VFX Suite 1.5

Today Red Giant released the first major update to the VFX Suite we introduced last year. Lens Distortion A brand-new effect, Lens Distortion makes it ridiculously easy to profile the distortion of any lens, and either remove it, or build a VFX workflow around it in After Effects. It’s a necessary utility that’s also a blast to use. This is my favorite...

May 2020

Slugline 2

View fullsize From the Slugline Blog:Slugline 2 is a new app that replaces the old Slugline for Mac. It has a slick new UI, which includes a lovely dark mode. Big new features include: a drag-and-drop outline, an awesome new timeline, color-coded notes, Final...

May 2020

Virtual NAB at C4DLive

TLDR;Hi!C4DLive is happening this week! Already!Watch my talk at noon PDT on Thursday, April 23! Ask questions!Buy Cinema 4D, Get Red Giant Complete for 50% OffRed Giant Complete is free for students and teachersTGNTR;If it weren’t for COVID-19, the newly-combined Maxon, Red Giant, and Redshift teams would have been at NAB in Las Vegas this week, sharing...

Apr 2020

Red Giant & Maxon, Sitting in a Tree

Red Giant, where I’ve been Chief Creative Officer for a couple of years now, but making filmmaking tools for you for 17 years, is merging with Maxon, makers of Cinema 4D.From the Red Giant blog:Hi folks — by now you’ve probably heard the news that Maxon and Red Giant are joining forces to become one company. This is a really exciting time. For years,...

Dec 2019

New Photography Shortcuts Using ToolBox Pro

My love affair with Apple’s Shortcuts took a bit of a hit during the transition to iOS 13, but my fascination with this on-device development environment has been rekindled thanks to a new app called ToolBox Pro.ToolBox Pro is a free iOS/iPadOS app that adds powerful new actions to Apple Shortcuts. An in-app purchase unlocks even more functionality....

Nov 2019

Visual Effects Compositing in Adobe After Effects: My IBC 2019 Talk

Adobe gratiously invited me to speak at their IBC 2019 booth about visual effects compositing in After Effects — something I’ve been doing againts all advice for many (many!) years. You can watch the entire talk here:

Sep 2019

Red Giant VFX Suite

Today Red Giant has released a brand-new collection of plug-ins for visual effects compositing. It’s called VFX Suite, and some of these tools are things I’ve been dreaming about since computers were beige. There are nine plug-ins in the suite. You can learn about all of them at Red Giant’ but here I’ll focus on the five I created tutorials for. Supercomp...

Jun 2019

Trapcode Suite 15, Featuring Fluid Dynamics

Last year, one of the Red Giant engineers presented some research on fluid dynamics to our team. He showed these gorgeous animations of realistic fluid motion. Only they weren’t animations — they were simulations, running in real time on his laptop. This became the foundation of today’s update to the Trapcode Suite. Both Particular and Form now feature...

Oct 2018

Apple Shortcuts: The Bicycle for the Mind is Back, but it’s Electric

Apple Embraces Tinkering for the First Time in 20 YearsSteve Jobs famously described the computer as “a bicycle for our minds.” Whether or not you’ve heard that before, it’s worth refreshing your memory on the context by watching this short video. The gist is that humans aren’t very efficient at getting around when compared to the rest of the animal...

Oct 2018

How the Meta-work of Automation is the Real Work of Work

Note: The original title of this post was “Quadro is Dead, Long Live Stream Deck.” In my making-of video for TANK, I heaped praise on an iOS app called Quadro, that I’d used to create a custom iPad control surface for my common After Effects tasks. Days after posting the video, Quadro announced that they were shutting down the app, having “not been...

Jul 2018