masks – just generally useful
  • Blend modes – specifying, how layers “combine” with each other
  • Brush – there must be a way to change the color of pixels
  • Selections – choosing, which pixels of layer you want to edit
  • Procedural adjustments – changing brightness, hue, saturation, convolutions (blur, sharpening …) etc.

File formats:

Photopea uses the PSD format as the main format for storing image documents with additional information. All files, that you open in Photopea (such as PNG, JPG, Sketch) are converted to PSD (when they are not PSDs already). When you finish editing, the result can be saved from PSD to other formats.

Photopea also supports many kinds of resources, that can be used for editing the image. You can load your own brushes, gradients, fonts and more, the same way you open images.

Want to give it a try? Hop to photopea.com and let me know what you think in the comments section below.

Google registered the brand Pigweed, a supposed new operating system.

Posted on by danigriffin_fho7l4

Google registered the brand pigweed, a supposed new operating system.

Google registered a trademark for the name Pigweed in January 31st. with is supposed to be a new operating system.  The document does not give details about Pigweed, but it I know that it has appeared related to the operating system Fuchsia, which is in development.

Fuchsia is an upcoming mobile operating system that will combine features from Android and Chrome.

At this point Google has not announced informations about this supposed operating system. 

Source: Techradar

Payoneer’s 2020 Freelancer Income Report

Posted on by danigriffin_fho7l4

Payoneer’s 2020 Freelancer Income Report

Payoneer, a very well known payments platform among freelancers, has posted their 2020 Freelancer Income Report based on a survey of more than 7,000 global freelancers in more than 150 countries around the world.

The freelance economy is growing day by day and becoming the preferred lifestyle choice for more and more workers around the world each day, mostly by younger workers pursuing independence.

54% of millennials in developed countries started or plan to start their own business and as many as 64% of millennial full-time workers want to have “side hustles” to make extra money. For older workers, freelancing provides an attractive option to extend their career while gaining a new measure of freedom and flexibility.

You can have access to this report following this link:

2020 Freelancer Income Report 

Hubspot’s email signature generator

Posted on by danigriffin_fho7l4

Hubspot’s email signature generator

This post may have some information outside the subject of this blog, but I thought it was worth sharing with you.

A couple of days ago I got an email from  Hubspot  with a  link  to a page where you can create your own email signature. The truth is that I loved it. It’s super easy to use and the results are very professional.

I am using it to update all the signatures of my email accounts and I am very happy. My signatures look much more professional and visually beautiful.

Here’s the link:

https://www.hubspot.com/email-signature-generator

It should be noted that I do not have any type of affiliation with Hubspot and I do not earn anything with this, in fact the tool is free, so I hope you find it as useful as was for me.

Are you an organizing maniac?

Posted on by danigriffin_fho7l4

Are you an organizing maniac?

Colombian Motion Designer and Animator Rodrigo Dominguez has launched a new After Effects extension called Declutter.

Created to organize your project assets into predefined folder structures. You can customize folders, child folders, labels, names and the type of assets you want them to store.

Features:

 

  • Versatile: Create and save as many folder structures you want.
  • Customizable: Edit folder names and labels to suit your organization needs.
  • Fast: Organize thousands of assets by type in a matter of seconds.
  • Easy to use: Thanks to a super clean UI.

 

Sort by type:

You can tell the extension to put assets in specific folders organizing them by type. If there is an asset type that isn’t specified, it will automatically put it in the root folder.

Supported assets:

 

  • Compositions
  • Pre-Compositions
  • Compositions based on a prefix
  • Audio files
  • Video files
  • Image files
  • Solids
  • Extensions (like .png or .c4d files)

Check it out at AeScripts.com or follow this link https://bit.ly/2S0eiCR 

A New Competitor for Adobe After Effects has Landed?

Posted on by danigriffin_fho7l4

A New Competitor for Adobe After Effects has Landed? 

The name of this new software is Cavalry, and it’s looking very good at this early Beta stages.

Made for Windows and MAC and mainly focused in Motion Design, Generative Art, Character Animation, Data Visualization, FUI, Visual Effects and much more.

Built on a modern, innovative architecture and conceived to accommodate a wide range of applications, Cavalry’s feature set is growing very fast.

I am already excited to see what they will come up with in the near future.

Cavalry’s renderer runs on your GPU meaning animation can be played back in real time and any changes updated live.

When I read this I went … Wow! I think this may be worth taking a look at.

You can join the Beta program at  https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/ and share your animations with the hashtag  #cavalryapp