1. East to West
New Covenant Bible Church asked me to create a graphic for their choir cantata that’s on April 18th. This was great because the testimony video I’ve been working on is for the same day. So I created the graphic for them, and...
2. Shatter
Well, yesterday was Tuesday and I had some free time again, so here’s the shatter video I made in After Effects using CC Pixel Polly and a Fast Blur. The last one of these I uploaded (The Blueprint Reveal) I had an idea of what I...
3. Blue Print Reveal
I get about a three hour break in between classes on Tuesdays. I use that time to finish any homework I have so I don’t have to do it in the evening, and then I find some work to do or something. Well today is a special treat! I...
4. The Suffering Servant Sou...
NCBC asked me to create a graphic for their upcoming easter series called “The Suffering Servant”. It didn’t ring a bell with me about what the suffering servant was, so I googled it (yes googled is a verb). As soon as I...
5. Focal Point Source Files
I worked on this with another person for a series New Covenant Bible Church did called Focal Point. You can watch the Focal Point sermons on the Video Podcast here. Go ahead and download the PSD files and use them any way you...
Canon 7d
I got a Canon 7d this evening to use at work and am really excited to use it. The good news is there are a lot of graduation parties that must be attended this weekend, so there are ample opportunities to try it out. I’m planning on using the video option on it a lot. I’ve seen some amazing footage that it’s shot and am excited to try it out for myself. I’ll be posting photos and video clips that I shoot with the camera this weekend in a couple of days.
I’m also going to work on coming up with a video project to produce using this camera to try it in a real project.
Anyone got any ideas?
Upgrades
I’ve recently upgraded to Adobe Master Collection CS5, and it’s quite a bit faster. On Mondays I capture and render out New Covenant Bible Church’s Sunday Sermon for different platforms (Web, iPhone, etc.) and yesterday I used Adobe Media Encoder CS5 and it rendered out all of the files I needed in a third of the time that it usually takes. It was absolutely awesome! I’m excited to be able to use this new 64 bit software, and I really think it’s going to make me more productive because it’s just so darn quick.
I also upgraded my AVID from 3gb of RAM to 8gb of RAM! WHOA talk about a boost! It’s great because my editing software (Media Composer and the Adobe Suite) will use every bit of it, and will allow me to just absolutely motor through projects. I’m really excited about that.
I also purchased the entire trapcode suite by Red Giant. It’s going to be really nice to use all of these new tools together to make the best product I possibly can!
The Five Before Logo Build
“The Five Before” is an idea from another church, except they call it “The Ten Before”. The Five Before is a pre-service countdown video that has a host that gives the announcements the five minutes before the service starts. At New Covenant Bible Church, we’re going to use this with the youth group on Wednesday nights. I needed a way to open the video up, and made this Logo Build to put at the beginning of the video (I did get the building idea from another site though). So I created the logo in Photoshop and brought the layers into After Effects and built it up. Here it is, and let me know what you think.
The Five Before Logo Build from Andrew Male on Vimeo.
After Effects Countdown Expression
Recently I’ve been experimenting with an idea for a countdown video. The first step was to figure out how to make a countdown. Well many guys go in to the timeline, and make text layers that change every second to make it appear to countdown. When you’re talking about a ten minute countdown that can get really tedious, and there was no way I was going to do that. So I came up with an expression to do this. All you have to do is copy and paste it into the “Source Text” expression area and there you go. If you want to change how long the countdown is, go into the expression and change where it says “dur = 10″ near the beginning of the expression, to “dur = (however many minutes you would like it to be)”. Hope this helps!
offset = 0;
i = inPoint + offset; //the in point of the layer
dur = 10; //the duration of the countdown in minutes
dur *= 60; //the duration of the countdown in seconds
seconds = Math.max(dur - Math.max((time - i), 0),0); //the countdown time in total seconds
minutes = Math.floor(seconds / 60); //the countdown time in minutes
seconds = Math.floor(seconds - (minutes * 60)); //the countdown time in seconds (minus minutes)
if(seconds < 10) seconds = '0' + seconds; //add an additional '0' in front of single digit seconds
if(minutes < 10) minutes = '0' + minutes; //add an additional '0' in front of single digit seconds
minutes + ':' + seconds