[Burt Hazard]

I’d just add that both AE and Motion are excellent pieces of software of course. And AE has had lots of years of development behind it as well as thousand of plugins etc. developed for it. Having said that I personally had weaned myself off of AE a fair while ago because I realized that I do all my motion graphics within Motion. One of the core differences is that in Motion you have the incredible flexibility to work with Motion’s procedural Behaviors as well as the established keyframe methods. In fact, you have the ability to bake Behaviors into keyframes in order to perform specific adjustmentts and work with Behaviors alongside keyframes, a pretty incredible way to work. With the power of the Particle Emitter, Replicator, Paint tool (which allows you to choose between a myriad of Shape Styles), and a quasi-3D motion graphics environment (“2.5D” really), you have an incredibly fast tool for creating motion graphics. Actually to be fair AE is sort of “2.7D” ’cause it gives you even more 3D capabilities like being able to import actual scenes from 3D apps like Cinema 4D.

I seem to remember that Apple had originally used former Discreet/Autodesk engineers to design Motion, which of course would explain anomalous features such as the Flame-style Gestures, but in a way I think they did an incredible job of devising a new motion graphics paradigm. But who knows if Apple will ax this app in the future!

[Burt Hazard]

Thanks guys,

I went ahead and bought and installed this pup (I’ll wait until the dust settles on FCPX itself; if it ever does) and I’ve got to say it’s a pretty sweet piece kit. 🙂

[Burt Hazard]

They also still have it at Macmall…but for how much longer.

[Burt Hazard]

Also, there’s a Rain macro on the Shake installer disk in the “Cookbook” macros folder (Image Macros>Rain Macro) which you could install and play around with.

The funny thing is, rain (drops, at least) are actually one of the few effects that is harder to shoot practically, of course since water droplets are transparent. It can be done, but it usually isn’t that dramatic. (For instance there are scenes of the Ben Stiller EXTRAS episode that were shot while it was actually raining but you literally can’t tell.)

[Burt Hazard]

And definitely download the Captain’s Blowout Filter if you don’t already have it: https://pistolerapost.com/pluginz/ (courtesy of Patrick Sheffield and Captain Mench).

[Burt Hazard]

Yeah, it is pretty annoying, but like so many things I’ve just gotten used to it! 🙂

I’ve run into this type of problem because I’m doing my main compositing work in Shake but all my main roto work in Silhouette Roto. I had bought the FCP/AE plugin version of Silhouette previously and at the time had thought it was a pretty neat idea, but have lived to regret it since I’m working with image sequences in Shake projects, so I then have to convert ’em to self-contained QT movs to bring into FCP, place the Silhouette Roto filter on ’em, etc.; a really cumbersome way of working (although I’d have to export the shapes back into Shake anyway). And because of the non-linear editor drop-frame etc. nature of FCP, a lot of times I will have to deal with missing a final frame in which I have to tweak the roto shapes directly in Shake’s cumbersome bezier rotoshapes which was what I was trying to avoid in the first place!

But for me the better solution will be to upgrade to the most recent standalone version of Silhouette so I can just work with image sequences natively. (Otherwise, handles are the way to go.)

[Burt Hazard]

Actually Blender is open source, i.e., totally free and has nothing to do with Autodesk. And they also have a Newtek Lightwave and a Maxon Cinema 4D forum here at the Cow. You might want to check out the Vue forums on https://www.cornucopia.com.

Your idea is a good one but I also think they try to create new forums when they have a forum leader(s) that has enough expertise to start fielding questions right away.

[Burt Hazard]

I haven’t purchased the upgrade yet but I’m pretty excited about Motion 4’s new feature that allows you to link behavior parameters, etc. to each other; that in itself is a killer ability, on par with AE’s expression “pick-whip.”

[Burt Hazard]

I make the lazy slouch “gofer” coffee, sweep the editing room & green rooms, clean the monitors, etc. 🙂

Hey wait a minute, I am the assistant as well! It ain’t so grand after all! 🙁

[Burt Hazard]

As a follow-up to the clipping issue, I did a quick Wiki search and discovered that nowadays Adobe Audition, Audacity, Sound Forge, and Nero have some kind of audio peak restoration capabilies, but of course with Sound Forge and Nero you’d need a PC as well. 🙂

And they do point out that they do offer useful results with partially clipped audio.