You heard right, easing fans: Ease and Wizz is compatible with After Effects CS5. They’ve Adobe-fied the interface, but it’s otherwise identical.
So if you’ve been putting off that upgrade till you know that your easing expressions work with CS5 (however unlikely that may be), you’re home free! Go forth and tween. Tween like the wind!
The ProRes4444 codec is included with the latest Final Cut Studio. And it rules. It’s almost as good as Falco when he was at his peak.
However, colours have a tendency to shift when importing ProRes4444 renders into Final Cut. This tip from Todd Kopriva lets you know how to stop these annoying gamma shifts – just in time for Christmas.
Scripting maestro Lloyd Alvarez has relaunched his site for all things After Effects, aescripts.com. The new system looks set to become After Effects’ de facto repository for scripts, and implements a “suggested donation” feature so that the scriptwriters can (hopefully) get compensated for their hard work. I’m delighted that Lloyd has offered to host Ease and Wizz over there, so the download link will be over at http://aescripts.com/ease-and-wizz/, but I’ll continue to mirror the content on ianhaigh.com so that all the old links don’t get broken.
Also, check out this intro video I made for Ease and Wizz. I just can’t get enough of that Dr Strangelove type.
Version 2.0 boasts many, many new features including true 3D realistic shading. Plus! If you upgrade today, Red Giant will send you Particular’s creator, Peder Norrby, to do your work for you. Seems pretty reasonable.
Here’s a handy little expression to stop a nested comp playing till you want it to.
Trapcode Particular, the venerable must-have After Effects plugin for making stuff fly-around-all-over-the-place-and-look-cool, is almost due for an upgrade. Here’s a taster, which shows off one new feature – particles will respond to After Effects lights.
Update: Them particle gurus have posted a PDF listing all the new features. Of which there are an abundance.
I’m pleased to announce version 2.0 of Ease and Wizz, the After Effects palette for smoother easing. It’s an adaptation of Robert Penner’s easing equations for Flash, and gives you more options when you’re tweening values such as position, rotation, or scale.
The big change in this version is that now you can tween along a curved motion path, which was previously impossible (the expression would effectively ignore the bezier curves, and the resulting motion path would be linear). Also, you can now apply easing expressions to mask paths and shape paths.
I call this monumental addition … “Curvaceous”.
Note that when using Curvaceous, you will no longer have access to Back and Elastic tweening. The (slightly techie) explanation for this that rather than tweening the actual value of the property, Curvaceous tweens the time of the property, using the valueAtTime method. As the Back and Elastic easing types actually overshoot the original keyframes, Curvaceous has no way of knowing how to extrapolate the extra data to move past the last value. Simply turn off Curvaceous if you require Back or Elastic (the palette updates when you toggle Curvaceous, so you don’t need to commit this to memory).
http://ianhaigh.com/easeandwizz/
Hope you find it useful!
Ease and Wizz, my adaptation of Flash easing equations for use with Adobe After Effects, broke with the release of After Effects CS4. However, thanks to Adobe’s free trials, I’ve managed to get it working again.
You can grab Ease and Wizz 1.12 here.
Looks as though CS4 breaks Ease and Wizz. Curses! I’m going to try to grab a trial from somewhere and see if it’s fixable; I’ll post the results when I get some.
Well, that didn’t take too long. The best new feature is now you can tell the expressions to affect all the keyframes instead of just the first two. The palette layout is a bit nicer, too. Grab it while it’s hot.
Ease and Wizz is a suite of expressions for After Effects. I’ve adapted Robert Penner’s easing equations to work with After Effects, and added a palette so they’re really easy to use. Grab Ease and Wizz and give it a go!
