Teaser 2

Satya Meka has a hot new plugin coming very soon to aescripts.  It is called Data Glitch and it creates awesome realistic digital image glitches with total ease.  Something you would see during a satellite transmission or a cable broadcast or from a damaged disk. Bad TV plugin is great for analog TV look, but this is 2010 and you hardly see anything that’s analog anymore. This plugin simulates a realistic digital glitch effect.

In real-life most of the glitches occur due to problems in encoding/decoding and sometimes data corruption. This plugin does exactly that. It encodes the data, glitches the data and then decodes it similar to the real life situation.

Coming soon! Data Glitch is available now!

First of all, After Effects launches more quickly — more than twice as fast.

Dealing with files is faster. Reading and writing certain compressed file formats is twice as fast. We have also parallelized QuickTime export. This improves the performance of common tasks like transcoding files into other formats.

Rendering is faster. In the simple cases, when rendering on a single core, we are seeing 20-40% shorter render times. This is a result of general efficiencies gained during the 64-bit conversion. As a result, each core on your system is being used more efficiently and you can expect to see greater utilization for each CPU core.

Of course, virtually everyone has multi-core CPUs nowadays. Have you ever used the “Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously” option in the preferences? There are several key improvements in this area as well. We have completely rewritten the After Effects multi-core processing engine for CS5. Benchmark projects are rendering with 30-50% shorter render times. That’s up to twice as fast!

In CS4, there was a significant lag when starting up multi-core processing (MP). For short renders, it was often faster to use fewer cores. This is no longer the case in CS5. Starting an MP render may have taken 30 seconds in CS4, but it is 1-2 seconds in CS5. If you’ve been avoiding using MP for RAM previews for this reason, this one is for you.

As with every After Effects upgrade we will make sure all our scripts are clearly labeled to let you know which version they are compatible with.

Here is the full course description and curriculum: http://www.fxphd.com/courses#AFX210

You can sign up here: https://www.fxphd.com/lounge/payments.php

We are trying to track how many people are referred from here so if you enter: lloydalvarez in the referring member field we’ll be able to track it.  Thanks in advance for that.

Check out the interview on Motionworks

Besides the new pretty graphics, the site is designed to be easier to navigate and find scripts. The biggest change however, is how you will go about obtaining the scripts. In the past we just let you download the script and then kindly asked that you “buy Lloyd a beer” and while a few of you did buy a beer or two, the vast majority of users didn’t.

This was not much of an issue at first since this is all a labor of love, but as the site grew increasingly popular there were mounting maintenance costs. Having seen the massive success that the iPhone App store brought to small developers, we thought: could we do something similar for the scripting community? Make a centralized and easy to use site that offers incredibly powerful tools on the cheap. This of course meant really thinking about how to monetize something that most people have come to expect for free.

We think we came up with a clever solution. Most of the scripts on the site are still free (if it used to be free if will continue to be free) but when you add them to the cart they are added with a suggested donation amount. You can modify this amount to whatever you want, including zero, but the hope is you will find it easy to throw a few bucks back to the developers in one easy transaction. The other benefit of centralizing is that you can now come to one place where you can find the best scripts available for After Effects and you can get them all at once. We are starting out with some very well known names in the scripting world, but the hope is to add more so if you’d like to see your scripts here please get in touch.

Finally to celebrate the re-launch and welcome two brand new scripts: sParticular and Immigration, the first commercial script for After Effects, enter the promo code ImmigrationLaunch at checkout for $10 off Immigration. (This coupon code is now expired)

In case you were not able to make it you canwatch the presentation courtesy of AENY (make sure to watch it in HD).

This edition also features an entire chapter on scripting written by non other than Jeff Almasol who is the man when it comes to scripting and has been my mentor all along as I’ve learned to write scripts.

It also features an entire chapter on expressions written by the man whom I learned expressions from and all around great guy Dan Ebberts.

First, the tag prefix is changing from the bullet to an asterisk.

Second, to be able to continue working with legacy projects which have already been tagged using the bullet prefix download the Zorro-Tag Prefix Changer.jsx script below that will convert legacy projects from the bullet to the asterisk. I also put together a video tutorial to show you how to do it:

Watch tutorial in HD on Vimeo

Lastly make sure you download the new version of Zorro to work with asterisk and be cross-platform compatible.

******* This tag prefix changer script is only necessary if you tagged a project with the 1.0 version of Zorro and are now using version 1.2 or above. IF YOU NEVER USED V1.0 OF ZORRO THEN YOU DON’T NEED THIS SCRIPT ********

Multiprocessing performance issues with multi-core machines, especially high-end 8-core hardware. When all 8 cores try to render a complex or memory intensive composition with Render Mutliple Frames Simultaneously, the application can become memory starved if each process has insufficient memory. To remedy this, there is a text preference to control the maximum number of cores that Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously will use. Open the text preference file and look in the ["MP"] section for: “MaxNumberOfProcesses” = “0″. “0″ is the default setting, which disables this preference setting. For better performance on an 8-core machine with 8GB RAM, for example, change the “0″ setting to “4″ and save the preference file and restart After Effects. This restricts multiprocessing with RenderMultiple Frames Simultaneously to 4 cores, each getting approximately 2GB of RAM.

This was such a big issue that I had updated BG Renderer to check how many processors and memory a machine had (mac only) and issued a warning if it was less than 1.5 gb per proc although I think it really should be at least 2gb since things usually render slower not faster (as explained above).  I plan on updating BG Renderer to facilitate changing this pref, but I want to do some testing first to see how changing it affects the background render processes since the pref controls the whole app not just the bg render.  Stay tuned.