Next Generation Simplifies Character Animation, Adds Stereographic Capabilities and Physical Rendering.

Today, MAXON announced CINEMA 4D Release 13, the next generation of its industry- leading 3D motion graphics, visual effects, painting, and rendering software application. With all new character tools, integrated stereographic capabilities, stream-lined multi-artist collaboration and physical rendering, CINEMA 4D Release 13 builds on the company’s 25-year legacy of enabling digital content creators around the world to produce highly engaging content quickly and easily for a variety of industries.

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1. Dropbox - Dropbox allows you to easily transfer files between you and your clients, sync files between your different workstations, backup important files and create public links to share with the world. Go get your free 2GB account today and start integrating cloud based storage into your workflow. You will soon wonder how you lived without it.
2. Skype - Forget MSN and ICQ! Skype is the leading tool to interact with your clients, associates and friends. With features like video calling, screen sharing and group calling, this is way better than what any landline could ever offer.
3. Evernote – Gone are the days of scrapbooks full of clippings, print outs and notes. Evernote is your digital scrapbook and filing cabinet that captures anything you want and keeps it organized using notebooks, notes, titles, tags and web links. Start storing your text, images, webpages, audio recordings and video clips with a free account.
4. CloudApp - Quickly share images, links, music, videos and files with a drag and drop of a mouse click. This small application will take your piece of media, upload it to the web and create a shortened URL that points directly to it. Plus it keeps track of clicks! Could we ask for anything easier?
5. Wunderlist - Life is a list and Wunderlist keeps them up to date across platforms and devices. You will not be disappointed with the rich features this simple application possesses.
6. MailChimp - This is your one stop shop for all of your mailing list needs. It has every feature you would ever want in a mailing list service and a ton of extras. Don’t bother trying the other services out there because this one is the best!
7. Twitter - As the online world becomes more social, so must you! Start building a social network using Twitter and get immersed into this new form of communication. Feel free to add us now! @jmdesign

The applications we are gravitating towards are those that sync with the cloud. To stay nibble and mobile we need tools that are accesible from any Internet enabled device so our data, networks and communites go where we go.

Lloyd Alvarez made this plug-in and you can go buy it here:
http://aescripts.com/bg-renderer/

Over the past year I have produced a few videos that needed a voice over track. I tried a few local shops to do the work for me and everything turned out great, but it took a long time to book the talent, book the studio and wait for the track to be edited and sent to me.

It wasn’t until I found Voice123 that recording VO tracks became fun again. Voice123 is a free service for the buyer that connects you with great voice talent. It only takes a few minutes to post a project, set your budget and within 24 hours you should already have a few auditions to review. Make sure to try Voice123 for your next project.

Web link: Voice123

The great folks at Red Giant Software put together a useful resource for motion graphic designers called Red Giant People. Much like the now defunct Trapcode People website, Red Giant People is a place where anyone can submit their own After Effects presets. The library is already off to a good start and is a growing resource of free goodies.

Ever wanted to add some spice to your data being presented in After Effects? Get ready to be blown away by Yanobox‘s new plugin called Nodes for After Effects, Final Cut Pro and Motion. This plugin offers editors and Motion graphics artists a unique tool to combine text and graphics into beautiful 3D animations. Nodes lets you play with a number of different presets, or you can create your own graphic vocabulary by customizing all available parameters.

You can use MPEG Streamclip to: open most movie formats including MPEG files or transport streams; play them at full screen; edit them with Cut, Copy, Paste, and Trim; set In/Out points and convert them into muxed or demuxed files, or export them to QuickTime, AVI, WMV, DV and MPEG-4 files with more than professional quality, so you can easily import them in Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Toast 6, 7, 8, and use them with many other applications or devices.
Supported input formats: MPEG, VOB, PS, M2P, MOD, VRO, DAT, MOV, DV, AVI, MP4, TS, M2T, MMV, REC, VID, AUD, AVR, VDR, PVR, TP0, TOD, M2V, M1V, MPV, AIFF, M1A, MP2, MPA, AC3, …

filmBurn.ffx is an After Effects 7.0 Animation Preset that automatically creates the overexposed “roll-out” effect, where the tail (and the head if you want) of a clip flickers into overexposure. It’s aware of the in- and out-points of your footage layers in the After Effects timeline, so you can experiment with different effects just by trimming your layers differently.