[Andy Engelkemier]

I’ll have to look into that on future projects.

For now, I’ve decided to just make the checkmark somewhere near cyan, since the background is orange, then use do a color replace. It’s pretty simple, and there’s no transparency, so that should work fairly well.

I haven’t learned enough about Essential Graphics. I don’t feel there is very good training out there, and even the documentation seems a bit lacking.

One VERY significant thing that it didn’t seem to address is Libraries can not be updated. WHO made That decision. It was a terrible discovery. I created a title animation and saved it there to be shared with a coworker. You can’t even Download it. It just plain doesn’t exist locally. So warning, don’t do it. Save locally, Then share.
But it seems like quite a bit extra work to have to export my template, then import it. Because then if I want to update the animation, I have to export it, then import it again?

I’ve had troubles with things updating in Premiere. Two of us tried to get updates and things to work properly, and we have since abandoned essential graphics for the most part. I’ve used it for a couple projects where I was in a hurry and the titles needed animations. But updating doesn’t seem to work. And protected regions only work Sometimes. It’s really odd. It seems very “beta.”

Anyway, for now, I think that’s just way more work. I’ll wait on essential graphics for them to either abandon it, or fix it. Kinda like the collaboration with teams feature. They did a Terrible job implementing that. Every time we’ve tried it, it corrupted data, and we had to abandon. When I spoke with Adobe about it, they basically said, “we haven’t heard much about it because to tell you the truth, not many people use it.” Oh, well…great.

[Andy Engelkemier]

Well, now I’m having even More troubles. So I have to wonder if they are related.

When you add some text, you have an option to add “enable font size adjustment.” Well, that came through, but it doesn’t do anything.
I added tracking as an animation item, and that works. But that’s a separate item.

Also all my items are now highlighted red. This happened as soon as I changed to a different composition in AE. But it didn’t go back when I went back to the comp.

It’s fairly annoying that you can’t Update a title you created. But what can you do? Another one of Adobe’s Mostly finished features released to everyone without fully documenting it.

And before you say, “no, here’s the documentation.” I’ll save you the trouble: https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/responsive-design.html
And scroll to the bottom to find the one liner about sending it to Premiere.

I tested my protected section within aftereffects. I used the comp, and sure enough. No need to retime. You just stretch the end point. And yes, it works exactly as you’d want it to.

This is really making me feel like this is just a bug. They didn’t list it in their known issues though. So maybe just not many people are using this yet? If it actually worked, then it would be pretty darn nice. But it seems like only a few things work ok.

[Andy Engelkemier]

Now, see…that’s the trouble. We’re a design consultancy. And engineering, and we even do assembly production.
We would likely entertain most anything that someone wants to pay us to do. Each job is pretty different.

Some videos I’ve done: A crazy amount of B-roll footage shot around a building to celebrate their team, mixed with shots of the people in various ways. Handheld footage of a BBQ festival following one team. Some flir camera footage (we actually have a nice one of those) of a few different products. “sexy” product use footage.
That’s about it so far. Much of the stuff I work on, the product isn’t out yet so I do it all digitally with animation. But I’d Love to do more camera matching and inserting the product into the video. But that’s usually pretty time consuming and expensive. And I don’t quite have the know-how to get the shots right myself.

I know Just enough about video to get some of the shots, but it takes too long because I often don’t see the problems until I look at the footage on my computer. So I want to learn some of the tricks of what to look for. And I know some of them can be addressed with the proper equipment.

I thought I’d start by seeing what I can do with my 6D. And I think I should be able to find the technical details on some of that. I can ask our local photography/videography store as well. But they Do have some incentive to sell me a bunch of stuff. And that’s likely where I’ll buy it if there isn’t a huge price discrepancy with B&H or Amazon. But I don’t want to spend 6K on just a camera unless that’s really what I would need. If I can just buy some nice rigs, lights, and a lens more specific to video, then that might be it. But at this point, I don’t know.

I’ll keep looking and see what I learn. I just thought I’d turn to some of the expertise here to see if anyone suggested any training. What I’m Not doing is weddings. Although, if someone wanted to spend 20-30K on video, edit, and animating some stuff for their wedding, then congrats. You’ve hired yourself a wedding videographer/animator.

[Andy Engelkemier]

Well, you have hit the nail on the head here, but that’s what I’m trying to fix.

The reason we hire out video, or just whip out a cell phone, is speed. Currently, I’ll choose to use my cell phone for some things, or a gopro even. Because of speed.

I have the same problem with photography. I can’t do it Fast enough because I don’t fully know how to use the equipment and what settings I need to get the shot I want. Hey, this is lower light than I expected, so maybe I should swap to a prime lens to get less noise. Maybe I have to track something later, so I should probably use a heck of a lot of light for something? Someone wants a rack focus. Can my camera even do that? So we hire those kinds of things out.

The cell phone footage happened just recently, and they Did use a gimbal at least. But they didn’t know what they were doing so much that one person requested I take a vertical video and flip it. After they asked that they realized it wasn’t possible to do. And they didn’t use the gimbal on that so it was shaky as hell. I made it look ok, but not great.

What I’m after though, is getting rid of the need to hire out work. A client hires us to put something together, and hiring out eats Heavily into our profit because I’m at the shoot with the videographers in most cases. Shot lists don’t work in subjective situations.

So I’m really looking for some training on what I can do with my equipment, and arming myself with the knowledge of what other equipment I need in order to expediently set up a shot with reasonably good quality and control.

[Andy Engelkemier]

This is why I come here. Exactly what I wanted, and had no idea that existed, and in my search all that I found was dynamic link, which was Not what I was looking for because that’s a bit more work, and has a higher chance for corrupt files (at least in my experience).

[Andy Engelkemier]

Particular, yeah, you could get something that looks really neat, but it still won’t be photo real. I mean, you could paint a photo real painting in microsoft paint pixel by pixel. People have done it, but I feel like they maybe have wasted their life to prove a point.
If you’re looking for stylized, particular would be cool, start with some of the burling smoke looks from explosions. Could look neat. Need the same thing for cheap? You Can accomplish most everything with particle world, but you’ll need to be Really patient. It’s not at All as fast. Even between versions of Particular you’ll notice huge speed jumps.
But if you’re after that, I know Video Copilot has at least one video that shows how to accomplish the same types of controls with particle world and scripting. Usually the trouble is controlling the point, and just converting world space to an object.
But remember, that is Slow. Get past a couple thousand particles, and you’ll find yourself needing to pre-render layers for compositing.

A before and after shot would also help a bunch. Like, I have this video, or image, and I want it to look something like this video/effect.

You can tell people have different opinions based on their assumptions of what you’re after. People who have cameras, will Definitely just tell you to shoot it. I have to hire out my shots, so I’m always on the side of “digitize it,” but I would change my tune with a nice rig I think.

[Andy Engelkemier]

I’d put my money on trapcode form and nothing more than that.

Most of their examples are always lights and flashy stuff, but you just choose a particle system, and how to control it. With form, it’s a grid, and you choose your footage to control color, and size of the square particles.

There are a few examples of this on their page. If you haven’t looked at their plugins, particular is probably their most popular since it’s the most customizable. I kind of wonder if you could do it with that. Probably…but form would be more efficient for sure. Particular wants to start from a single point, rather than a grid, even though grid is technically an option.

Anyway, it’s not cheap if you only use it once, so hopefully you use it a lot, or you’re getting paid a lot for this project.

[Andy Engelkemier]

Thanks Walter. Great explanations, and very helpful.

I feel a little like AME was handling the color conversion incorrectly still, but I am happy to have a reasonable solution because I’ve already had to render the thing out a couple more times because of last minute changes.

[Andy Engelkemier]

So clip to white was exactly what I needed. I just couldn’t remember that was under levels. And searching for clip color? Yeah, Way too many results for not what I was looking for.
So thanks for that.

I’m curious on the color space though. That’s gamma 2.4? Why would I work in gamma 2.4?
I’m not disputing, I’m just looking for the reason there. It seems odd because, I would think I would want to work in the same gamma profile as my monitor? Not many of us are working in HDR monitors yet, although my monitor does confuse me on what I’m seeing because I’m working in the AdobeRGB profile on my monitor, and if I switch to sRGB it looks Terrible. But many of the other monitors here aren’t as nice, and in the “near white” area, there monitors look Terrible. Too much contrast so they just see bands many times.

Anyway, I’m all set with this actually working and rendering what I’m seeing. The clipping was the trick. And changing the color space did change things a little bit, but I think they look at least as good.

[Andy Engelkemier]

I’m not sure I understand what you’re explaining. My monitor is 8 bit, and I’m outputting to an 8 bit format. I won’t be editing the video further, so I’m not sure why 10 bit would make sense.

Am I making something that can be replicated in playback? Absolutely! It’s white! You can replicate white in 1 bit color!

The issue I’m having is not the output bits. It’s the question of when AfterEffects/Media Encoder, is actually converting colors. In photoshop, if you have a 32bit image, and you want to save that as a jpeg, which is going to be 8 bit, you just have to save it while adjusting the gamma to .4545, which is the inverse of 2.2 because the 32bit image you are looking at has a gamma of 1.0.

I’m just mostly confused because the thumbnail preview of the render is coming out how I see it in AfterEffects.

Basically I’m asking if the only way to render this out is to render it to a 32bit format, then convert that in an image processor afterward. That seems crazy to me, but wouldn’t surprise me.