[Ben Griggs]

Have you gotten this taken care of?

I’ve seen it happen, and as long as you haven’t actually written data to the disk all the information is still there (but not)

Creating a RAID array generally doesn’t zero out the drives, that would take a while for a drive that size, you’d notice. It just changes the master boot record, MBR, and that can be repaired by windows usually.

You can jump to using Acronis (not free). It’s probably the safest route, you’ll get everything. But you need equal size storage to write the recovered data to and be prepared to wait for ages while it rebuilds.

What can prevent Windows from automatically repairing the MBR in this case, is if your bios and the MBR conflict about being RAID. So try switching from RAID to IDE in your BIOS and see if Windows wants to actually be useful!. Chances are you’ll have your data back real quick.

GL,
Ben

[Ben Griggs]

Photoshop Extended can import your 3D mod, light it, paint it and whatever. Then export a pre-multiplied mov after you have keyframed object and or camera positions.

There are plenty of free 3D models out there granting full rights, however of a lower quality.

[Ben Griggs]

I have been messing with some equally messed up chroma shots where the lighting is just off.

My best results for footage like that came from duplicating the footage layer and messing with the levels. A couple of gradients on the sides may be needed to get it all smoothed. Once you have adjusted the duplicated layer to show crisp contrasting greens precompose it and use that layer to extract your matte.

Doing this you really damage your color but your not using color from the duplicate layer, only the matte. Used along with some junk masks you should get somewhat acceptable results however it’s quite tedious.

Past that, what is to be put in the background is what will make or break the final look. If the director won’t/can’t shoot again try to convince him to have an overcast cloudy background rather than a clear blue sky or other solids.

[Ben Griggs]

Hi Kate,

I am not sure what you mean by “less is better” I will assume your talking about the codec installation. As far as I know .tod are nothing but renamed .mpeg2 files, so just make sure a mpeg2 codec gets in there. All of your media players will start taking advantage of codecs immediately.

Still like I said before you will have to rename the files from .tod to .mpg (or if you really need to .mp2 so you remember the compression)

Again, like I said before, my experience is with JVC Evrio .MOD files. Just a MPEG2 that is named differently by JVC.
Best,
Ben

[Ben Griggs]

[Ben Griggs]

Hi Kate,
I was recently using an Everio that put out .MOD files not .TOD I’ll guess it’s not going to be much different.

You need the proper codecs on your computer to open them, the K-lite codec pack will contain the proper one. With the codecs installed it should open right up in your normal video viewing program.

If you just need the .MPG extension just replace the MOD or TOD with that by right clicking the file in explorer and choosing rename, you will get a warning but nothing to worry about. It is tedious if your renaming hundreds of files I use a mass file renamer for that mess.

In short, install Codecs and rename the file extention.

Cheers
Ben

[Ben Griggs]

Michael,

If you have access to the Sapphire plugins from Genarts there are 4 sets of effects that will be very useful

Film effect and grain
Edge effects
Time effects
and Flicker tools

You will only need Sapphire boxes 2 and 4 for these, but the total package (all 4 boxes) are extremely helpful in many cases.

Every effect I see in that video can be accomplished without multiple shots using these. With the exception of some particles that were in one of the transitions.

https://www.genarts.com/sapphire-ae.html#list-of-effects
From the page :
“You can download and use a fully functional copy of Sapphire Plug-ins. After a 3-week trial period, the plug-ins will output a watermark unless you purchase and enter a serial number.”

Best,
Ben

[Ben Griggs]

A few links,

I figured out the above from this page
https://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/8.0/help.html?content=WSE109AE3D-1512-4ab6-AC80-78CC82E05A26.html

Trapcodes 3D Stroke tutorials on their site
https://www.trapcode.com/products_3dstroke.html

and what I call “eye candy and inspiration page” from Trapcode
https://www.trapcode.com/gallery.html
Just to see the possibilities

Best,
Ben

[Ben Griggs]

Hi,

Just to clarify, Trapcode’s 3D stroke only works on masks not outlines. So, type out your text then select it, then go to Layer->autotrace. Supposing you have the default user colors the text will now be outlined in yellow (mask) instead of blue (outline) Mess around with the trace features as it tries to use as few curves as possible while tracing.

This will give you a new layer “auto-traced layername” then you can hide or delete the original text layer.

Apply 3d stroke and go at it as usual.

I have seen this question a few times and nowhere is it exactly said how to get a mask from any object like that. The only problem about it is the text cannot be changed without starting it all over with the tracing.

[Ben Griggs]

Milton,

If you can try out http://www.zaxwerks.com their 3d warps will do this better and easier than any standard effects.