Some basic animation

[Mark Suszko]

You could do this with some investment of time using just Final Cut, or a little faster and better in Apple Motion. Also look at zaxworks, they have a forum here on the COW. That last option has pre-canned moves of the type you seek, but can also do more when you are ready for it.

[Terry Mikkelsen]

Blender will work and is free. But instead of spending money, you will spend many, many hours learning how to use it if you are new to this type of interface and workflow. Good luck.

Tech-T Productions
http://www.technical-t.com

[John Brookhouse]

Thanks for the info. I suppose that I should mention that I’m just doing curriculum for a church and it’s pretty low-budget. Due to that I am working on a PC using Corel VideoStudio X12. In other words, FCP and Motion options are out for me. And it looks like Zaxwerks is a plug in for those programs.

[Mark Suszko]

Some folks swear by a freeware/shareware app for PC video called VirtualDub. I’ve never played with it.

If you have Photoshop, you could do all of this in there, but it is going to take time, you would create layered psd files for the logo, the background, and the light object. These are all placed in the same comp in photoshop, and then you use the image sequence tools to create a “movie” of individual frames. By creating a photoshop batch action, you could create an automated process that would move the background layers across the frame in little increments for each frame, and this would take only minutes to run. This resulting image stack or “frame movie” then must be imported into your editing program to create the final effect.

You can have it fast, good, easy and cheap, but only two at a time:-)

[Mark Suszko]

I just remembered a dandy little 3-d animation program for the PC crowd that is very easy to work with but gives a great finished look.
It’s a little old now but still works great.

https://www.crystalgraphics.com/web/3dimpactpro.main.asp

Last time I looked this was around fifty bucks.

This is basically a cut-down version of the original crystal TOPAS software, with the keyframing replaced by canned moves, and a six inch phone directory-sized instruction manual reduced to a 2-page pamplet.

However, if you turn on all the rendering controls and etc in the render preferences, you get a beautiful, broadcast quality SD output, great for a logo animation.

You can make the logo itself 3-d as well: this program will accept a vector based file, or it can create a 3-d extruded model from simple black and white art. If you have a photo, you can easily texture map it onto a shape, like sticking decals on a plastic toy model. A pallette of canned textures lets you make it look like glass, stone, metal, etc. and you can add lights of various types and colors, with or without lens flares, animate the lights independently from the model, or “group” all or parts of the models and apply moves universally to them.

You could think of it as a much more primitive version of what you get in Zaxworks.

My kids used to like using the simple geometrics and free hand drawing tools to draw up huge, elaborate 3-d spaceships with this when they came to visit me at work. You can build up complex things like city blocks full of skyscrapers, just by sticking some simple shapes together using the “group” tool. I also was able to create convincing plastic pill bottles, with caps, labels, and pills, and simulate a tabletop close-up snorkel cam jib move past these pill bottles, using this program. It was easy: the bottles, lids, pills are all just really circles, extruded, multiplied, and given textures, properties, and edges from the premade pallettes. The label was made in photoshop and applied to the model like a decal.

Output is AVI files and stills in a few formats like jpeg and targa.

When I used this a lot, you could download a full version and work with it for free, you get a watermark on the render output until you register and pay for the software, but its free to try and lots of fun, I recommend it. If you get it and get stuck, find me here and I’ll try to talk you thru your problem.