Last night’s project involved motion tracking, a feature in After Effects that allows users to overlay still images or video on a moving object. It seems fairly straightforward, but becomes tricky when the object you’re tracking moves quickly relative to the frame rate of the camera that shot it.

Enjoy, or perhaps endure, the silliness.

That’s the kind of nerd I can be.

But I’m not talking about AJAX, ColdFusion, or anything as dry and tedious as that. If I’m going to do it in my spare time it’s going to be something much more fun. Something like Adobe’s fantastic video effects application, After Effects!

It’s not easy to explain how much you can do with this program, but I’ll give you an idea. After a day of playing around, I created motion graphics  (objects, titles, people), replaced colors, stabilized sequences, and tracked motion.

Tonight, time permitting: sound!

I found some great free tutorials, courtesy of the wizards at Video Copilot. They’ve produced some amazing materials: very comprehensive and relatively fast-paced, compared with other training videos I’ve seen. Browse around their site and check out the kinds of things a real expert can do with After Effects. Here’s a taste:

The whole point of Ustream is that you can create your own live video channel. It’s great: nobody judges you and your cat-cam or your goofy live running commentary of So You Think You Can Dance. It doesn’t cost anything, and you’re up and running in minutes.

The Ustream iPhone app removes the entire point of this service by not allowing you to tune into your channel, unless of course your channel is “popular” or “featured.” Not bloody likely!

And forget about using the iPhone Safari browser to get around this because it doesn’t support Flash.