Chris Evans
Forum Replies Created
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John’s description is fantastic. You may want to add a curves adjustment to go along with the white solid that brightens your smoke up so it blends into the white solid a little better. Use the same linear reveal or mask.
If you wanted to add a little displacement, turbulent displace on a masked adjustment layer won’t work because you don’t have anything to cover it up like the tutorial you posted (try it and you’ll see why). Make a fractal noise layer (multiple ones with Red, Blue, and Green tint effects and Screen transfer mode looks better for this) and precompose it (them). In the precomp, animate a feathered mask across the same as John described the white solid. Then use that precomp as a displacement map on your text and it should give it just a little displacement as it animates on. Remember the displacement map goes on your text and not the precomp.
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Set an in and out point. On the right side of the Program Monitor window, it shows the duration.
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Until you’re rendering for delivery, you should keep everything as high quality as possible. For that situation, I’d render an .avi or .mov with no codec or animation codec. Or you could do a PNG sequence.
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It’s tough. I’d probably just put a black solid over the old letters with the new numbers over it (obviously color corrected to match) and just line up the background with the border already there, ignoring the shadows. Kinda pretending that section isn’t reflective. If that looks weird, I’d make the numbers a little smaller and feather the edge of that background solid so the line between reflections and non-reflections isn’t so obvious. If both of those are simply completely unacceptable, you could try and copy the reflections from the area around the numbers and manually animate them over the numbers while it’s close and kinda fade that out as it gets farther away. That last option is a lot of work to get it to look correct and is probably unnecessary.
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Should be easy enough with the Magic Want Tool. If you click in a country, the selection shouldn’t go past the white border.
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Very likely, I think it would have been faster to try it than asking here though.
I’d use Mocha for my first try, since it’s a planar tracker, it should have a pretty easy time with this. If it has problems, you could try a 4 corner motion track in After Effects. I think it’s gonna be more difficult to change the numbers and keep the reflection.
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Sometimes, it’s helpful to know why this is happening. H.264 is a fantastic codec for final delivery because of it’s ability to compress videos to such a small size while still retaining decent quality. The issue is that the way h.264 compresses uses a lot of math to take one frame and using motion prediction formulas to create the next and/or previous few or many frames without saving all those frames individually. It’s way more complicated than that and I don’t know much more than that, but that’s the general idea. You may already know that, but the important thing to take away from that is that when you’re playing it, it requires the CPU to do a lot more calculations in order to give you a picture than a larger file where the limiting speed is just the transfer speed from the hard drive. When you’re just playing it (like in VLC player), the CPU can keep up just fine, but when you’re editing, that takes more oomph and it’s difficult to get that even with good CPUs. If you bring in a clip that doesn’t start with one of those keyframes, it’s gonna have to do a lot of extra math to display those couple frames.
It’s more complicated than that, but it’s the general idea and hopefully helps you understand why it’s so difficult. It’s not a fault of Adobe or GoPro, just the nature of the products.
Kinda unnecessary information, but hopefully it’s interesting at least.
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CC Split. Exactly what you’re looking for.
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Your CPU and RAM are the most important. I’d recommend buying finding the best combo of those that you can. Don’t get something with a crappy graphics card and keep it Nvidia. Go with at least 1GB or 2GB GPU. You’ll probably want something with at least a decent sized hard drive so you don’t have to work with footage directly on an external hard drive. An SSD would be nice, but you may have trouble finding a good one at that price point and it’s not too big of a deal. SSD’s speed up opening programs and some things in the program like searching effects and opening add-ons or scripts, but most of the time it doesn’t actually speed up your workflow. If you only get an SSD, you’ll probably have to put all your footage on external hard drives and have them plugged in all the time to work, which isn’t too bad if you don’t move a lot, so it’s something to consider. I recommend an SSD plus a large HDD, but if you can’t find that, just get a big HDD.
I’ll bullet point it for you. But don’t ignore the paragraph above.
CPU: Best you can get. Primary Concern.
RAM: Best you can get. Secondary Concern. Minimum 8GB, Strongly recommend 16GB.
GPU: Minimum Nvidia something.
Storage: Minimum 500GB HDD.
Screen: Minimum 1920×1080.Of the two you’ve got listed there, the one with 16GB of RAM is better, the difference in GPU won’t make too much difference, but the RAM will.
Brands? Ask 100 people and you’ll get 105 different answers. Just find the one that gets you the best hardware for the best price and keep good care of it. Read reviews on the laptops and see what people say. Look for things like build quality in the reviews, since your Mac Mini lasted you 10 years, I imagine you’ll want something that will last that long again, so pay attention to that. And you’ll probably want to get insurance on it if you’re using this for work, in the unlikely event your computer dies, you’ll regret not having it.
Keep backups of everything. Keep backups of everything. Keep backups of everything.
Do you need a laptop? Consider getting a desktop?
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You could try the Warp Stabilizer effect.