I used this filter to apply a glow with a gradient attached to it to the alpha channel from the keyed hand. As with all Boris Filters – this filter could be used in many ways. For instance, the gradient colors, the thickness or brightness of the glow and many other parameters could all be animated over time. In this clip I chose to have the outline of the hand movement from the original video to be the only changing parameter.

The best books I’ve found for learning After Effects:

1. After Effects 7.0 Studio Techniques by Mark Christiansen [good tutors on keying and blue /green screen techniques]
2. Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects by Trish and Chris Meyer

Both come with DVDs and lots of examples.

My first impulse is to say After Effects is easy to learn. Then I’m reminded . . . I used to tell people it was easy to start a business after I’d had my own for awhile. My partner cautioned me to think about all the years I’d spent working 60 hour weeks to get the business off it’s feet. Well, all right, then . . . if you are driven and enjoy lots of technical details and trial and error experimentation you can start to enjoy creating with After Effects after say 8-10 hours of doing some serious tutors. The interface is complex and some of the concepts will be brand new to most folks. The good news is that this is an incredibly creative versatile tool for media makers that will vastly broaden the scope of what you can do.

The blue screen I used was a rack 15′ by 20′ that sported a chroma key blue cloth curtain. I would probably try a green screen for the next project. The blue often shifted to grey when automatic focus had to be used on the camera and that made keying really difficult. I used Keylight, a keying filter that comes with the Pro version of Adobe After Effects to do the keying at first. More about this in another post. I also used Boris Continuum Complete (BCC) Linear Color Key extensively. In the end I think I got consistently better results from BCCs filter.

For my end of the quarter project I used the "story boarding" feature in Premiere Pro to keep the project organized. What’s funny is – Premiere had a much more sophisticated, useful story boarding feature several versions back which they removed for some reason from subsequent versions. You could then organize your clips and print a report to work off of. The picture here was captured with Print Screen – the only way to get a visual reference report out of Premiere as of version 2.0. Nonetheless – this limited version of story boarding is still useful. I used it to lay out my clips and organize them visually. I then simply dragged and dropped the whole story board onto the timeline and with only a few tweaks had a big chunk of work done.