Adobe After Effect

Today was an exciting day with all the editing and tweaking in Adobe After Effect. I wanted to create a creepy and flashy introduction for my flash project and found an awesome tutorial in Videocopilot on how to create a 3D room. Honestly, I have no idea how to use this piece of sophisticate program. I did temper with it last time but I quickly shut it down because there are just too many option and I don’t know even where to start.

After some gruesome 10 hours of testing, editing, moving, trying, failing and tweaking. I think I have master the beginner level of editing in After Effect. In my younger days, I specifically use Sony Vegas for my videos. Yes, Window Movie Maker was crap and will be crap too in the future. If you haven’t notice it I love to edit AMV (Anime Music Video) last time when I was back in middle school. Due to constrain of physical hardware I’m forced to reconsider this hobby of mine and change to something less expensive (in time and money).

The first few hours of following a 13 minutes long video was thrilling and a headache at the same time. The fear of mistakenly pressing an unknown keyboard shortcut can spell disaster when your new to the program at hand. I actually did it twice of accidentally triggered an unknown mischievous key and it messed up everything. Font crashing is another part of the joy ride too. However, a few more tries I had found the solution. Thank God!

The rendering part can be especially daunting at first sight. I tried the ‘export‘ settings but it helped produced a bad rendering that looks like a compressed image from the sides (I did this with other options as well still the same result). So, after some youtubing. What I really need to use is the ‘Render Queue‘ under ‘Composition’. Option are again, aplenty but most of the community recommend everyone to use a quicktime container with H.264 codec. Oh! Don’t forget to switch on your audio in the same console because the default is not included.

I’ll be uploading the video tomorrow. Stay tune!