Brian Lynn
Forum Replies Created
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Its hard to suggest anything without knowing where your talent level is or seeing the footage you’re working with…
Are you competent in rotoscoping? Motion tracking?
Spend some time and watch some sports… Watch the commercials and the openers. A pro football game would probably be your best bet with your subject. Pick a few clips you like that don’t look too complex and try to reproduce something similar.
Or pick an effect you like that you can’t do and come back to the Cow and get the help you need =)
Brian
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Yeah its usually easier to select the text by clicking the layer itself.
The jitter on the text… how fast does it move? Is it a hard edge text? Try applying a Fast Blur of 1 or 2 and try it again. This usually isn’t as much of an issue on horizontal motion, though it might help. Without seeing the jitter its hard to try and help…
Can you post a clip of the jittery text move?
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I would suggest requesting a dedicated machine, off the coporate security protocols, that you can use as a render machine…
Another option is rendering to image sequences intead of video clips when you have a complex project. This will allow you to start and stop the render at will.
When I stop a render of an image sequence (at least in CS3) the render cue places a new render cue in line which which automatically picks up the frames where the first render left off.
After Effects has an option for numbering images, I leave mine set so that it numbers images based on frame number… So if something does super-crash and I can’t use the automatic restart that the cue makes, I can go to the render folder, and check the number on the last frame rendered. Then I can go back into my AE project, change the time from a clock counter to a frames counter, set my work area to start at the first frame that wasn’t rendered, and restart the render from that point without having to redo the entire thing.
As far as I know the only “post render” action you can do is set in the Output Module tab in a drop down menu, and does not include a log-off after render… There is also Aerender which is found here:
Windows: \Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CS3\Support Files
Mac OS: /Applications/Adobe After Effects CS3
It has lots of rendering options for automation, but I dont think it includes a log off method.
Brian Lynn
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Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects: Essential and Advanced Techniques, 4th Edition by Chris and Trish Meyer
an absolute must read!
CreativeCow and the other tutorial sites it supports i.e. VideoCopilot.net, and typically any instructional site listed in posts here are good and worth a look.
CreativeCow and some of the other forums style sites will be an immense help with the incredible access the Cow gives you to extraordinarily talented people.
Lynda.com is one of my favorite resources for lots of great software tuts on a large variety of areas from After Effects to MS Word and more! But… its not free. The “basics” are free but to get into the more advanced its a pay site. And the “basics” are good!! I think its totally worth it, the lessons are timed well, easy to follow, and broken down in small chunks so you’re not overloaded.
Brian Lynn
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Can you change the text? Not the color, but the actual text itself? What happens if you select it and try to add to the line or edit the text?
What version of After Effects are you using?
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If you’re not displaying across multiple verticle plasmas with a Vista Spyder with a few DX4 outputs, then I would use the same method you are to do what you are doing.
Only thing you really need to know is what direction the screen is going to rotate, or render out clockwide 90 and counterclockwise 90 clips to cover yourself if you can’t find out ahead of time.
Brian Lynn
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I shouldn’t have to pay $500 for another silly media compressor program when I’ve already spent 1000s on what I have… I’m not a fan of Sorenson products anyway… they scare me…
Even the install for Sorenson Squeeze tells you basically that some things CRASH with FFDSHOW installed, so you can “blacklist it” where when you run certain programs it will pretend like its not even installed… This freaks me out to no end! I don’t want scary stuff like this on my system just so I can handle some silly non-standard compressed what ever the heck this is…
Still no idea where that Welcome screen comes from in the screen shot, it doesn’t appear to be part of anything Sorenson.
Windows Media player will play the clips now, but anything QuickTime based will not, like After Effects and QTPro.
I am using this “Squeeze” trial to produce a watermarked sample to see if it is really producing a useable video on export.
I wish some one could just say “oh yeah… I’ve seen that… its because some idiot was using cheap tools to make the video and its broken!”
But that hasn’t happened yet =)
Brian -
I had posted this same issue with another clip back in May in the main AE forums. I put the clip up in an FTP (which is down currently) and a member downloaded it and was able to recompress it using Sorenson Squeeze 4.5.
So I downloaded a trial of Sorenson 5, and sure enough it works…
So why does some junk like Sorenson work, yet a full blown professional tool like After Effects or Final Cut Pro can’t touch this clip??
Also interesting: before I installed the Sorenson 5 trial Windows Media Player would not play the file… now it will!
What the heck is going on!
Thanks for the responses! =)
Brian -
Yeah I wish I had not ever seen it either.
On my PC when I use MPEG Stream Clip it first tells me the file format is not recognizable. Then it asks me if I want to cancel, or open anyway, if I tell it to Open Anyway then MPEG Stream Clip gives me this error:
Apple QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component is not installed…
Please uninstall QuickTime completely. Then install QuickTime Alternative 1.81 (exactly this version), making sure the “Extra QuickTime plugins” checkbox is enabled.
Alternatively, if you have QuickTime and you don’t want to uninstall it, you can buy the MPEG-2 Playback Componenet from Apple Computer.
You can find the QuickTime Alternative here:
(blah blah blah gives a URL and some unimportant other text from here on)Such an odd problem…
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What version of AE are you using? Are you PC or Mac? Do you have any adjustment layers? Sorry for shooting back your questions with questions… Racking my brain trying to figure out what you have going on there!