November 16, 2009

Trailer Editing Workshop

It's been long time since my last update. Anyway just spend four days in Oulu studying how to make great trailers. We had Craig Protzel & Sohini Sengupta from Mark Woollen company to teach us some great techniques. They are an award winning editor/producer team who have worked on some the most memorable recent movie trailers in Hollywood (Such as Milk, Slumdog Millionaire, The Wrestler, 500 days of summer). It was a great workshop and I want to share some great trailers I saw there from Mark Woollen company.



June 6, 2009

Fake 3D + Drop Shadow Tutorial Movie

Zak Peric has released "Green Grass" video tutorial where he uses Fake 3D and Drop Shadow filters from my Tapio's FxPack in Apple Motion. Big thanks to Zak for this!



Zak Peric is a freelance artist and lecturer teaching for Creative Computing at Tower Hamlets College and London College of Communication. You should definitely check Zak's great tutorials from his website http://embryo.me.uk/ to learn some great tips and tricks from Apple Motion.

June 1, 2009

Tapio's FxPack 1.1

Just added Light Sweep filter to my Fxpack. I know it's overused but I still missed it from After Effects so I created my own to use in Motion and Final Cut Pro. Hope you find it useful.



Fake 3D (host: Motion, After Effects)
Works by replicating object in Z-space. You can get similar effect in Motion with replicator but this one renders faster and is easier to control.

Light Sweep (host: Motion, Final Cut Pro)
Generates light sweep and highlighs edges based on alpha channel. Quite similar to After Effects Light Sweep filter.

Drop Shadow (host: Motion, Final Cut Pro)
I mainly made this for Final Cut Pro because FCP's own drop shadow has some terrible artifacts when you add it to video with alpha channel and have fields enabled in your sequence. This is standard filter so you can add multiple copies of it to clip. It also has "shadow only" option.

Numbers (host: Motion)
Generate counting/random numbers in Motion. Very similar to After Effects Numbers filter.

Grow Bounds (host: Motion)
Lets you grow bounds of individual layer inside Motion.

Download Tapio's FxPack 1.1 here.

Registered version of FxFactory Pro 2.0.5, Mac OS X 10.5.5 and Apple Motion 3 required. This is total freeware and was made as hobby. So there might be some bugs. Use at your own risk.

May 21, 2009

Concept is the King

Let's face it. As nice as it is to make great looking spots and promos, without good idea those are mostly waste of time. Some time ago I thought I should read some books about advertising. My friend suggested me Pete Barry's - The Advertising Concept Book and I must say it's really good and can warmly recommend it to anyone interested about creating great concepts in advertising.


BTW it's only 20 euros in Amazon so it's practically free for such amount of great information.

February 21, 2009

New Era of Gaming

I might becoming old but I must say that generally I'am not looking same things from videogames than when I was fifteen. So I don't want to spend hours just to learn how to play game. Also for some reason ultra violent games (just played Killzone 2 demo) don't make me any wow effect anymore. So in short I'am not that hardcore player anymore what I used to be when I was teenager.

I've owned Wii and lots of party games so I know there are lot of alternatives but couple of days ago I bought Flower to my PS3 and saw some kind of light. Very simple controls, very beautiful, very meditative, very relaxing. No scores, no possibility of dying, no time limit. Just relaxing. Perfect!

I guess we have to give honor for this kind of games to distribution platfroms like PSN, Xbox Live and WiiWare that enable small studios to put out cheap and unique downloadable titles that are doing well for themselves. So while larger studios are just making "bigger and badder" versions of the same games every year, real innovation seem to happen in these mini games.

So if you happen to own PS3 I encourage you to spend eight euros and have some quality relaxing time with Flower.

January 28, 2009

TV station in a Mac

There has been very interesting development lately for broadcasters around Mac and Quartz Composer technology. VJ softwares such as VDMX has been doing incredible things in realtime for years without any special hardware but those hasn't been frame accurate or reliable enough for 24/7 broadcasters.

Now Austrian company called ToolsOnAir is building Composition Suite. Total broadcast playout solution based completely on Mac. I registered to their site and tried beta versions of softwares and I must say I'am impressed. I was able to play SD video with quite complex realtime Quartz Composer graphics (bug, lower third, ticker, clock) through AJA Kona LHe SDI output without any drop frames. I sure will be following their development with big interest.


ToolsOnAir Composition Player beta running in my edit. Video coming to AJA Kona LHe from digibeta (SDI), Composition Player overlaying Quartz Composer graphics in realtime and outputting to AJA Kona LHe SDI output (frame accurately). Impressive.