Brian Berneker
Forum Replies Created
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Basically you create a null or other 3D object and parent your particle position to it.
Maltaannon’s tutorial on growing vines in AE uses such a technique to keyframe the movement of a light to control the position of particles in Particular. You might want to check that out…
Brian
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If you watch actual hummingbird footage, I think you will find that the wings twist up and down as they flap too. If you put the anchor point of the wing flap layers at the forefront (“shoulder”) of the wing, you can rotate on that axis as well, adding to the effect.
Also, if you are doing the wing flapping in a pre-comp, you might want to extend/slow the timeline, add a more pronounced motion blur (i.e. echo effect), and then time-remap it back to fast speed. If your flaps go faster than the frame rate, then you won’t get any usable blur the regular way, because it won’t have enough frames to sample.
This way you will get a more natural representation of that wing lag on the twist, and the more pronounced blur that occurs with super-fast hummingbird wing flapping. Of course there will be a bit of a premium in terms of render time…
Brian
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I’m thinking adjust your motion track for position and rotation but NOT scale. Or, scale it only a tiny bit, by applying the tracking data to a null and parenting your BG to the null with only slight scaling.
Farther objects in the distance (i.e. mountains) tend to remain roughly the same size (not accounting for perspective objects, trees, the road etc.) I guess if your footage was shot out the back window of a vehicle it might be ok as-is, so I’m assuming you’re constructing the read window shot?
If so, build it with 3D layers – I’ve found that 2D never pulls it off, especially with the side window stuff. You need parallax to make it work. I built an entire desert complete with joshua trees in trapcode Particular once just so I could have side window scrolling, and even then it was merely passable.
Andrew Kramer has a tutorial on this very task in his Serious FX and Compositing DVD.
https://store.creativecow.net/p/52/serious_effects__compositing
Brian
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Have you tried opening that file by itself in a different application and scrubbing to that frame? without knowing what you’re doing in your comp, I’m suspicious of the file somehow.
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Yeah, grow bounds does it nicely… damn, someone beat me to the punch!! 🙂
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Microcosm is a lossless codec with alpha that gives you a decent file size reduction and automatically comes with both mac and windows versions. It’s about $100, but could be handy…
https://www.digitalanarchy.com/micro/micro_main.html
I might add that it does unfortunately come at a slight speed premium, slowing renders just a little, but the file savings are pretty significant.
Brian
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You could even use PDFs if you wanted to, since AE reads them.
I looked around, and there is actually a CC page turn effect that sort of does the trick. You might be able to get away with it, but it’s not truly a 3D effect. If you made it a 3D object, you would see it’s just a 2D effect on the face of your solid or shape, but could work. It’s more like a page curl tear-away rather than fold-over. It allows you to define a front and a back too, and keyframe the fold position.
Brian
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I wish I were more fluent in Vegas to give you the proper answer, but I often run into a similar problem with Final Cut Pro. After some digging, I found there was an aspect setting in the clip bin properties that allowed me to correct it properly (I believe it was actually a response to a post on the forums here). That’s why I’m suggesting you find the similar setting in Vegas.
The other (probably improper) way I used to get around it before that was by opening the clip in Quicktime, pressing command-J (CTRL-J in windows I guess) and going to the visual settings tab of the video track and manually setting the scaled size to 854×480 and resaving. This wasn’t a flawless solution but it got me some headway at least…
Not suprisingly, when using AE rendered files in Premiere it recognizes the aspect perfectly.
Brian
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Is it a specific frame, or a specific spot on the timeline? There was a glitch with a quicktime update a while ago that caused some problems rendering past a number of frames. The most recent update addresses this, but if you for some reason got an older quicktime update, it might be the cause. Get the latest quicktime update and see if that doesn’t fix it.
Brian
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I just looked at the trailer, and it looks like a basic animated comp with some transparency, using layer add mode or something like that, and maybe a bit of lens flare to add to the glassy look.
The little bit of curving could be done with cc-cylinder or cc-sphere but for something that simple, more likely just a punch effect. Should be pretty basic, really…
Brian