[Burt Hazard]

[Rob Grauert] “Also, in one of my classes about a year and a half ago I remember one of my teachers mentioning something about device that you hook up to your microphone. It allows you to set the levels, but if someone screams it doesn’t record above the set level. What is that device?”

An audio compressor/limiter

A hardware box would be a good thing to have for digital audio, for although FCP of course does have a compressor filter, it doesn’t help you if your levels are already clipped/distorted (I’ve heard people say that there isn’t any way to recover from this but I did see an article or ad in an audio magazine that showed a tantalizing picture of a piece of software/plugin/DAW or hardware that claimed to actually be able to mathematically reconstruct the peaks of clipped digital audio waveforms. Must be expensive though. And I forget what it was!)

[Burt Hazard]

Yes, you can using an animated mask shape(s) and blending modes to achieve this sort of effect in Motion.

[Burt Hazard]

I would just add that if you wanted to see the text as well you could use the following recipe:

Group 1 Normal
Text 1 Stencil Alpha
Text 2 Stencil Alpha
BG Graphic Normal
Group 2 Pass Through
Text 1 Copy Normal
Text 2 Copy Normal

Actually Stephen’s method results in a much more interstesting effect anyway; when I was playin’ around in Motion this morning I realized this has nice fututure possibilities for quasi-abstract text backgrounds.

[Burt Hazard]

The Motion behaviors either tend to be procedural (i.e., generated by algorithims) or possibly “pre-baked,” like the text behaviors, so sometimes the workaround is to render/”bake” your text with the effect, then reimport it and add a scrub filter to reverse it. Also you could play around with other text behaviors like evaporate. But probably your best bet would be to use the Sequence Text Behavior to customize your own effect.

[Burt Hazard]

Funny and excellent article.

It does never cease to amaze me how much people whine and complain nowadays about editing, color correction, compositing when it is so much easier to do this stuff now.

To take rotoscoping for an example, CINEFEX had a 2001:A SPACE ODYSSEY retrospective in which they described having the roto artists painstakingly paint the outlines of the Discovery model shots that were projected onto their work tables. Then they had a second team (low paid art students) paint in the outlines. Then they had to bring each cell-sheet to an Oxberry animation stand, make sure everything was correctly calibrated and registered, film each plate frame by frame. Then, of course, they had to develop the film and run the travelling mattes through an optical printer along with the painstakingly created starfield backgrounds. And if they had a problem in the process, they had to do it again!

[Burt Hazard]

I’m not sure how you’re going to avoid rendering by performing these operations. I don’t know what compositing app you’re using, but I’m familiar with Shake in which you have to render out your Shake scripts (using FileOut nodes) no matter what and of course you’d have to render out your Color projects. In Shake you could do both your dustbusting and color grading within the app which would save one step.

[Burt Hazard]

Yeah, makes sense.

I think the trick is to first create a your shape, and then create an image mask (Object>Add Image Mask), and finally drag your shape into the Mask Source image well.

[Burt Hazard]

Also you can check out:

SHAKE 4
Marco Paolini
(excellent book, although of course it is just like seeing just the tip of of the iceberg that is Shake)

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF VISUAL EFFECTS
Damian Allen and Brian Connor
(excellent Shake/compositing cookbook)

And I can also recommend the Gnomon Shake DVD series by Matt Linder and Gary Jackemuk (very comprehensive covering keying, rotoing, tracking, transforms, color correction, and although I took notes during the Expressions and Macros section in the last DVD, I mentally went on a holiday during the Unix Scripting/Unix Command Shell bits, but it might be something eventually you might be interested in).

I found that I started making real progress on learning Shake by using it in real projects and shooting experimental visual effects shots. Then you can go back through the manual and figure out what each node actually does; yeah, it does take time!

For further explorations into the world of compositing I can also highly recommend Steve Wright’s books: COMPOSITING VISUAL EFFECTS: ESSENTIALS FOR THE ASPIRING ARTIST & DIGITAL COMPOSITING FOR FILM AND VIDEO. Also:

FILMING THE FANTASTIC: A GUIDE TO VISUAL EFFECTS CINEMATOGRAPHY
Mark Sawicki

EXPLORING VISUAL EFFECTS: FROM STORYBOARDS TO MINIATURES & COMPOSITING-VISUAL EFFECTS THEORY, PROCESS AND PIPELINE
Billy Garfield Woody II

MATCHMOVING: THE INVISIBLE ART OF CAMERA TRACKING
Tim Dobbert
(I’m working through this one right now)

[DIGITAL] LIGHTING AND RENDERING
Jeremy Birn

THE HDRI HANDBOOK: HIGH DYNAMIC RANGE IMAGING FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS AND CG ARTISTS
Christian Bloch

[Burt Hazard]

Well, in Motion you could try using the Distortion>Bulge filter and tweaking the parameters. Or maybe play around with the Displace filter and adding a “convex cylindrically-shaped” gradient to its image well.

(If you have extra funds to play with, I can recommend Shake. It has a special Warp section with LensDistort and PinCushion nodes to deal with lens aberrations and stuff like that.)

Or you could even use the patented Steve Jobs “Reality Distortion Field” that gets rid of most problems by simply wishing them away! 🙂

[Burt Hazard]

Filters>Distortion>Displace, Ripple, Underwater, Wave, etc.