Graymachine’s Video Rock Review

Harry Frank’s lack of tutorials lately on the After Effects scene comes with a damn good excuse: Video Rock.  His newest product is a huge packet of 200 graphic elements, stills and movies alike that help to give your productions that 80’s & 90’s flair.  This is chuck full of “hand-drawn” looking animations, glints, lightning bolts, clouds and everything that you see when you watch those shows from the era when motion graphics, and titles had that retro-esque look about them that we all seem to love.

http://www.vimeo.com/7362144

Coming in a DVD case straight outta The Breakfast Club, this is a very cool looking release.  The elements themselves are organized into different “classes” such as:  Math, English, Art, History, Band, & Science.  These different classes then have the different elements within them such as circles, cubes and triangles (geometry) in the Math folder, and bubbles, clouds, water and lightning in the Science folder.  This organization lets you filter through the PNGs, PSDs and MOVs to find what you want, and they are well organized in to sub folder structures as well.  Also, within the Homeroom folder, there is and easy looping preset to apply to the loopable elements, AE Template files to mess around with (all CS3 1920×1080), and of course a Gallery to find the element you are looking for.  The only thing I had a problem with, is that the gallery is just still images embedded into a PDF file, so you have to go and find the element and open it in Quicktime to preview, but once you have seen all the elements once, it is pretty easy to know which is which when you are looking at the thumbnails.

When you start filtering through all your elements, you are going to see that these things are HUGE!  With a lot of the 200 elements at full HD (1920×1080), these are going to be easy to integrate into any size project you may be working on.  Personally, the best thing about this product is the simplicity of it. Yeah, a lot of people might be able to make these things on their own… but for such a great price, it really is well worth the money that you put into it.  I mean, you got backgrounds, animated elements, shooting stars, grids, banners, lower thirds, doodly lines… Harry really captured the 80’s production scene with this package.

This is a perfect product for anyone that is producing lots of title sequences, a school to have to learn with, and really anyone who just loves to have collections of awesome elements on hand whenever they need them.  And to even prompt you even more, Harry has been gracious enough to give us our own special coupon code for $10 off the price!  So instead of the $84.99 it normally is, you can knock it down to $74.99!  Go check out the product page for more details, and make sure that you enter Discount Code: VIDEOHIVE before you check out!