Here is a link to a playlist of other people’s motion/tv graphics work that I compiled. This is to hopefully give you some ideas of the types of things you could potentially create in Xpression. As you watch, try to identify the different Xpression components you could use to create different animations and effects you see. If you find other good examples, please send me the link so I can share it with other students.
There are some complicated 3D motion graphics thrown in the mix, but you will probably want to ignore those for now. Concentrate on the 2D and simple 3D animations that can be built using Xpression primitives. In the very first video from Wireframe Group, the graphics were actually built in Xpression. Some of the other examples were created in After Effects, but a lot of it could easily be done in Xpression. There are some pretty fancy masking techniques being used in some of these examples to reveal content graphics and videos. So, keep that in mind when you are watching these, and know that it’s not necessarily all that complicated to recreate some of those very sophisticated looking effects. You can put mask materials on any of the primitive objects, and then use them to create interesting masking effects and wipes with the various object animation properties.
Just for fun, I duplicated some of the masking techniques from the above play list in Xpression. I used a mask material on a cylinder, on cubes, slabs, and quads, along with layer objects to built these. Of course, I keyframed the animations on the timeline on various tracks. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like you can directly adjust the audio levels on videos that include audio. You might need to do your audio fades in your NLE (ie. Premiere Pro) and export your clips for use in Xpression. I didn’t agonize over these, I just slapped them together to show you it can be done. Of course you would want to take more care when you are doing your own work for a show or demo reel.
Remember that the fancy textures and highlights are graphics that would need to be created in Photoshop first, then applied to objects in Xpression. You can also use After Effects, Cinema 4D, Maya, etc. to create more complex animated textures and other animations, and export them as videos and then use them as video textures on Xpression objects. If you do eventually decide to learn to create your own 3D objects and .obj sequences, you can import them directly into Xpression. However, depending on what you are planning to do, it’s still sometimes more efficient to just export the animations as videos and apply them to a quad in your scene. It’s often good to use a combination of these techniques to optimize utility and performance in the sequencer during a show.
Things that have to change regularly, like names and statistics, etc would need to be built in Xpression so they can be easily updated, but other things that stay the same from show to show can be applied as videos and incorporated in the scene. The Xpression video codec is very good at compressing video, and they do run very fast. To save even more processing power, you can even export layers of animated objects that you have built inside of Xpression as a video, and then put them back in your scene on a single quad. Based on my own experience, this can actually make a significant difference if you are using a lot of blending modes in your materials.
Wireframe Group has a few good tutorials on building Xpression graphics. Most are pretty advanced, but watching them will give you a good idea of the directions you can take this once you are comfortable with the basics, and want to pursue 3D graphics to incorporate them into your work.