I’ve been watching a show on Revision 3 called Film Riot. In the show the are showing the filmmaking process and how to do some pretty convincing special effects on a low budget. On their last show they had a face morph effect that everyone wanted to know how it was done. Well they didn’t come up with the effect so they pointed the viewer to VideoCopilot.net who did the original effect using Adobe After Effects.
Now the last time I played around with After Effects, version 5 or 6 I think, it was a pretty good video composition program that had some basic 3D tools. But after watching some of the 90+ tutorials on Video Copilot, After Effects has become a pretty damn powerful tool, it can even handle 4k video which is a digital format used for feature film. I just wish there was a cheaper way to get to play with it. After Effects runs a cool grand which is waaayyy out of my budget. There is a trail version that Adobe will let you play with for 30 days.
Besides the free AE tutorials Video Copilot also sells several resource packs for AE wit things like explostion, textures, smoke effects, and the like for use in AE. The products run between $50-250 each. I can see where someone really in to doing there own video effects could rapidly go broke.
