Archives: tips

Maya: Graph Editor Tricks

Professor and Dean takes you through some quick tips and tricks for working with the Maya graph editor.[fx_video src=”/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/freetip-mayagraph.mp4″ link=”/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/freetip-mayagraph.mp4″ width=”1024″ height=”768″]Maya: Graph Editor Tricks[/fx_video]

Final Cut: Travel Matte Luma

Professor Nick Deacon shows you how to make some cool motion graphics with layers in Final Cut Pro and its “travel matte luma composite” mode. These days, editors are called upon to make titles or motion graphics menus often with little notice. Professor Nick shows how you can quickly and easily take a quickly drawn

Flame: Camera Shake Expression

Professor and Dean John Montgomery walks you through creating a reusable, customizable camera shake node from scratch. The technique involves some commando shooting, animation massaging, expressions, and even a bit of manual editing of setup files to create the end result. Thankfully, that end result can be reused many times over and over again —

Photoshop: Vector-Based Guides

fxphd Professor Rose Draper walks us through a simple but incredibly useful tip on how to create your own vector custom guides for use in all your projects.[fx_video src=”/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/freetip-psdguides.mp4″ link=”/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/freetip-psdguides.mp4″ width=”1024″ height=”768″]Photoshop: Vector-Based Guides[/fx_video]

Flame: Stabilization Trick

Sometimes a scene looks like it will track and stablise perfectly but shots like ocean horizons filmed from a boat or open spaces can sometimes just fail to have anything to lock on to horizontally. It seems like an easy track but the shot just wont track. Professor and Dean Mike Seymour shows an easy

Maya: Render Passes

In this free tip, Professor Tahl Niran walks you through setting up multipass renders in Maya. Not only does it show you how to use the built in varieties, it includes how to do your own custom Fresnel pass, which is not included in the presets which ship with Maya. Niran teaches the Shake courses

Flame: Displacement Tricks

In this tip, Professor and Dean Mike Seymour shows how to use Flame’s 3D compositing work space and tools to add extra realism to a package shot using black wrap and a bottle of milk. This simple 5 min quicktime shows a combined use of flame’s displacement maps, source nodes, expressions, extended bicubics in action.