[Tim Wilson]

Hmmm, that’s a tougher question. Any of you other biz whizzes have some ideas?

[Tim Wilson]

The fact that they’re coming to you with a budget rather than asking you to give it away for the publicity (“Just tuck a business card in there!”) is a joy and a wonder. My teensy experience with big companies says not to expect the money truck to back up to your door and start dumping bills on your head just because it’s a big company. Budgets are tight all over.

Even if they’re spending a million dollars to put on a one-day conference (I’ve seen it happen), the budget for the gift bags won’t be anything like that.

My approach in these scenarios has been the same as it is with other clients. “What’s your budget? What kind of packaging do you want? What quantity? Give me as much information as you can so I can help you make the choice that will work best for you.”

Even if they say, “I have no idea,” then you still the need the info before you can make a proposal. In any case, it should include a range of options, each of which covers you of course.

It rarely works out exactly on the first pass. But I’ve found that presenting some options and leaving the ball in their court helps. “The price breaks at 10,000 units, so with the color sleeve you want, it’s actually cheaper than doing the 8,000 units you propose. You could also save more with a clear plastic case and a full color label on the disk.”

Or whatever the case may be. No matter what price you come to, they’ll feel better about participating, and you can feel better about not pulling a price out of thin air.

FWIW…

tw

[Tim Wilson]

Nobody would like that more than the folks at Boris, I’m sure.

The logjam is a simple technological one: Peder Norrby uses After Effects to develop his filters, which he intends to be used in After Effects. No other application offers the same set of parameters in the same way (of course), so something is always going to get lost in translation in another app.

If you have other tools that support third-party AE filters (FCP, Avid using Elastic Gasket, etc.), drop some Trapcode filters in. You’ll see for yourself that Boris handles them pretty well when compared to others…but if you want the full experience of an AE filter, AE is the place to be. Filters like Trapcode’s can be reason enough to work there if you don’t already.

tw

[Tim Wilson]

Remember the example I gave of surf footage that showed the limitations for working with water? This is what I was talking about. This is why surfing footage is an excellent example of footage that works best overcranked in the camera. Some effects can’t be created any other way.

As a result, the amazing Pixel Motion mode of Timewarp is simply the wrong tool for a straight time remap like 50%. Better to use frame blending. You may even get good results from one of AE’s older time filters. Heck, any NLE will do a decent job reducing the speed of a clip by 50%, and many will do it in real time.

So if you need a 50% speed change, use the right tool. If you want to use the Timewarp filter for the purpose of experimentation, use footage that’s better suited to it. Actually, nearly anything *but* water will work fine out of the box.

If you want to use the filter with the footage you have, in order to solve a particular problem, then John’s suggestions will get you there.

As always, match the tools to the task. You can sort of drive a nail with your shoe, but you can’t tie your shoes with a hammer at all.

In other words, some problems take more than a few clicks to solve, even with the right tools. Knowing which is which is why they pay you the big money.

And of course we’re happy to help here.

tw

[Tim Wilson]

Depends what you mean by “retailers.” I know some folks who make a grand living by making documentaries for state parks and only selling through the park’s gift shops, local hotels, and the like.

If you mean retailers like Barnes & Noble rather than a local hotel, then yeah, distribution is your only shot. The purchases are done at a corporate level, and while they absolutely make smaller buys (such as from small presses or for specific regions), they can buy from boatloads of them at once with a single account through distributors like Ingram, Publishers Group West, etc. It’s a matter of efficiency.

I was in this end of retailing (as it happens, at Barnes & Noble) for a few years, and never heard about disreputable distributors. But you’ll find that many of them, like publishers, are minutely specialized — regional, scholarly, religious, etc. This more than anything else will dictate which way you might start looking.

But if you are indeed looking to cover an area that you can reach by car, or few enough units that you’re willing to handle order fullfillment and returns by yourself, then go for it.

As with all such things, then, the question is, what’s your business model? What are you trying to do?

[Tim Wilson]

Hmmm, could be an excellent idea for a tutorial. Filters like this aren’t always as easy as they look.

In general, you’re going to want to start with Pixel Motion. The foundation of a technology called Optical Flow, it analyzes the position of pixels in each frame, and creates in-between frames by predicting where new pixels should be placed to create new frames.

It sounds like this is what you’ve done, because you describe some unpleasant surprises with interpolation.

A first step might be to raise the number of iterations, which will also increase the render time, of course.

You might also want to increase the number of motion vectors — that is, the number of elements being tracked to create the new frames.

The other thing to note is that if there’s a whole bunch of motion between frames, and the pixels move different amounts along different axes, it’s harder to predict where each pixel should be.

I once did an optical flow retiming with surfing footage from the ArtBeats library, and it looked fantastic…until the very end, where the wave wrapped in on itself. There was no way for the algorigthm to guess that the pixels had to move in a tight spiral between frames, so it calculated the distance between the pixels linearly, and looked more like a morph than a retiming. Way cool, but not what I was looking for. My solution there was to edit off those last frames and say “See how great it looks!”, but it sounds like you’re having problems in the middle of things.

So as you begin, try using simpler, slower footage to see more success as you begin to experiment. I know the temptation is to begin with dramatic sports footage or something, but your first steps will be firmer with less dynamic footage.

One thing to keep in mind is that AE’s implementation of this technology allows you to specify input channels. The green channel offers the clearest edges, so start there.

Also keep in mind that some footage is going to need more control than even this powerful new filter offers. Those super-duper specialized tools are what third parties are for. Check the Adobe website for third-party timewarp filters — they’re all darn near amazing, and they offer masks to isolate the areas of the frame (not just channels) you’re interested in, and other tools that you may find useful.

Last but not least, keep in mind that many of the shots you see that *appear* to be using this and similar effects are accomplished by overcranking the film or video (Thanks, Varicam!) frame rates. If you have more frames, you don’t need to interpolate — just change the rate. Massive control, teensy-weensy render times.

Without seeing the footage and knowing what you’ve done with each of the parameters, it’s hard to offer more than these few admittedly minor suggestions. If none of these work, pass along some more details and let’s see what we can figure out.

Tim

[Tim Wilson]

The place to do your compositing is actually INSIDE Flash 8.

I know that all caps is considered yelling…but I’m yelling. The compositing in Flash 8 is absolutely jaw-dropping. It’s fun for video, but mark my words: this is the tip of the iceberg. Want to see into the future? Pay attention to the use of video in Flash.

I’m not kidding.

So here’s a link to get you started: https://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/alpha_video_03.html

Note that this is page 3 of 4. For some background on how Flash is accomplishing this, I highly recommend reading the first two pages as well.

Skip down to step 11 on page 3. The first ten steps all deal with After Effects, and you ask how to do it without AE. This is the short version:
1) Build the key in FCP.
2) Export the video into a codec that supports alpha.
3) Use the Flash 8 encoder to convert to FLV.
4) Composite over background in Flash.

As you read the article, you’ll learn that there are advantages to doing it this way rather than using AE’s FLV export, including the addition of encoding markers, crop, and trim.

I’ll say it again — Flash 8 is a revolution and a revelation. You may not know it yet, but you will.

Tim

[Tim Wilson]

On the Boris website, my son: https://www.borisfx.com/products/effects.php

That list also describes limitations with some filters, and the filters within some larger packages that may not work.

Boris’s support for third-party AE filters is unmatched…although if you want full support for all the features that those filters provide, you’ll of course need to use them in After Effects.

Tim

[Tim Wilson]

When you say “outline font,” I assume you mean half a PostScript font — that is, missing the printer font. One, because that’s the proper usage of the word, and two…it won’t work. Using the screen font (the outline) alone causes the jaggies to appear.

Here’s the technology behind it. In other applications, the screen font alone is just fine for producing pretty output on the screen. That’s what screen fonts are for, of course. You’ll only see the jaggies when you print.

Whether you display your text in Boris as raster text or vector text, Boris *builds* the text as a vector element. This is what makes Boris text smooth at even massive sizes. But that smoothness is provided by the vector information contained in the PostScript file — the printer font.

I can think of three workarounds:

1) Find the printer font, install it and you’re good to go.

2) Use a TrueType version of the font you need. (TT combines screen and printer fonts in one package, so easier to keep track of.)

3) Choose another font for which either 1) or 2) is true.

I’d love to tell you to just flip a switch and everything will be fine, but that’s the way it is.

Good luck!

Tim

[Tim Wilson]

[Jon Zanone] “My sense is Liquid is less picky about hardware.”

I think the opposite is true, actually. Except for a very few effects, the video card in Xpress-world is used for display. Mind you, your life will be miserable with display issues…

..however, in Liquid the card is used for EVERYTHING. The first video app to take advantage of GPU processing, Liquid is wired to take advantage of your video card in ways that nobody else does. You can do downright magical things for your performance simply by upgrading your video card (assuming of course that your drives can keep up). It’s a very inexpensive way to beef up your system…but you have to choose wisely.

Having said both of those things, however, the best advice is to favor the app you need most. Although the two apps are now under the same roof, for the majority of their lives they’ve been developed independently. While I haven’t dug too far myself, I suspect that finding cards that will maximize your experience in both Xpress and Liquid is going to be harder than it sounds.

Let us know what you find!