You can’t have video without audio… it just doesn’t work. That’s why in high school it was A/V club, not just V Club… although that does sound pretty rad. Anywho… if you want to complete an animation, short film, commercial or whatever… you have to have good audio, and that means scores and sound effects! I have found some of the best places around the web to purchase packages, find individual songs, and even snag some free tracks for you and your work!

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  SmartSound.com

  A division of SonicFire Pro’s awesome scoring software, the SmartSound library lets you pick from thousands of songs and hundreds of albums in their library. They also offer tools to trim your tracks to a custom length and you can also utilize an FCP Plugin to do that same task of automatically fitting your timeline.

  Visit Website

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  Pump Audio

  The awesome thing about pump audio is that anyone can contribute to the pickings. They accept music and tracks from artists from all around the world. This is NOT stock music… these are actual songs from indie artists. The way Pump Audio sees it is, you don’t want to lay a lame, generic track over an edit you have poured your heart and soul into right? Well, then… why settle?

  Visit Website

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  Shockwave-Sound.com

  These guys have been around for the past nine years as one of the pioneers of the online royalty free stock music industry. They have everything here… you can go into a song, pick different lengths, versions, sound effects FROM those songs… whatever you might need. There are always new tracks added every week, and they even have a service that you can request voiceover talent.

  Visit Website

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  Non Stop

  Wow, Non Stop has a pretty hefty credit list when you check it out… Harry Potter, Monster VS Aliens, Wall-E, Chronicles of Narnia… the list just goes on. There is no wonder Warner/Chappel wanted to acquire them in 2007. They have over 700 in their library of music and by registering over at CUEgle you can preview every bit they have… this stuff is absolutely amazing.

  Visit Website

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  Digital Juice

  Digital Juice is known for having just huge deals and amazing products that you get the best bang for your buck. They have two different kinds of audio products, StackTraxx and SoundFX Libraries. First, the StackTraxx are now on their 50th volume and come with 20 music tracks at varied lengths, and are usually $50 singly, but you can get a pack of five for $80, and a pack of 10 for $150! That is insanely cheap for stock music! As for the SoundFX libraries, they only have 4 collections right now, but each collection has over 11,000 elements and only costs about $250! If you are looking to buy a large pack of music or sound effects… this is probably one of your best bets.

  Visit Website

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  Video Copilot

  Andrew Kramer and his team only have two products in the audio realm of things, but they are still pretty heavy hitters, and placed at a good price. The first, Designer Sound FX has been out for a couple years, and is still a pretty good package. It comes with 500 royalty free sound effects, and especially for use AE users, tutorials and project files for their killer promo video. Next, Pro Scores is more in the scoring department (hence the name) and includes orchestral music tracks and epic musical elements. There are also layered music tracks, tension building elements, and of course some killer tutorials. Both products are priced right around $100.

  Visit Website

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  SampleSwap

  Finally the free stuff! Now, if you aren’t big money and can’t afford large packs, you might have to grab some free elements online and create your own beats and scores. That’s where SampleSwap comes in. They have 5.5 gigabytes of sounds from techno and drum’n'bass beats, to sound effects and instrument sounds to complete whatever your task may be.

  Visit Website

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  StockMusic.net

  This site is pretty straighforward. $30 bucks a track, $200 for 10 tracks, pay once… use them forever. They have thousands of tracks in every single genre you could think of, and they are trusted by some big names in the industry. Chances are you have probably heard their work used somewhere on television or in the movies. I’m sure you didn’t miss the blockbuster, Black Dawn with Steven Seagal… yeah they had a hand in that one.

  Visit Website

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  Audio Jungle

  We can’t leave out one of our most useful sites on the Envato Network! It might seem like a shameless plug, but Audio Jungle, like all the other sites in the marketplace network have some of the most competitive prices in the business. The way they work, is you can deposit money into your account, and generally get files for a little cheaper than if you were to buy them outright. There is also a fantastic affiliate program that you can sign up for to earn money for all the marketplaces as well. Anyone can submit files, but only the best and highest quality get accepted.

  Visit Website

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  Royalty Free Music Clips

  This guy seems like he is doing a similar thing to me with his blog, and rounding up as many free music clips, stock sound effects and whatever else he can find from around the web. This is a great site to subscribe to and grab what he has to offer as it becomes available. He takes the hassle out of searching for you and provides it one, easy to find location!

  Visit Website

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  Partners In Rhyme

  Partners in Rhyme have been delivering royalty free music since the AOL days… 1996! That’s a long time… and they have a collection to prove it. They have different CDs available for purchase (most from $70-$100), and they provide an awesome flash player so you can preview every track before you shell out your cash to buy.

  Visit Website

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  Free Music Archive (FMA)

  The Free Music Archive is an editor’s paradise. You can never have enough stock music to pick and choose from, and you can never have enough FREE files either. This site is run by the WFMU, the most renowned freeform radio station in America. They are able to stick music created by artists online for use in productions, podcasts or whatever for those of us that can’t afford to by large packs of stock music. Make sure you bookmark this page, creator or consumer… it’s a great site to be a part of!

  Visit Website

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  Film Music Moby.com

  You know about that musical artist Moby right? Well he has a portion of his website with free music he created for filmmakers to use in whatever they see fit, as long as it is non-commercial, and non-profit. This is obviously all professional stuff, and all you have to do to access it is create a free account on the page after the jump!

  Visit Website

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  Freeplay Music

  More free stuff! Man, you gotta love sites like this! FreePlay has 6339 tracks as of the time of me writing this, and is growing every day. All of the tracks are downloadable absolutely free if you are just fooling around and this stuff is non-profit/non-commercial. If it is, however you need to go about purchasing licensing, where you can find all that information on their website.

  Visit Website

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Overview

• Core Training Value: You will learn the fundamental 12 Principles of Animation and how they can be used within After Effects to give all your future projects more life.
• Difficulty: Beginner

This is a Premium Tutorial. To view you must Become a Premium Member.

Premium Tut Preview

Tutorial Sneak Peek

Once you’ve joined, log-in to the Premium Dashboard with your username and password to immediately access your Premium Content. Navigate to Ae Plus via ‘Premium Categories’ in the sidebar. You’ll be able to grab the tutorial videos, project files and assets in the members’ area.

Overview

• Core Training Value: You will learn the fundamental 12 Principles of Animation and how they can be used within After Effects to give all your future projects more life.
• Difficulty: Beginner

This is a Premium Tutorial. To view you must Become a Premium Member.

Premium Tut Preview

Tutorial Sneak Peek

Once you’ve joined, log-in to the Premium Dashboard with your username and password to immediately access your Premium Content. Navigate to Ae Plus via ‘Premium Categories’ in the sidebar. You’ll be able to grab the tutorial videos, project files and assets in the members’ area.

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  Martin Brennand – Unlink Tracking Techniques

  Martin shows up some interesting techniques to implement when dealing with tricky pan shots that can cause for a difficult track.

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• 

  Carl Larsen – Horizontal Replacement and Roto

  Carl Larsen from Telescope Media Group shos you how to use Mocha effectively for replacing skies as well as some good roto techniques.

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  David Torno – Face Replacement

  You probably saw this a while back, but David Torno has an awesome tutorial on how he replaced the faces of characters from the Golden Girl with faces of a band for their video… spectacular.

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  Ben Heusner – Using Mocha Shape in a Compositing Workflow

  Well… the title was kind of a mouthfull, and really basically tells you what you are about to watch. Learn how to use the Mocha Shape addon for MochaAE as an awesome tool in your compositing shots.

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  Carl Larsen – 2.5D Rig Removal

  Carl shows you how to remove objects within a shot using MochaAE as well as Photoshop. This is an essential technique to learn… trust me… I have run into it many times.

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  Carl Larsen – Tracking for Broadcast Graphics

  In this sweet tutorial, Carl show you how to track some footage of a gun with some blowback to crate some cool graphic overlays.

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  Ben Heusner – Roto Techniques

  Again, using Mocha Shape in conjunction with MochaAE, learn how to create spectacular mattes in less time to ease your compositing tasks.

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• 

  Eran Stern – Red Giant Warp and Mocha

  Eran walks you through exporting your tracking data for use with Red Giant Warp instead of the basic corner pin effect in AE.

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• 

  Ross Shain – Adjust Track Module

  In this tutorial Ross shows you how to adjust your tracks midway through for a very thorough and awesome track for your footage, whatever it may be!

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• 

  The Basics of Mocha

  In this tutorial, Ben Le Tourneau shows you all the basic features on getting you up to speed on using the software.

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  Exporting Data into After Effects

  This is a simple walkthrough on how to export your tracking data into After Effects.

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• 

  Aharon Rabinowitz – Exporting Mocha Data

  Similar to the one before, this one features one of our buddies, Aharon Rabinowitz showing you how to export tracking data from Mocha into AE.

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• 

  Martin Brennard – Top 5 Workflow Tips

  Pretty straight forward eh? So yeah, this is a must see if you work in Mocha a lot. I mean you might learn something new… you never know!

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• 

  Chris Heur – Convert 2D to 3D

  In this awesome tutorial Chris shows you how to take an old movie like Nosferatu and take it from 2D into 3D using tools like Mocha.

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  Martin Brennard – Tracking Foreground Obstructions

  This tutorial shows you how to compensate for things that get in the way of your track, and how to make Mocha ignore those when it comes time to track the things that matter.

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  Ben Heusner – Logo Replacement

  Learn how to use Mocha’s roto tools for use in replacing a logo on a candy bar.

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• 

  Ben Heusner – Exporting Track Mattes

  Learn how to stabilize and export track mattes into After Effects for use later for task such as eye replacement.

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  Sasa Jokic – Matchmoving Multiple Tracks

  This is by far one of my favorite tutorials for Mocha. In this you learn how to track a ton of different planes of people holding up green cards so that it creates a specific image.

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  CMIVFX – Advance Planar Tracking

  In this tutorial you will learn some advanced techniques for planar tracking in lots of real world situations.

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  Ross Shain – Image Stabilization

  Instead of using this just for tracks, you can also use Mocha for tasks such as image stabilization, something that I am sure we all need every once in a while.

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• 

  Mathias Mohl’s MochaImport Script and Tutorial

  Mathias has created a spectacular script to let you import Mocha data into After Effects and onto certain layers. He shows you how to use that data to track makeup onto actor’s faces.

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• 

  Jeff Foster – Motion Tracking with Mocha

  In this tutorial from Jeff he shows us how easy it is to take some impromptu footage shot on the street and use Mocha to replace the side of a semi truck with whatever you want!

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  RGTV Ep. 27 Building an Airport Scene Part 1 – Backplate

  In this tutorial, Mathias creates the backplate for which we will be creating this airport scene.

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  RGTV Ep. 28 Building an Airport Scene Part 2 – Compositing

  In this next tutorial, Mathias shows you how to track with Mocha and use the data with MochaImport to create a sweet looking composite.

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  Eran Stern – Bionic Lab

  Using Mocha in this tutorial, Eran tracks footage to a computer screen as well as offsets different layers of numbers to create a cool looking lab text animation.

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• 

  Richard Harrington – Mocha Walkthrough

  Another one of those basic tutorial, Richard Harrington for Layers Magazine takes you through some of the basics for MochaAE.

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• 

  Aaron Zander – The Gatorade Effect Part 1

  In this first part, Aaron takes a look at the toolset within Mocha and how it can be used to create the look desired.

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  Aaron Zander – The Gatorade Effect Part 2

  In this second part Aaron shows us how to use Mocha link splines to other tracks, adjust tracks and keyframes, and finally rendering.

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1 The Plus Project

As you may know we have some pretty big plans for these Tuts+ sites. While today they are humble little tutorial blogs, we’ve thought for some time that it would be cool to build an entire platform for education. We’re going to call that platform Plus. You’ll know Plus content as our premium content, but no longer.
Our premium content is now ‘Premium’ (go figure!) and Plus is the brand for the educational platform we’re building, which, just like Psdtuts+, will be completely free for the most part.

With Tuts+ well established now, we’ve finally begun work on the project! We’ve acquired the domain Plus.org which will be the home of the new platform (yay for our first four letter domain!) We’ve also brought over our resident code genius Ryan Allen (who built our ActiveDen platform all by himself back in 2006) to team up with Tuts+ developer extraordinaire Fred Wu and kick ass front-end guru Derek Herman. And Skellie and I have been busy spec’ing out the plans for the new site, and it’s pretty, damn cool if I do say so myself!

Right now the Tuts+ sites are fairly passive, but we’d like to get the whole community involved in writing, teaching, answering questions and generally learning. The new Plus.org platform promises to incorporate all that plus some nifty ideas we’ve taken from gaming to come together into a social education platform.

It’s going to take a long time and we’re going to roll it all out in pieces over the next 2 years. We’re super excited about it all, and I hope I’ll have more updates in the coming months!

2 Creative Sessions and Mobiletuts+

While Plus.org will take a long time, we do have some new goodies coming much sooner including Creative Sessions which is being built now, and also Mobiletuts+ which will be all about mobile development!

3 Server Update

About a week and a half ago we had some major problems with our servers. I’m happy to say that we’ve now completely resolved these issues by moving hosts and reengineering our hosting setup completely from scratch. The new setup is much quicker and has a much greater capacity for growth, so fingers crossed, that will be the last server outage for a long time to come!

4 The Redesign

The new theme has a few neat features you may want to check out including:

• Basix!
  While Tuts+ has always been known for intermediate to advanced level content, we’ve been thinking it’d be good to separate out tutorials and articles better suited to people just getting started. So we’ve created the Basix tag for quick browsing. You’ll find it in the top menu, and expect to see more Basix content soon as we beef up our library of novice-friendly content.
• Easy access to Videos, Tips and Premium Posts
  We’ve also started tagging videos, tips and Premium membership posts so that along with Basix content you can quickly find what you’re after. We’re generally going to be working to clean up our category/tagging across the network in the coming months to get it more standardized.
• Tutorial Details on Posts
  We’re also going to start standardizing all tutorials to have a "Tutorial Details" section at the top with difficulty and other pertinent details. Eventually we’ll get all the archives updated … but with over 2000 tutorials, that will take a while!
• Bigger, more readable content area
  We’ve expanded the site to be optimized for bigger 1280px wide screens, with a bit of JavaScript to resize for smaller resolutions. This has given us the space to clean up the content area to be a bit bigger and more readable generally.
• Latest Creattica content for inspiration
  We’ve also started porting over the latest Creattica content into our sidebars. There’s actually a redesign of Creattica coming in the next few weeks and we’ll be expanding the gallery to cover even more types of inspiration. The new sidebar widget will give even more exposure to those talented creatives on Creattica!
• General UI Improvements
  Most of the improvements on the new design are small, subtle improvements such as a reduction in the number of clicks needed to browse categories, a clearer search field, faster loading pages and generally cleaner, more optimized code.

One change that we have also made is to remove the community link feed. Over the years this was a great way to get exposure to community links, but unfortunately was also home to a lot of spam. So with this iteration we’ve left it behind.

Also at the moment sites with Flickr groups don’t have it showing, but don’t worry that’ll be back. There’s just a problem with our Flickr plugin at the moment!!

There are still some more tweaks to do to the new design and a lot of post formatting to do to get our archives matching up with the new theme. But for all intents and purposes the new theme is now alive and well! Enjoy!

We just released this tutorial that you can use this element in. Also helpful would be the similar tutorials: Creating a Crowd Scene with Particular 2, Creating the Jumbotron Look in After Effects, and How to Create Light Wrap and Edge Blur.

To download this file you must be a Premium member. Join AE Premium for just $9/month.

To download this file you must be a Premium member. Join AE Premium for just $9/month.

Telegrafico

Old Sans Black

Headline

SF Movie Poster

Dinova

Media Gothic

Florencesans SC

Sans Thirteen Black

Xscale

Space Marine

Xcelsion

7th Service

Old Republic

Guardian

Bitsumishi

He’s Dead Jim

Hagane

Fireye

Ash

Breakaway

Autobahn

Carbon Block

Dorado Headline

Corporate HQ

Good Times

Choktoff

Kimberly

Pirulen

SF Old Republic

Final Frontier

Flip Flop

Fortune City

Harabara

Mamma Gamma

Mentone

MicroMieps

Moltors

Oceania

Olijo

Ptarmigan

Reservoir Grunge

SF Laundromatic

SF Speedwaystar

SF Theramin Gothic

Shadow Tag

Should’ve Known

Strenuous

Sveningsson

Venus Rising

Virtue

Whoop-Ass

Zag

4th and Inches

Ethon

Amity Jack

Forque

Featured Item

DS Narrow

Ingrata

Jumbo

Red Circle

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It seems to all be resolved now, but I just wanted to make a quick apology for the inconvenience and interruptions. We’re going to be re-examining our hosting setup to make sure we avoid this situation in the future and to generally try to pull up the quality of service across the board.

In the meantime there may be some further minor interruptions as we shore up the setup. Thank you for your patience!