[Adam Taylor]

you could try creating a greyscale plasma effect in a separate comp, using fractal noise and whatever else gives you the swirly patterns you want.

Then use a very soft edged mask to cut the centre out to white – so you have white centre and swirly edges..

then in your animation comp, bring in the plasma comp, and use it to drive a displacement effect on your artwork. Thats should add some subtle motion to your image around the edges.

adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk

[Adam Taylor]

it could be that your line graphics are too fine and you are seeing the aliasing when the lines are diagonal (not horizontal or vertical). You may improve it by either thickening the lines or perhaps adding a touch of blur to them.

adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk

[Adam Taylor]

I’ve had a three for several years. Its never squeaked…ever!

I also find i don’t use the buttons, as i have enough keyboard shortcuts to remember across all the different apps i use. I probably would use them on a 4 because it has the leds to remind you what each button does.

By far the most important thing for me is the ergonomics of using a pen and good sized tablet over scrubbing around with a block of soap on a rope! Which ever model you choose, get a widescreen one – i have both wide and standard, and the wide is so much more useable when working on a two screen setup.

adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk

[Adam Taylor]

If you happen to know anyone with a ProTools system (the cheapest LE version has this option now), Elastic Audio is now a built-in feature (which i use to fit vo’s to ever commercial i make) which lets you shape the the audio to fit your needs.

there used to be a plug-in that comes as part of the DVToolkit for Protools, called Vocalign – which allowed you to set a source dialogue line, then a target dialogue, and it would reshape the timeline so that the second matched the first – perfect for replacing lipsynced dialogue. Although you had to be careful not to overdo the effect, it was pretty impressive

I would be surprised if you ever see that feature in FCP – its not really a video requirement, and it takes some extremely complex calculations to regenerate and repitch audio formants correctly.

adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk

[Adam Taylor]

Thanks for stating the obvious, i’d never have thought of that.
Not everyone is working to broadcast specs or has the budget to buy the full package!!

all they want is the ability to match up shots done by various people, on various cameras and under differing lighting conditions and Its only for internal company use.

Basic stuff that should be achievable on a basic package. All the full studio would do is confuse them, as they are not video editors – just people with a need to use video as a tool within their working day.

regards
Adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk

[Adam Taylor]

Off-site storage of the backups is definitely the right thing to do.
24 LTO3 tapes will easily fit in a holdall, so i can take one set of tapes home with me, and leave one set in the loader. Change them weekly, and jobs done.

As for the video – all my video is on the raids in full uncompressed 10bit, so its all backed up onto the tapes anyway. If the building should burn down, i won’t have the digibetas, but i’ll still have the media on the data tapes.

I misread Davids note earlier and thought he wrote “Dark Star” test!! My mind immediately thought of the “intelligent bomb”that wants to destroy everything in the film of the same name…not the kind of test i want to do with my backups!!

adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk

[Adam Taylor]

for a backup system, i would think a relatively slow random access to files is pretty pointless anyway. Its not intended for instant access but as a safe, secure way of preserving your data.

As for cost – its relative to what your needs are…the more data needs to be protected, the lower the relative cost is when compared to the potential losses incurred if you should lose all your data.

adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk

[Adam Taylor]

you hear wrong!

A tape based system is by far the safest method of backing up data…its why all the banks and governments use them. They are a known technology, have a good longterm shelf life, and are not likely to fall foul of manufacturers desire to change disk formats every few years.

Hard drives have a very limited shelf, and if not used regularly the magnetic field on a hard drive is known to fade resulting in corrupt data.

I use an Overland Arcvault 24 Tape Library. This holds 24 LTO3 tapes, each capable of up to 800gb of storage. I use this in conjunction with Netvault Backup software to schedule and run all my backups.

You can get much smaller devices, but as i backup 3 macs, and two Raids (14Tb) – i need a big capacity.

Speaking from experience I would not trust hard drives for backing up.

I have twice had raid failures due to faulty drives, and both times i was able to restore my data. Only three weeks ago – I had two drives fail over the weekend, causing complete loss of data from the larger raid, which contains almost 4 years of edit work! After replacing the faulty drives, and 23 hours of automatically rewriting the data, i was good to go again.

Get a tape based system….you’ll only regret it if you don’t!

adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk

[Adam Taylor]

hey wayne, if you have a look on the AE Cow pages, Eran Stern has recently put up a tutorial showing how to create exactly that effect in AE, using the built-in filters.

adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk

[Adam Taylor]

the dead dog can bite back, though.

A friend did just that – dropped in a shot he knew was awful, just so he could remove it when the producer spotted it.

Only problem was the producer loved it, and my friend was ordered to remove (in his opinion) one of the best cuts in the show.

adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk