[Antoni Jones]

Actually Digieffects Cinelook 2 is on par with Magicbullet. I use it all the time to create great looking Film Effect’s with a high degree of control. Creative Cow has actually compared the 2, check out the link below for more information:

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=1&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/johnson_tim/cinelook_vs_magicbullet/index.html

-Regards

[Antoni Jones]

Why dont you render the final comp out uncompressed and then drop it into your favourite NLE and add the timecode there?. Then just render it out to whatever format you choose?.

[Antoni Jones]

There is a similar tutorial on Youtube, go here:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=x9tc48FR9Tw

-Regards

[Antoni Jones]

After some experimenting Iv’e found something that works.

1-Create Your Text
2-With the Text Layer Selected in the Timeline goto Layer > Auto-Trace
3-Click OK, This traces a freeform mask path around the individual letters
4-Apply Trapcode 3D Stroke to the traced layer
5-Turn the Eyeball off in the original Text Layer
6-Tweak Trapcode 3D Stroke as needed

This works but is not perfect and you may need to tweak settings in the Auto-Trace dialog box to get it as you want (read the CS3 help file).

-Regards

[Antoni Jones]

I have both AE 7.0 and CS3 on my PC. When I select “Create Outlines” in AE 7.0 it creates mask paths the same shape of the individual letters of the text on a new solid with I can then use with 3D Stroke. When I do the same thing in CS3 rather than create masks it creates a Shape layer with individual letter shapes which gives a greater deal of control over the letters but does NOT seem to work with 3D stroke, this is very annoying and I cant even click on the “Mask” button to create masks instead of shapes. Does anyone know if this is a bug in CS3 or intended?, or if there is a workaround??.

[Antoni Jones]

Why can’t you just use the Mask Expansion property?… just wondering why you need to scale down the mask another way?.

[Antoni Jones]

Thank you for the information on creating the text however I’m still having problems with the effect since I can’t really follow his tutorial very well. It doesn’t seem very clear to me can somebody please create a video tutorial or something like that for this effect?.

-Regards

[Antoni Jones]

It’s possible he was joking…

[Antoni Jones]

Aharon, I love your podcasts on After Effects, maybe you could do another Podcast showing us the technique you have described?. I’m sure it will be a useful addition to your Podcast tutorials.

[Antoni Jones]

Thank you for your input. I had better results when I rendered the file out uncompressed and then rendered it out in Quicktime Pro using the H264 codec. It still wasn’t perfect but it was better so that’s always a bonus. I will try and render the next movie as FLV from AE as you described to try and see if that gives better results. I also heared that although Youtube resizes the movies to 320×240 res when you upload them it’s best when working in AE to create comps with the standard DV NTSC/PAL resolutions and then render out the files to 320×240 as working with higher resolutions at the beginning gives you better results.