Adolfo Rozenfeld
Forum Replies Created
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Ok, Winston.
Sorry for the delay in the response. For some reason the Cow forums stopped sending me e-mail notifications of posts. Go figure 🙂You can think of the Sequence Text behavior as a raw building block, the template Apple used to produce most text animation presets in Motion.
It has two main interface areas, In the first one, the upper part (Format), you add or remove text parameters: whatever you want, scale, fill color, position, tracking, opacity, glow size, color or position, etc.
The second part (Sequence Control) offers a lot of ways to select which parts of the text body are affected and which ones are not. Of course you can animate the behavior, so that the “affected” part changes over time. That’s essentially what most text presets do (sometimes combined with other effects).
Ok, so let’s see with the example you mentioned.
Create some text. Make sure it has at least two lines, since that’s what you wanted.
Go and apply the Sequence Text behavior to it.Now, you wanted a slant effect. So, in the upper part of the behavior, press the Add pull-down menu and select Format > Slant.
Assign a value to slant. You will notice the whole text changes.You want to limit the slant to the second line.
No problem. In the lower part, notice the Select drop down menu. It offers options like character, word, line, etc. Line is exactly what you want, right?
Now, the last thing letting it know which line you want to affect.The Traversal option is by default set to “Ramp”, which means that it will automatically increase the value and go from line 1 to line 2 to line 3, etc (same for characters or words, if you choose those in the Select option), You want to set Traversal to Custom. After that, it will allow you to choose the specific line you want.
One last thing: there’s a parameter called Spread. If you’re familiar with “feather” in visual applications, this is the equivalent. It means the influence is not sharp edged, but feathered… You want to set Spread to 0 if you would like that only the second line is affected.
Hope this helps.
Much easier to do than to explain, since the whole proceess (like most things in Motion) is really visual.Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
Chris:
With all (huge) respect, I believe the description you gave was true for previous versions of After Effects. And it’s still accurate for the current version, if you don’t have a really high end graphics card.
BUT in After Effects 7.0, if you have one of the really powerful cards that support things like anti-aliasing and Motion Blur, AE gives you the choice of using the GPU for processing those during RAM previews and also final renders. That’s what “Always” means – enable OpenGL procesing for RAM previews. We got to the point where a Geforce 7900, ATI X850 or X1900 or QuadroFX will process those things with identical quality. Oddly, the power of the graphics cards is platform dependent. You may get better results with one brand on Mac and the other brand on Windows, despite them having similar horsepower.
To enable it for final renders, you have to check the “Enable OpenGL renderer” in the Render Settings. Of course, not even middle of the road cards like the 256 MB Radeon X1600 in my MacBook Pro will produce a final render with good results, since it lacks the features Adobe calls “high quality OpenGL” or something like that (basically, the ability to produce anti-aliased output),Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
Absolutely amazing, Chris.
Thank you so much for sharing!Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
Absolutely amazing, Chris.
Thank you so much for sharing!Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
No problem.
Automator and Motion, two beautiful things, aren’t they?
The same tasks, five years ago, would have taken a full day of repetitive manual work, spent in terms of both preparing files and building the design.Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
You’ll be delighted to read this. Real time performance increases, rather than the opposite, when you move from DV25 to uncompressed. Uncompressed codecs are much easier to decode, or so the results suggest. The only condition, obviously, is that your disk system can handle 8 or 10 streams of SD 8-10 bit UC footage at 20-26 MB/s. Just stripping a couple of SATA drives won’t give you that kind of disk performance (but it will allow you to work with that kind of quality for very little money, if at some point it’s more about quality than performance).
RT performance with uncompressed HD is nowhere near these numbers. In fact, if it was, it would be impossible for most people to afford the kind of disk system needed for that. Bear in mind a single, 10 bit UC stream is about 140 MB/s. Can you imagine what kind of RAID is needed for playing back 4 or 5 (not to mention 8) of those simultaneously?
DVCPRO HD does work very well in RT.DV25, ie regular plain DV/DVCAM/DVCPRO gets a performance boost also, since the Decklink cards have hardware support for DV playback that it seems the CPU benefits when not having to deal with the Firewire DV output thing.
PhotoJPEG, last time I checked, wasn’t enabled in FCP for real time playback at all. In fact, the RT menu doesn’t show the different Safe/Unsafe RT submodes it shows for evertything else. It’s still a great codec for many things. Just not for RT effects editing.
DV50 is somewhat more demanding than DV25, but it’s so much better and the data rates are very reasonable. And RT performance is as good as you could ever need, given that if you’re doing complex layered compositing you would better be using in a specialized application, right? All around a good codec to work with things like Betacam SP and even near Digibeta quality with a single, independent SATA drive.
Still graphics… they play in real time in normal quality, and the keying for alpha is also RT. Large photos scaled down, look better when you render them. There’s a very high quality setting for spatial transformations with improved motion filtering that only kicks in when you select it in settings and only when you render the segment. Otherwise image quality and performance is very good based on the standard for NLE software, not compositing or motion graphics software.
Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
There’s an OEM supplier which is coming out with an ExpressCard/34 SDI-HD SDI card soon. If only Blackmagic could take the hardware, add their software and component I/0, it would be terrific. As for disk speed and such, many of us are frequently using Decklink products with applications which basically play cached frames from RAM (as After Effects, Motion, Combustion), so it would still be completly useful.
Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
Sure. The easiest way is to turn the images in your folder into a numbered sequence. You can do this quickly, without the pain of manually renaming files, by using Automator. The Rename Finder Items action in Automator allows you to quickly batch rename all those images. You just need to choose the “make sequential” option and also enable the option to add a fixed number of zeros. Drag the images to Automator before the Rename Finder items action, hit play and you’re done. After that, you import the image sequence in Motion and use that as the source for the replicator. Uncheck the Play Frames checkbox so each cell won’t loop continously but rather show a single image from the sequence. Check the Random Start Frame option so that each cell contains a different image, taken randomly from the sequence.
Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
You can easily do this in Motion. Select the Object and then go to the Media tab in the Project palette (Hit Command-4 or the “Project” button if not already visible). Select the thumbnail related to your image (again, in the Media tab, not the Layers tab) and then go to the Inspector. It will show the different interpretation and timing behaviors of your source footage. Set the Start and End frames to the frame you want and then set the End Condition to “Hold”. You can now alter the duration manually in the timeline for your frozen image.
Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
Left hand and right hand?
Photoshop C2 does have video previews with Decklink cards, because BMD wrote the simple export component that’s required for this. It probably took them a couple of days to write it. You could get the IO to work with Photoshop using EchoFire, which means AJA could add support for this if they wanted to. Since EchoFire is $275, the Decklink free Photoshop export function was a big deal for me when deciding. The Decklink software also adds an import component, that allows Photoshop to grab a frame from a video source.
I know this is an AJA forum. I have participated here many times when I was using the IO and I am hardly a troll. It just surprises me they are not adding these things in such a competitive market. They may loose clientes because of this. I am again considering the IO, as I am moving most of my work to a laptop. But it wouldn’t suprise if Decklink are first to market with an ExpressCar/34 HD/SD card for the MacBook Pro.Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com