[Darby Edelen]

I’m not sure of the specifics, but I can tell you that QT Player and FC Pro tend to look at things like resolution slightly different than AE does.

I can also tell you that 1280×1080 is not an HD frame size for display. I know that many HDV cameras capture HD anamorphically at 1440×1080 and then must have a non-square PAR applied to stretch them to the full HD frame.

For reference, 1920×1080 is the frame size for 1080i/p HD display and 1280×720 is the frame size for 720p.

As for your specific situation I’m afraid I can’t offer too much help except to ask: how did you received/shot the footage, and how did you captured it?

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

Vegas makes spots of ‘light’ that crawl along a mask or ‘image contour’ (edges). It doesn’t work very well for creating something like a Neon Sign =/

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

[Carlos] “What I don

[Darby Edelen]

[Carlos] “The thing is that the video looks wider than in the composition and I don

[Darby Edelen]

My recommendation would be to create a matte from your Logo. Duplicate the layer, add a Color Correction>Tint effect to the duplicate with the default settings (making it B&W), add a Color Correction>Levels effect and increase the black input to a very high level (so that the parts of your logo you want to keep are entirely black and the parts that you don’t are white), add a Channel>Invert effect to the RGB channels to make the blacks white and the whites black, then set the original lower layer to use the upper layer (the matte you just made) as a luma matte.

Note that if there is a drop shadow involved here you can try to make those areas gray in the matte by tweaking your levels effect to maintain some opacity in the shadows.

After this is done you might find that Channels>Remove Color Matting set to White might help on the original layer, or a Matte>Simple Choker.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

[filmapprentice] “what effects could be used to generate that bright, neon look.”

Try putting a duplicate of the neon sign layer above the source layer and setting its blend mode to “Add.” You can put a Blur & Sharpen>Box Blur on that layer (I recommend 3 iterations) in order to give it a glowy look. The higher your radius, the more diffuse the glow will be.

Note that if the source neon sign isn’t lit (is dark) then the add blend mode will not do much at all to the underlying layers and you will need to add a bright color to the additive layer. If your neon sign has an alpha channel this could be easily accomplished with Generate>Fill. Whatever you choose for the fill color will be the color of the glow.

You could also try 2 or more layers set to “Add” if you want the core of the neon sign to glow a brighter/whiter color and the falloff to be more colored/dimmer.

Another alternative to give yourself a nice white hot core and a beautiful falloff would be making your project 32bpc and using a levels effect to boost the additive layer into the superwhite range. This will add to render time however.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

[stuartambient] “So what’s the secret to getting things lined up just right for view in any 3D angle.”

The secret is to do exactly what you haven’t been doing =O

[stuartambient] “At this point I’m not mucking with the anchor point but using position and rotation (not orientation) to line them up.”

You should set the anchor points to the corners of the 3D layers, parent all of them to one ‘master’ layer and then make sure that the ‘positions’ and ‘orientations’ line up properly. For example, if you have a 300×300 solid with an anchor point of [0,0] (the upper left corner) as the ‘master’ layer, and you want a 300×300 solid projecting at 90

[Darby Edelen]

Most of the background elements in the examples you showed probably do not loop, but are instead created to be longer than the segment they will run behind. This would be especially true of the introductory elements.

That said, I can give you some pointers on looping animations (which is pretty much all I do all day long for DVD Menus).

For loops you just need to remember to make sure that the end of the animation is exactly the same as the beginning of the animation. There are a lot of techniques that can help with this.

Obviously some effects (such as Fractal Noise) have an ‘Evolution’ property that can be set to loop every x rotations. Any time this is offered to you, you should use it.

Others, such as Wave Warp, have a ‘Phase’ property that naturally loops on every rotation. Whenever I use Wave Warp I don’t use the ‘Speed’ property and instead I manually animate the ‘Phase’ property as this gives me a greater degree of control over the way the animation looks at its in and out points.

There are also expressions that can help you:

loopOut();

and

loopIn();

Both of these work fairly well without supplying any parameters to the expression. After the last keyframe (or before the first keyframe, in the case of loopIn) of the property that the expression is applied to they loop the values of the property.

The most valuable parameters to supply these expressions are:

loopOut(“continue”); //Causes the values to continue to change at the same rate as they were at the last keyframe

loopOut(“pingpong”); //Causes the values to loop back and forth. If A is the first keyframe and B is the last keyframe of the property, then this causes the values to go A->B, B->A, A->B, etc.

loopOut(“cycle”); //This is the default if none are supplied and causes the property to loop A->B, A->B, A->B, etc.

loopOut(“offset”); //Loops the change of values of the property. If a layer moves from [0,0] to [0, 20] in 1 second then after the last keyframe [0,20] the layer will move from [0,20] to [0,40] in 1 second (an identical change in value as the first move, only using the last keyframe as a starting point).

Any property can be effected by these loopOut()/loopIn() expressions. I commonly pre-compose a short looping Fractal Noise layer, time-remap the pre-composition in the final comp and apply a loopOut(); to the time-remap property.

If you have any more specific questions, I’d be glad to help.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

Are you installing the CS3 version of the plug-in? As I recall there are two separate installers/folders included in the newest version of KLF. Make sure you are using the one intended for CS3.

If you haven’t downloaded the newest version yet then you have an outdated plug-in that will not work in CS3.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

Is this DVD intended for use in a set top DVD player or in a computer? If the latter then you could use almost any codec you want. However, although newer codecs often give fantastic results at low file sizes they are not as compatible as some of the old standards. You should look at an option like Sorenson Squeeze or Canopus ProCoder (Compressor from Apple is another option, but only available as part of the Final Cut Studio) to encode your files.

From your description it doesn’t sound like it’s intended for a set top DVD player. If it is then I think you’ll want to repost with more specifics.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA