Brendan Coots
Forum Replies Created
-
I totally understand where you’re coming from, and as an ex-freelancer I agree with most of what you’re saying. The problem is, those rate squeezes are coming form the top, as in the paying clients, not from the studios themselves. For any artist to attack a studio for these things is to completely ignore the realities and dynamics of the very industry they claim to have a such a handle on. Here’s an article illustrating my point quite nicely:
https://www.variety.com/article/VR1117965871.html?categoryid=13&cs=1
As a production manager I push hard to get the budgets needed to perform the work properly, but a lot of clients are getting very hip to the fact that they can play studios against each other and put the squeeze on. If I fight too hard for a large budget, I risk losing the job altogether. A balance has to be struck as a result. It’s very foolish for people to assume that all studios should pay top dollar on every project that comes around, or they are somehow “cheating” everyone. Ask around and just about every studio manager will tell you that few jobs have the budget to do that. You work with what you’re given. I’d love to have high-dollar expert artists on every job, but reality is reality.
For my small studio, that balance is paying what we think is fair, and what most other studios in our area seem to be paying. At our current day rate, artists would be making almost $160,000 a year, which is 3-4 times the local median income. I think that’s fair, but if there are artists who don’t, they are free to hunt around until they get the rate they want. I suspect that the $60/hr artists are making more annually than the $100 artist simply because they are getting more work.
Another dynamic that people just HAVE to accept is that there is a literal flood of new talent coming into this industry that are young, hungry for work and very talented. They will often jump at the chance to make $30 an hour. If I then have to choose between hiring the hungry talented guy for $50/hr or the similarly talent artist who insists he is worth $100/hr, which do you think I will choose? That downward price pressure is all around us, from the client on down to the new entries into the talent pool, and again, to blame it all on the studio who is playing middle-man is ignoring the realities of the marketplace.
-
Particular is probably your best bet unless you can afford to purchase a separate app like Particle Illusion. Particular can seem pretty daunting, but only because there are so many controls, many of which can be ignored in your case. Here’s a few settings that will push you in the right direction, but I don’t have AE open so some of these points are from memory:
1. Use an expression to tie the Particular emitter’s position to the position of a star layer created in AE or Illustrator, etc. Place the particular layer behind the star layer so that any emitted particles come from behind it.
2. Focus on just a few particular settings at first, such as particle type, number of particles, velocity and lifespan:
– For particle type, use star or something other than the default. Apply the glow effect to your particular layer to give them that sparkly look.
– For # of particles, try a high value at first just so you can see what you’re doing, maybe 1,000.
– For lifespan, set this to something like 1 second, again just so you can see the effect clearly and adjust it later. This setting will cause the particles to “die” 1 second after they are emitted. You will later need to adjust this to taste.
– Velocity controls how far from their origin point particles will shoot over time. Since you want the particles to leave a trail behind the star, the velocity should be set quite low so they aren’t shooting all over the place.
Once that all works out roughly to your liking, start playing with things like the color and opacity. Particular has some really cool “color over life” and “opacity over life” settings that allow you to set a color when they are born, and the color they become as they get older. To use these tools you simply draw a curve in the red box they provide that defines when the color/opacity should be changed. For opacity, a straight line from the upper left to lower right of the box will cause them to fade evenly over time. Do this with the color over life as well, which will cause them to change color over time (giving a nice rainbow cheese effect!) and fade out as they die, so they don’t just pop off of the screen.
From there, animating your star should give you a rough approximation of what you’re looking for. If any of this doesn’t make sense, or you get hung up on anything, post here and I’ll try to help further.
Good luck!
-
It really depends on the subject matter and the work you need to perform, but generally speaking the workflow should be no different solely because of longer run times.
If it makes you more comfortable, you can always break up your project into individual compositions and string them together on a master timeline.
If you can post more information about your project, specifically what is giving you trouble, we can probably help out more.
-
First of all, public skewerings are clever on sites meant for teenagers, but not grown-up sites like Creative Cow. This is especially true of the variety that aren’t backed up by any data, facts or even anecdotal evidence to support the claims made. Would you care to at least list the studios in town that pay $1k/day? Because I’ve worked at most of them over the past 7 years and I don’t recall hearing of any artist making that much, especially the ones with the really bad attitudes.
But then again, maybe you’re right – I’m a cheap slave-driving jerk because my studio, only in its second year of operation, can’t afford to pay After Effects artists $260,000/year (aka $1k/day).
-
The cross marks are used to track the camera’s movement using motion tracking software. They are just tape, but motion tracking software uses the cross marks to detect where the camera is moving. The software generates a camera file that can be imported into 3D programs and After Effects. This camera moves exactly as your real-world camera did, so any graphics or other elements you position in 3D space will appear to be in the video. It’s much more complicated than that, and takes a lot of experience to do right. After Effects has a built in motion tracker, but it’s only 2D so you can’t really do as much with it.
As for how to get rid of them, you need to mask them out. Any that the actor walks in front of will require you to hand-animate the masks.
-
Well, a good start would be to turn the sound off…
Seriously though:
1. convert the the footage to black and white
2. apply Levels and blow the highlights/mids out while increasing the blacks. Old film was poorly made and required very strong lights to expose. Therefore, everything looked more blown out and contrasty.
3. create a black solid. create a circlular-shaped mask that touches each edge of the frame. feather it out heavily and invert it. Turn the opacity of this layer down to something like 10-20% and you’ve got an easy vignetting effect.
4. introduce that subtle flickering effect by keyframing the opacity of the footage between 100% and something like 97% fairly rapidly.
5. Add very mild grain using After Effect’s grain tools
6. DON’T do things like simulated scratches, they are almost always a dead giveaway that it’s a fake.
-
There are several things that seem consistent when working with remote artists:
– Communication is much more difficult, and therefore mistakes are more common
– I rarely feel like remote artists are working as hard/fast as they would if they were in-house. Not that I’m a slave driver at all, but remote artists are noticeably slower, especially once you get into the second or third week of a project.
– It introduces the need for file transfers/DVDs to get new assets to the artist, and to get their deliverables, which takes up valuable time.
– All the files for their portion of the project are living on their machine at home, and therefore we’re forced to rely on their backup habits to ensure we don’t lose everything and have to start over from scratch. The only alternative is frequent external drive swaps and such. It’s a risk.
All of that said, I was a freelancer for many years so I know how it goes, but it does become more difficult from a studio perspective.
-
Actually, After Effects 7.0 and earlier is NOT multi-threaded.
AE CS3 does take advantage of multiple cores, but any version prior is lacking. You will see a speed increase with more cores using 7.0, but nowhere near what you would if it were truly multi-threaded.
Since CS3 is coming out in a matter of weeks from what I hear, it’s a sound investment to buy a multicore/multiprocessor rig. Problem is, for each core you should have 2GB RAM installed or AE will not allow you to render multiple frames at once. Since 32-bit PCs are limited to 3GB RAM, Mac Pros are a very nice alternative.
-
Needless to say, that completely depends on your skill set. I am a Creative Director/owner of a studio in the San Francisco area, and I base the rates I pay on three tiers of skill level (entry-level to pro), with entry level paying $35/hr. or so, and pro level paying $50-$60/hr. I’m sure rates here are different than Boston, but that may help.
As an aside, when contractors are working from home I have never factored their rig into the rate, and to date no one has asked me to. I don’t really care if you have a 32-core mainframe, as long as you can deliver quality work. Having a lot of processing power doesn’t necessarily mean you will finish faster, better or be free of the risk of losing data etc… Another part of this issue is that having contractors work from home adds a LOT of extra work for me and the producer, so it’s a bit of a wash.
-
You might try saving the file out of Illustrator as an older version. I instinctively save Illustrator files meant for AE as “Illustrator Version 10.” When you choose Save As… you will be given a dropdown menu to select legacy versions.