Help for a n00b in motion graphics requirements.

[Jeremy Fabiano]

Leith,

I’m a noob to this stuff too – but I’ll try and help.

I’m hoping you have access to Adobe’s Encore? You’re gonna need that or another DVD authoring program to publish the files to DVD disk.

I suggest Encore because I’ve used it and I know it works..

Theres a few Encore and After Effects tutorials out there that you’ll want to watch (a lot here and some on youtube etc).

You’re also going to need to go through some basic afterFX tutorials so I hope your deadline is somewhat forgiving..

https://videocopilot.net
Look in the Tutorials tab and the Presets tab (some mini tutorials in here)

Also this the cow has a great many tutorials. One of my favorite posters is Aharon Rabinowitz https://leaders.creativecow.net/leaders/rabinowitz_aharon/

Between Aharon and Andrew I’ve taught myself a fair amount of stuff over the last year – but I didn’t have a specific thing to learn so I just watched everything.

Good Luck man, let me know if theres anything else I can try to help with.

-Jeremy

[Jeremy Allen]

As far as specs go, you really need to find out how they will be playing the animation in the showroom. Will it be played on a computer screen, thru a DVD player to a big ol Plasma screen, DVD player to a projector? The final playback really makes all the difference as far as how you need to set it up. If it’s on an old school tube TV then that will be one thing… HD plasma requires something totally different. So you really need to figure that stuff out before you even put one picture into After Effects.

As far as the animation, as long as the sequence of the picture and text really are all the same, you should be able to do that fairly easily. There are a couple ways you could approach it. This is just how I would do it.

1. Put your first picture out on the timeline, starting at frame zero.

2. Animate the picture in and out however you wish.

3. Create your text layer and animate that however you wish. I would keep the in point of the text layer at frame zero, even if it doesn’t show up until the picture has been up for a few seconds. Just keep the text off frame or at 0 opacity until it’s time to show up. Once you start duplicating and sequencing the pictures and text, it’s easier to keep them all lined up because the layers all start at the same point.

4. Now select whichever properties you animated for the picture and save it as an animation preset.

6. Now drag all the other photos onto the stage at frame zero.

7. With your playhead at frame zero, select all the pictures in the timeline and apply the newly created picture animation preset from the effects and presets palette.

8. Duplicate your text layer 29 times and change each to the appropriate words.

9. Now all you have to do is sequence the pictures and text in the timeline.

Keep in mind, this method assumes you know exactly how you want the picture and text to animate. If you have to go back and change something about the animation later, you will have to start the whole preset process over. I don’t think you can edit a preset once it’s created, but someone else may know how.

There are other ways you could do this by duplicating and nesting precomps so that you could change the initial precomp animation and all the other precomps would change accordingly, but then you end up with a ton of precomps. But if you’re fairly sure you know how you want the animation to go, you can use the method I outlined.

Anyone else feel free to correct or modify my method if I’ve missed something. Hope this helps..

———————————————
8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.2
DualCore G5 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11

AE7 on both for now.

[Leith Gow]

Thankyou Very much guys!
I will be speaking to the client today about the Playback.
As far as animation goes, i will be making sure that the client understands the time issues with making drastic changes. As its my first actual MG client im really trying to have the project mapped out and as simple as possible.

Thanks again guys.
Will keep you posted.

AE…
Best Thing Since Warcraft.

[Joey Foreman]

Are you on a pc or a mac?
Do you have CS3 or Final Cut Studio?
It’s easy enough to to set up a PAL composition in AE. It’s available as a preset when you create a new comp.
You’ll output your finished project with Best settings, using the Animation codec.
As for encoding and authoring the DVD you’ll need Premiere Pro and/or Encore or Compressor and/or DVD Studio Pro.
I’ve also heard you can do it in Toast but i have no experience with that.
For an easy and relatively cheap way to get up to speed in these applications I recommend Lynda.com.

Joey Foreman
Editor/Animator
Nowhere Productions, Athens, GA

[Leith Gow]

Thanks mate, Im using a powerbook g4 with AE 7 (its a little slow but it seems to manage) and i do have Final Cut pro but very little experience with it.

Once again to all you guys, Thanks so much for the responses, i really do appreciate it.

cheers,
Leith

AE…
Best Thing Since Warcraft.