After Effects Lately

AE Portal on PVC by Rich Young

New tools for lip-sync and creating Digital Cinema Packages, plus tutorials for difference mattes, film looks, Element 3D, time-lapse, and more.

Here’s the latest week or so of assorted After Effects tutorials, tips, and scripts & plug-ins new and old.

Mamoworld has released Auto Lip-Sync, a tool that leverages built-in features of After Effects to help you animate a mouth in sync with audio. Auto Lip-Sync features a step-by-step wizard that analyzes a voice recording and helps you customize and fine-tune the mouth for your project, for example, how wide the mouth opens and how it deforms for certain syllables. It also provides null objects to animate user-provided teeth and tongue. It won’t solve all your problems, especially if prominent jaws need animating, but should pay for itself before the first job is finished. To peak at some successes and limitations with related techniques, see an AE Portal roundup, Lip Sync in After Effects.

VinhSon Nguyen has an early review, and there’s also a contest on Aetuts+ for users that want to try a fully functional trial of Auto Lip-Sync and maybe win some product. Also on AEtuts is A Look At How To Use “Auto Lip-Sync” by creator Mathias Mohl, which does lip sync on a moving car: tracking in MochaAE, importing with MochaImport+, and stepping through the wizard. Here’s the intro tutorial, Talking Tree with Auto Lip-Sync:

CuteDCP is a new DCP (Digital Cinema Package; explained) creation tool for After Effects from Fandev. It’s “an exporting (output module) plug-in which allows users to create DCPs from any file imported into After Effects and reduces the number of steps creating a DCP to a minimum. CuteDCP is easy to use and has been tested on most major play-out servers.” read more and watch all the videos...