[Christian Buettner]

Hi Jeff …

just to let you know: meanwhile I figured out that my overlay problems are stranger than I thought, but I fixed them using Encore CS2.
After some testing I noticed, that the offest worsens the more I moved the buttons off the center of the image. The offset increased on both sides. Lets say I moved the buttons more to the left side, the overlay started to ignore the last text letters. Moving it to the right resulted in the first letters to not be overlayed correctly.
So there seems to be a major bug.

Just for testing I tried to open the project in Encore CS2, which was still installed on another windows machine. Fortunately the project opend, just complaining about smart objects it can´t handle.
Although the color of my background images was appearing completly desaturated, the overlay worked correctly on every menu. And after burning and checking on a tv even the colors turned out to be fine.

So I´m at leat finished with this project, but I think that there is a major bug in CS4 concerning overlays.

Cheers

Christian

[Christian Buettner]

Hi Joe,

yep I did that.
But I guess I´ve found the cause. At least I hope. But am I wrong by asuming that the source shouldn´t be square pixels? My client handed me 768×576, instead of 720×576 non square. I gave it a try by changing square to non ssquare, which gave better results.

[Christian Buettner]

Hi Jeff

1. Mac or PC?
Mac

2. Is this a brand-new menu in a brand-new CS4 project?
I´ve been working on that for some time know. I have this crazy client who wants about 80 pages on a dvd. told him a website would do better, but as long as I get payed?

3. If the answer to #2 is no, try it and let us know what happens.
I´ll try …

4. Is the problem *exactly* the same on every text button? IOW, is the last letter of text always “un-highlighted” and by exactly the same amount?
Yes.

5. Do you get *exactly* the same results no matter which of the 4 methods you listed above were used?
Yes

6. Can you post screenshots? The menu viewer and the fully-expanded layers panel would be helpful.
I´ll try to send some tomorrow.

-Jeff

[Christian Buettner]

Hey Chris,

I´m also not a lawyer. I´ve read the Wiki link you posted and I take it that way: the article mainly refers to an employer-employee relationship. Converted to my case would be: if one of my employees (got 2 at the moment)would have made this AE project, the legal rights would belong to me.
Or maybe it´s the famous thin line we´re walking on. Although Microsoft did hire a lot of people to code Windoze, they wouldn´t hand over all the code to you if you buy it in a store.

[Christian Buettner]

hehe I´m reading what you´ve typed, but it still looks chinese;)

[Christian Buettner]

I see it excactly as Tom does. Meanwhile I´ve spoken to some other designer guys around here. They gave me sort of a chart (distributed by a coalition of designers) that gives you a factor by which to multiply your contracted price. Tom, you nearly hit it … taking into account a couple of items such as rights, area (worldwide, national, etc.) and period of usage (in this case … eternal) it would give me a factor of 6.
But here comes, as usual, the odd part: my client is pointing the gun at me. I didn´t even mentioned the factor that is officially used to determine creative work pricing. The old and disgusting game of push and pull has started. I really really hate that.
I mean this agency I´ve been working now for quite some time … they should be considered as pros, but they act foolish all along the way. First: they promise the source files to their client (so the client will never come again with this project, so no more money can be made out of it). Second: agencies are so concerned about legal affairs most of the time, they even do rights management on 2 frames of stock footage and all that. But in my case they completely forgot about me:(, or they know that can somehow enslave me and pull the “more jobs or now jobs”-gun.
These are the time when I start to think that in my next life I´d better become a wild life ranger.

[Christian Buettner]

Yes Jan, that´s what I mean.
If you look close enough everyone can reproduce the work of others and learn stuff (many many thanks to Dan here;) ) by just looking around and check what others do. In essence all that AE stuff is no secret. But the way you utilize all that knowledge to create work of your own is the creative part. And that is hard to put in money;)

So guys what would you say: let´s say the animation is worth about 5,000 dollar. What would you tend to charge if the client wants your AE files … AFTER the work is done? As it has been pointed out … at current stage my setup is just as I made it and it would be impossible for someone else to step in and understand whats going on. For that to happen I guess I´d need a couple of hours to clean up the project and convert expressions to keyframes etc.

[Christian Buettner]

add:

sorry, I forgot … I already got the bg etc. I want to how I get this distortion around the edges. I´ve tried Distort with a Ramp-Layer and everything, but it won´t give me those subtle “reflections” and the other cool stuff going on.

[Christian Buettner]

Well … what worked for you just worked for me!

Thanks a lot, I wouldn´t have figured that out on my own;)

[Christian Buettner]

Hey there …

I´m quite lucky because I´m not the director or the writer;) I´m just the editor.
I already gave all the different storys a different color grading. I think what the client maybe wanting is sort of a “dirty” vignette, if you know what I mean. So what would be the best way? I think trying stuff like film damage wouldn´t do the trick. I would need something like expression driven “grow stuff” or other ornament like objects which react to the beat.
I personally agree that a decent color grading is all that this clip needs and that adding graphical elements is a waste.