Chris Zwar
Forum Replies Created
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Maybe I’m thinking of something different, but CC cylinder or CC sphere should be easier to use. Start with a flat composition with a 2:1 ratio, eg 1000×500, create a flat version of your light beams, then apply the cc cylinder effect and adjust the settings to suit.
-Chris Zwar
Motion Graphics Designer
Will animate for food -
Without resorting to complex 3D apps or liquid simulations, I think the most simple solution would be to composite the shot of the person’s hand with a matching “hole”, filmed in-camera.
If you’re shooting this yourself, try locking the camera off, film the person sticking their hand in the bucket, then don’t move the camera and try using a power-drill with a kitchen beater or similar to create a whirlpool in the bucket for your “hole”. However you create the hole in your water, I really think that doing it “for real” and videoing it will give you the best results. Maybe you can use glass, or plastic bags, or compressed air, or some other trickery to generate your hole- but it will probably look much better than anything you can come up with in a comparable time on a computer.
Then in After Effects it becomes a compositing exercise to matte the different parts of your actor and the background plate together to get your look.
I’m really just thinking out loud here,
-Chris Zwar
Motion Graphics Designer
Will animate for food -
Create a square composition, add vertical stripes (either use the grid plugin, or just add some solids, or even the checkerboard plugin and mosaic set to 1 vertical block), then use the polar coordinates plugin. Set the polar co-ords to “rect to polar”, which is the opposite of the default, and make it 100%.
-Chris Zwar
Motion Graphics Designer
Will animate for food -
Create a square composition, add vertical stripes (either use the grid plugin, or just add some solids, or even the checkerboard plugin and mosaic set to 1 vertical block), then use the polar coordinates plugin. Set the polar co-ords to “rect to polar”, which is the opposite of the default, and make it 100%.
-Chris Zwar
Motion Graphics Designer
Will animate for food -
Without offering a solution (sorry!), I can suggest that if this is something you’re really into, then try looking at some simple physics equations. There are many which are freely available on the internet, just google for physics and you’ll find lots of free tutorials for undergrads.
After looking at Dan’s site, I went shopping for the book he recommened on Physics for Programmers, only to find that there were several and I didn’t write down the specific author of the one on Dan’s site. After reading through all of them (Borders is good for that) I chose “Mathematics and Physics for Programmers” by Danny Kodicek of Charles River Media Books. It’s got a lot of interesting things in there, many of which will be tedious but rewarding to adapt to After Effects expressions because of the lack of variables between frames, but as Dan says- you just have to loop the equations through everything that has already been done every frame. It isn’t that much harder for the programmer, it’s just slower to process.
Anyway if you’re into that sort of thing, I highly recommend that book.
-Chris Zwar
Motion Graphics Designer
Will animate for food -
Without offering a solution (sorry!), I can suggest that if this is something you’re really into, then try looking at some simple physics equations. There are many which are freely available on the internet, just google for physics and you’ll find lots of free tutorials for undergrads.
After looking at Dan’s site, I went shopping for the book he recommened on Physics for Programmers, only to find that there were several and I didn’t write down the specific author of the one on Dan’s site. After reading through all of them (Borders is good for that) I chose “Mathematics and Physics for Programmers” by Danny Kodicek of Charles River Media Books. It’s got a lot of interesting things in there, many of which will be tedious but rewarding to adapt to After Effects expressions because of the lack of variables between frames, but as Dan says- you just have to loop the equations through everything that has already been done every frame. It isn’t that much harder for the programmer, it’s just slower to process.
Anyway if you’re into that sort of thing, I highly recommend that book.
-Chris Zwar
Motion Graphics Designer
Will animate for food -
Well the grass is always greener…. a year ago I would have agreed with you and I had already begun learning FCP with the intention of switching completely. However since then I have been working freelance in a variety of facilities and all I can say is that (unfortunately) Media 100 appears to be more reliable than FCP. In fact a few weeks ago I was at a facility and there were a group of us working on an urgent project with an overnight turnaround. Two FCP suites kept crashing every time they encountered a timecode break when digitising, of which there were many. We gave up and did the project in older Media 100 suites.
There appear to be many variables with a FCP setup and I’m sure that if you have the right combination of graphics card and drives it’s great. But it may take a while to figure everything out and get it working with a professional level of reliability. I get the feeling that if you’re working with DV then FCP is pretty cool, but as soon as you start looking at uncompressed video and real-time fx then things may sometimes get a bit flaky. Not always, of course, just only when the deadline gets close 😉
Everything I wrote about Media 100 in the earler post is true, but I’d hate to give the impression that Media 100 is the only company that has had bugs in their software. I hope their new SW product is good, because if it is priced favourably compared to FCP then I will seriously consider buying it.
-Chris
Motion Graphics Designer
Will animate for food -
I’m sorry, but you have encountered and old and viscious bug which has nothing to do with your drives and hardware. In the “old days” this used to be referred to as the clip from hell, although I think that there were actually a few different bugs which all did basically the same thing- corrupt your timeline and prevent you from editing.
Many years ago a guy on the IMUG email list called Jason Stelzel figured out an exact series of everyday editing steps needed to produce a corrupt timeline, and personally demonstrated it to Media 100 staff at NAB many years ago (we’re talking 5 or 6 years) ago. The bug has been well documented and discussed on various Media 100 forums and email lists but has never been fixed. Although I haven’t encountered it for several years (I hardly edit now, I’m 95% After Effects) it used to make me so f*****g angry that I wanted to throw the whole system out and replace it. At one stage I wrote an 11 page complaint letter to Media 100 but that didn’t do too much, although at least they acknowledged they got it and they did address some of the issues I raised.
Let me summarise quickly, in case a lot of repressed anger comes bubbling up and I punch a hole in a wall:
– there is a bug in Media 100i in which your timeline can become corrupt. Creative Cow resident David Bogie used to call it “Media 100 eating its own children”. As I said above, it may actually be a few different bugs and some of them may have been fixed since, but basically you will either have one clip in the timeline that will crash your system if you try to edit it (the clip from hell) or else you’ll do something like “swap AB” and suddenly half the clips in your timeline dissapear, or you get a message saying that Media 100 found “overlapping clips” then it will delete a few clips and editing from then on will be really flaky, clips and especially transitions will dissapear randomly.
– the bug has been there for many years, although it was possibly a combination of several bugs, some of which may have been fixed in various revisions, which would explain why it’s reasonably rare. It is only on the Mac version. But it’s definitely something which has happened throughout my entire career as a Media 100 editor.
– you are more likely to encounter the bug if you edit in the timeline, ie. split clips, close gaps, and the swap A/B command seems to play an important role. If you edit in a more traditional 3-point method, or edit in the edit-suite rather than in the timeline you are less likely to encounter the bug. If you have really long clips on one track, and have a few short clips on the other track as cutaways, then you are asking for disaster. I developed the habit of never having “dark green” bits in my timelines, I would split a clip and delete any parts of a long clip that weren’t visible during a cutaway.
– in fairness, version 8.2.2 isn’t exactly new so maybe the bug has been fixed in current and future versions of the software. But it wasn’t fixed for many years even though it was well documented. You are talking about an old bug, but you are using old software.
– it is a software problem and has nothing to do with your hardware, so don’t waste time changing your drives.
– you can try to copy and paste clips into a new timeline but there’s a chance that will be corrupt too.
– as far as I know there isn’t a true solution, and although yelling and swearing can make you feel better it won’t fix anything (I’ve tried hundreds of times). The best bet is to get an older version of the program out of your backups folder and rebuild a new program by copying and pasting clips into a new program a few at a time.
I feel really sorry for you. I hope you haven’t lost too much work. I also hope that considering Media 100 has had 2 different owners since v 8.2.2 was released that this bug isn’t present in the forthcoming Media 100 SW product.
-Chris.
Motion Graphics Designer
Will animate for food -
There’s not much to add to the advice that’s already been given… basically you won’t get a better result in 5.5 without spending money, either by investing in Composite Wizard or by upgrading to 6.5 Pro (ideally both).
Version 7 is getting closer to being released and once it is released version 5.5 will start to look quite old, so I strongly recommend you begin budgeting for the upgrade now in order to make a big leap forward.
-Chris Zwar
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Hi Trug,
I noticed that approximately a month ago you posted a question regarding the cogs tutorial I wrote. If you email me directly- chris@chriszwar.com I’d be happy to elaborate on a few details- I wasn’t able to reply back then.
In regards to keying, I suggest registering at DV garage (dvgarage.com), which has many free tutorials including some on keying- they demonstrate breaking up a video into different parts to use different key settings. The keying tutorials are part of their light-sabre series. One of the tutorials deals specifically with the DV Garage keying plug-in, which they sell, but the principals are the same for keylight.
I love Keylight and think it’s brilliant, however I don’t like the way it tries to key and colour correct at the same time. I use Keylight to pull a key, then use the result as an alpha-matte for a duplicate of the original footage- and then I use the normal colour correction tools (spill supressor, HSL & Levels) to manually colour correct the original layer.
Chris Zwar