[Brandt Krueger]

Hi Jon (and anyone else that might have some ideas!)

I think you’re logic is correct as far as slowing down the entire clip, but I think what I’m really looking for is “negative easing”. Start fast, slow down, end fast. The easing actually will take a negative number, but it doesn’t seem to work- no matter what the time sliders are set at you get a big jump, then steady speed, then big jump (with no ramping).

Basically what I have is an 3D object with a LOT of parts. A variation of the barrage animation looks awesome, but the client wants each part of the object to zoom into frame, hang for a second or so, then zoom into position. I’m hoping to figure out a way to take advantage of the cascade abilities of PAFx to avoid making a bagillion individual movies…

[Brandt Krueger]

The short answer is no, unfortunately, but there are ways around it.

Here’s one from an earlier post where someone had the same question:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/41/859161#859163

It occurs to me another solution would be to animate both the object and the camera simultaneously, so that the object appears fixed in position relative to the camera, but is actually moving through the lighting environment. I suspect you could get some pretty crazy effects by playing around with combinations of object/camera movement.

Love to ya brother- I wouldn’t be posting as much as I have been if I wasn’t genuinely excited about this product. My hope is to help make it even better 🙂

-BK

[Brandt Krueger]

I don’t know if this is a bug or I’m doing something wrong…

Here’s what I get if I follow these steps:

Open Motion, Create Solid Color, Apply PAFx filter.
Import a couple of jpgs.
Assign JPG1 to Layer Map 1, JPG2 to Layer Map 2 and hide the originals.
Open PAFx and create a new primitive- once open make it a cube.
Apply Map 1 to the face on the left, Map 2 to the face on the right.
Close PAfx. Hey look, cool! My JPGs are the two sides of the cube facing me.

It looks great, so let’s render. Export as JPG image (or anything). Crud… my textures are “zoomed in” and don’t look like they did on the screen. I have tried adjusting both the screen and export drop down boxes to various combinations, but the result is the same. The scale on the final export is way off from how it looks on the screen.

Any ideas? I’d really like to get this layer mapping thing figured out ASAP as I have to do the same animation about 80 times with just different bitmaps applied…

Thanks,
Brandt

[Brandt Krueger]

Another minor bug, but Matt seemed to want all I could find.

When you zoom in on the timeline, the horizontal slider does not adjust to reflect the zoom until you click on it. This can give you a misleading idea of where in the project you are in relation to your zoom level, as well as can create sudden giant leaps of time when you only wanted to move the slider a little.

Other times, it will disappear completely until you click around a little on the zoom buttons and slider bar. I have been unable to determine what sequence makes it disappear.

-BK

[Brandt Krueger]

Hi Jay,

Path Action might be the ticket. If I have an object moving from pose position A to pose position B (outside the tube to inside the tube), and then apply Path Action: SpinY to the transition, it will rotate the screw as it moves. Positive rotation spins it one way, Negative the other. You may have to try SpinX or SpinZ, depending on your object and it’s “local” orientation of X,Y, and Z. I believe for this example you would want to leave “Use Common Center” unchecked.

Make sense?

-Brandt

[Brandt Krueger]

POTENTIAL BUG DESCRIPTION:
Ok, here’s an interesting one that hopefully can be duplicated to determine if it’s a bug or not. Create a new scene and add a 3D text object. Type the words “MYSTERY TEXT FLIP” and reduce/increase the font so it just fits on one line (52 pt Futura on mine). Add another pose at around 4 seconds, and another around 8 seconds in. Select the middle pose and set “Distribute” to Cylinder Wrap. Adjust the bend to make the phrase a complete cylinder (mine is about 77). Playback yields a nice little effect of the text wrapping itself into a circle, then going back to normal. Now, what if we want to have the text circle spin around once while it’s there? Again with the middle pose selected, I set “Pose Action” to “Spin Y” and set the rotation to -360. Everything looks great until it’s time to go back to normal in the second transition. Now, the letters M,Y,S,T and R,F,L,I,P all do a little rotational dance.

WORKAROUND:
It’s the combination of SpinY and Distribute that causes the weirdness.
Add a 1 Frame Pose with no pose actions attached. As we moved -360 deg, we no longer need Spin Y because we’re back where we started. I have a feeling that this could be the easy workaround to a lot of potential problems. If something’s not animating the way you’d like, you might give the 1 frame pose a try.

BUG OR NOT:
I say bug. ZW?

[Brandt Krueger]

POTENTIAL BUG DESCRIPTION:
When trying to grab or move something in PAFx, nothing appears to happen. In this example, I was trying to move the time slider and finally realized that I was getting the handles for resizing the windows in the FCP user interface which was underneath the PAFx window. The slider wasn’t moving and it appeared nothing was happening. Eventually when I closed the PAFx window, I realized I had resized my Viewer and Canvas windows.

ANSWER FROM ZAXWERKS:
I’ve noticed some funkyness with the PAFx sitting in front of certain
FCP tools/UI elements. I think this is an OS X issue – since we’re
using Carbon for our messaging and FCP is using the new Cocoa. I’m
guessing the system is getting a little confused and not understanding
that our Carbon window is in front of everything.

SOLUTION (from me, not from ZW):
Adjust your PAFx interface to keep important things away from the boundaries of your FCP windows and save it as a custom view. OR, if you have two monitors and you’re going to be in there a while, move the whole window to the other monitor. Unfortunately next time you open it it will move back to its original position.

STATUS:
BUG.

[Brandt Krueger]

This was my initial post in the forum. I still find it quite frightening, and unfortunately it’s not the kind of thing Matt can reproduce on his end.

Here’s what happened. Not once, but TWICE!

I started my first major project involving PAFx and had made about 30 ten second fly-inny, swoop-aroundy, zoom-outy titles, and was really grooving on how quickly PAFx was working. All of a sudden, BLAMO. FCP crashed. “No problem” I thought. I had been saving regulary, plus there’s the autosave from FCP. I opened my file that I had saved just minutes before (before I had started on the fatal title). I went to edit one of my already built titles and received the initial “Click to get started” box. I don’t know how it’s even possible, but somehow the crash caused every instance of PAFx in that project to reset to nothing. I sent the file to Matt at Zaxwerks, and he confirmed- no data in those clips.

Same with the autosave version. Now how is THAT possible? No idea, but about 5 clips into rebuilding the project it happened again.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION:
I removed some plugins that I was no longer using, as well as some trial versions of Boris Red that had expired. I trashed my FCP preferences and did a startup. (Google “Trashing FCP Preferences” and “MAC hold shift reboot” for more info). You might want to try them one at a time, as any or all of it might have been the cure.

Since I have done this, I have not had any problems.

WORD FROM ZAXWERKS:
They recommend not only saving early and often, but also saving to different files on a regular basis. Though I have not had any problems as mentioned above, I have, just to be safe for now, been saving as Project 1, Project 2, and Project 3 in a cycle.

[Brandt Krueger]

That’s an interesting one, Matt. Seems like there should be some way to streamline that up a bit. My current direction winds up with the titles being re-imported and rendered in FCP, while it sounds like you’re actually using the proper subtitle channels on the DVD.

Tell you what, though, when I’m done sorting out my own particular problems, I’ll put some thought into it.

Anyone else?

[Brandt Krueger]

Thanks for the thoughts, folks! I will proceed with caution.