[Alon_a]

Typically you would need to render as Quicktime movie with Alpha channel (Millions of Colors+) enabled. However, if you want to throw this into PowerPoint you’re basically out of luck, as PowerPoint does not respect alpha channels when playing back movies. In addition, PowerPoint would not let you put anything on top of the video, so if it is to serve as part of the background your clients may have another problem there.

It just so happens that my company has developed a solution for this troublesome (and rather well known) PowerPoint shortcoming. Our product is not launched yet and anyway I don’t wish to self-promote here, but if you contact me directly at

alon (dot) amit (at) gmail (dot) com

I’ll be glad to try and help solve the problem.

– A. A.

[Alon_a]

I don’t think you can get any of the standard lightning effects to follow a path. If you already have the path set up and tracking the cable, I would try to create the lightning from scratch: stroke the path, distort it with some turbulence and apply glow/shine. Getting secondary off-shoots may be difficult with just turbulence, so you may need to add additional paths that last only momentarily and are treated with the same effect setup.

If you’re totally stuck, let me know and I’ll give it a shot.

AA

[Alon_a]

Thanks Steve, that helped a lot. I see a lot of value in background preview preparation and background renders.

I must admit it’s not easy to commit to purchasing without ever trying it out, but I’ll try to get over it 🙂

AA

[Alon_a]

This looks absolutely fantastic. In fact, this just seems to be the way things should have been set up in AE to begin with… Hopefully Adobe realizes that and will embed Nucleo Pro in AE 8.0 🙂

One question: You emphasized how all the background action does not impact performance while you work, which is surely a key feature. Does this only apply in a multi-cpu setting? I have a single 3.2GHz P4 with HT, so will Nucleo Pro utilize the virtual “extra CPU” for the background jobs, or does it simply activate a low-priority process that doesn’t interfere with other processes?

Anyway thanks for the heads up. If I can use Nucleo Pro on my machine, I think you got yourself a customer…

AA

[Alon_a]

If you’re trying to create DOF on a video file (rather than an actual 3D comp with varios elements placed in 3D space), then I don’t see how you could get away from rotoscoping and blurring the foreground elements. Depending on the footage, you might be able to duplicate the video layer and use various adjustment and levels effects to create a matte for the foreground, for instance if you have sort-of well-lit characters over a sort-of dark background. You can then use this matte as a filter or track matte for a blur effect. But I don’t expect this would be perfect; in the end, you’ll have to roto – always a grueling task.

The question on camera movement comes up often, and the typical answer is Rick Gerard’s tutorials here on the Cow. They’re really great tutorial but of course they can’t cover every situation. They’re the top two here:

https://www.creativecow.net/articles/script_gen/authorsort/gerard_rick_script.html

AA

[Alon_a]

Apply time remapping (Ctrl+Alt+T) to the footage layer first. You can then extend it as much as you want.

AA

[Alon_a]

If you’re using ImageReady, this probably isn’t the right forum 🙂

AniGIFs are a very limited format. It’s hard to tell based on your description but it could be that you’re just facing the limitations of the the medium. While you’re here you might as well download a trial version of Adobe After Effects and try making it there… but again, don’t expect it to look like HD video, or even Flash.

AA

[Alon_a]

Paint Bucket. In AE 7 it is under Effects->Generate, in 6.5 it was someplace else (Render, I think).

AA

[Alon_a]

As far as I know, you’re right, CC Mr. Mercury does not easily lend itself to creating a transition since it doesn’t have a “master” knob for switching from a blobby image to a flat, unaffected one.

You have several options…

One simple method is to tweak the parameters to get an appropraite transition. Try something like this:

X & Y radius: 90 (depending on the size of your comp this may need to be more, or less)
Producer: (in the middle, which is the default setting)
Direction: (whatever, it’s irrelevant here)
Velocity: 0
Birth rate: 30 (depending on how fast you need the transition to be, you may need to play with that)
Longevity: 4sec (long enough to last the whole transition)
Gravity: 0
Resistance: 0
Extra: 1
Animation: Explosive (doesn’t make much difference with these settings)
Blob Influence: 100%
Influence Map: Blob In
Blob Birth Size: 0.01
Blob Death Size: 2

When this is applied to a layer, it should transition from fully transparent to fully opaque and undistorted, with some wobbly blobby action in the middle.

Another option would be to apply Mercury to a solid white layer. At the end of the animation you’ll want the layer to be its original self – solid white – and if Mercury doesn’t give you that just fade in another white layer, untreated. Then use this white animation as a track matte, and possibly a distortion map, to the layer you need to fade in. This may be too sketchy for a new user so let me know if you need more details.

AA

[Alon_a]

I’m not sure what you mean by “3D spaces”, but 3D objects cannot be imported natively into AE – you’ll need Zaxwerks’ Invigorator Pro for that, and then you’ll need to make sure that vectorworks (with which I’m not familiar) can export in one of the format accepted by Invig.

AA