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GUI Effects…
Well, I thought it was time to join this community, instead of just using the excellent tutorials! I normally spend my time using Cinema4D, but I’ve just started mucking around with AE properly (I used to prefer Premiere at college).
I was just wondering what the best way of creating GUI videos for computers would be? I’m after making a short video with an onscreen GUI that looks convincing. I thought that flash would be the best way to go, but I would prefer not to, as I really don’t have any sort of background in flash. A tutorial link would be great, I can’t seem to find anything, and a google for GAK just turns up the GAK plugin.
Sorry if this post doesn’t make too much sense, but it’s been a long day!
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5 Replies
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Mark Coleran uses AE for computer displays seen in James Bond movies and such, but he renders to the Quicktime Graphics codec, for low color depth, allowing for quick playback.
Since the colours in the GUI are simple, it’s not a big deal.
Unless I misunderstood …?
Steve
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hey, I had to do this recently on a job. I created all my elements (buttons, icons, cursors, windows, scrollbars, etc.) in Illustrator and imported into AE. This was important for our purposes (to maintain full scalability of the GUI). Alot of the elements can be re-used and changed quickly by referencing the AI file. Just remember to create stuff on different layers in AI, so they can be imported as a comp into AE. Also, It’s good to set crop marks in illustrator, so the elements import consistently the same size. Hope this helps.
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If you want the real thing, you might want to check out Microsoft Visual Basic Express (assuming you want a windows-style gui).
This may or may not work well for you, as of course its not scalable vector art, but if you just need a quick realistic gui, I’d say its the way to go. Its a totally free application and you build a gui by simply dragging and dropping the components that you want.
You might also want to check it out just to have good reference images of all the various windows widgets, if you want to recreate them in illustrator or whatever. Pretty much everything you would want is in there.Its a totally free download at: https://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vb/
Plus there are free training videos here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vb/learning/
The first 2 vids should walk you through everything you need to be able to make a gui. -
A lot, lot, lot of time ago I used to play around with Klik & Play, a Windows based game developer tool for kids. It was quite good for GUIs (far better than for games), but that was at the 3.11 times.
There’s a free version of it as well, and several older much enhanced versions for sale here: https://www.clickteam.com/English/index.php
They will probably work in an even more simple way than VB.
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Thanks for the idead, guys! I actually thought that htere may have been a plugin especially for this! Doh! Lol!
Anyway, I think i’ll go with using PS layers over the top of my video. I guess that for the animated parts (I want to have a body of text referance a peice of hardware using an arrow type thing) I’ll just use an animated gif.
If I find anything to make the job easier or another way of accomplishing the effect, I’ll post my results here. Sorry it took so long to resond, I got bogged down in other work!
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