There are already some nice responses in the comments and on my Facebook Fan Page. Some of you suggested that I should host my own show. What would you like me to talk about? Any suggestions? Or maybe you’d like me to just answer questions that you ask me?

Honestly I was thinking about something like that for a while, just never thought you’d be actually interested. If you are, than this is the place and time to let me know about it. I’m waiting for your comments.

Problems with overerexposed footage? Need to work in 32bpc for nice depth of field and motion blur? Now you can! Convert your footage from 8bpc to 32bpc with my new free plugin.

Click here to watch the video tutorial

We all deal with overexposed footage from time to time when doing postproduction, color correction, motiongraphics or visual effects. Usually theres not much we can do about it. In some cases we can replace the sky when it was a cloudy day and the clouds turned out looking like a white or gray solid. But what if the overexposed pixels are exactly what you need? Well… than you need to do nothing… until you start blurring the footage or adding color correction. In those cases you end up with areas that turn out gray while they should still be white. That causes a lot of additional work when compositing. At least that’s how thighs were until now.

Bitwiser is a concept I had in mind for quite some time that just came to life as Bitweiser Light Pixel Bender plugin. This “light” version is completely free, has no settings, and only works for overexposed areas converting them to superbright pixels in 32bpc mode. Let me know what you think of it, so I’d know if it’s worth spending more time on improving this solution. The Bitweiser Pro version (if it will ever be made) will have a bunch of settings for tweaking the looks, threshold, tinting colors, separate settings for highlights, midtones, shadows, and probably a lot of other features that did not yet came to my mind.

I’m always hungry for your comments, opinions and suggestions. Please enjoy this free release and let me know what you think.

Download: Bitweiser Light Pixel Bender plugin (After Effects CS4)

Update
The plugin is now available for purchace. Check out the Youveelizer tutorial for more info. Read on if you’d like to learn more about the concept of UV mapping, or just watch the Youveelizer tutorial.

UV Mapping (source: wiki)
UV mapping is a 3D modeling process of making a 2D image representing a 3D model. The map transforms the 3D object onto an image known as a texture. In contrast to “X”, “Y” and “Z”, which are the coordinates for the original 3D object in the modeling space, “U” and “V” are the coordinates of the transformed object. This creates the effect of painting the image onto the surface of the 3D object.

Every 3D application is capable of generating UV maps and rendering out a UV pass. What if we could use those UV maps in After Effects to change textures, replace 3D screens, change pictures hanging on our 3D walls, or even add reflections to our 3D models?

I did some tests and came up with a very rough Pixel Bender plugin for painting an image onto a surface of a 3D object using UV maps. Here is the result of the first test.
This technique opens up new opportunities to cutting down render times and making changes on the fly inside After Effects. There are some problems that need to be faced, but all and all it looks promising. I’ll keep you posted. The tutorial and plugin should be available after publishing all of the 4 tutorials I have already announced. Two of them are already online, so it shouldn’t be longer than two weeks. I’d do it now, but I’m a bit busy (for a change).

Update
The plugin is now available for purchace. Check out the Youveelizer tutorial for more info.

We’ve all been through this. Creating channel separation effect by hand is a pain. You have to duplicate the layers and use channel mixer and blend modes to get what you want. Not anymore. Now with new After Effects CS4 we can script a simple Pixel Bender to do just that.

Finally I got my hands on this amazing new tool from Adobe called Pixel Bender Toolkit. It allows you to script very powerful effects in a very simple way. What’s best is that scripts you create may be used as plugins and shaders in Photoshop, Flash, and After Effects.

Unfortunatelly I haven’t found a nice way to create user friendly interfaces for After Effects users. All Pixel Bender allows you to create as a parameter is a slider. But hey – I’m just starting. And besides – it’s still the first official release. I think there are many great things to come from Pixel Bender technology in the near future.

After writing your code and adding parameters you can simply put the PBK file into your plugins folder in After Effects CS4 and open the application. Your newly created shader will be available under the PixelBender group in the Effects & Presets pallette.

I’m currently working on a CustomEffect as a wrapper for the Pixel Bender code for your convinience. Here is the preview of the interface that I’m working on. I hope you’ll find this useful.

In the meanwhile grab the Pixel Bender plugin that will help you with simple RGB channel separation.

Download: Maltaannon's RGB Splitter PBK (After Effects CS4)

Happy AfterEffecting.

In the end those articles would create a huge manual for expressions that beginners and advanced users could refer to when experiencing problems. It would of course contain the obvious stuff, but also some tricks, tips and techniques that are not documented.

Articles would consist of the official technical part, more user-friendly approach in plain English and probably some short video tutorial and a project file demonstrating what was discussed in the article.

I’d start from the beginning. Syntax, keywords, data types and such. Boring but very important stuff. If one would go through it all it would not only show how to write expressions, but it would also help to understand and improve other people’s code, which I think is the best way to learn it if you’re having troubles.

Let me know what you think guys. If you find this idea interesting I’ll start just after finishing the MILG5 dvd, which is going pretty well by the way.

Happy AfterEffecting.

I already wrote a post about an experiment that I did that involved some new ways of creating 3d objects, even importing them from any 3d package. I haven’t done a tutorial on that yet, but I assure you it’s coming. Aside that I believe I have found a new interesting way of importing 3d textured objects to AE, but I know it is a bit out of my league in terms of programming it and creating a tool for it, but I’m sure to give it a shot one day, unless of course someone will contact me to work on this.

Heres the big concept. Have you ever used vanishing point from Photoshop? If you have you probably know where this is going. One of Photoshop vanishing point features is creating a 3DS model for importing to 3d applications, or a VPE file for importing into AE. Here’s where the fun begins. What if we could reverse that process and create a VPE file from a 3DS or OBJ file?

VPE file is just a plain text file that looks a bit like XML, so it is very easy to understand it, and even create by hand. What you get after importing it to AE is a new composition with 3D layers and a camera. I use it from time to time to create panoramas, or buildings from a single photo so I could easily move the camera around.

Now just imagine that we have a tool for reading 3DS or OBJ or any other common 3d file format that creates a VPE file from it, extracting the textures and describing the geometry. Wouldn’t that be just cool? Of course there are some limitations, but still this have a chance to be far more useful than what I plan to show you in the next few weeks. The objects would have to be low-poly to keep AE running at reasonable speed. Also I think that the only objects that can be created from VPE in AE are rectangular solids, so to keep some parts of them transparent the PNG texture applied to them would have to be trimmed or modified in any other way to hide that the actual plane with the texture is a rectangle.

Above that there are already tools out there to export 3d data from 3d apps to frameworks like Papervision3D for flash. I haven’t looked into them yet, but if they can do this for flash, why not export it for AE in VPE format? This all sounds a bit crazy but I don’t think it’s that far in the “impossible” area.

Anyway… I just wanted to share that thought with you hoping that a maybe one of you my dear visitors is a programmer with to much free time that will be willing to give this idea a try. Don’t hesitate to contact me about this idea. Tell your friends about it. Maybe someone will come forward and together we can build a 3d objects importing tool that we’ve always wanted.