Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
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[cathyralph] “I am wondering if I should also bank the perspective of the moon and stars to match it. Since they are so distant, would their horizon/perspective also change? I don’t have any real life way of testing this out I’d appreciate any advice on the matter.”
You should treat yourself to a night drive on a moonlit night =)
My own experience would tell me that, due to its distance, the moon appears to hang in the night sky as though it were tacked onto a very distant wall. This means that tracking should not affect the position of the moon very much, but panning definitely should. I would recommend making the moon a very distant 3D layer, this should come close to a ‘natural’ perspective of the moon.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
The benefit of having it animate once, and then looping it (you could even pre-comp and pre-render as I often do), is that AE will not spend as much time rendering.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[joHN OBRIEN] “Am I correct here? Adjustment layers in pre-comps affect layer in main comp below the precomp with the adjustment layer.”
This is only true if you enable collapse transformations/continuously rasterize on the pre-comp in the main comp.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[oldschool56] “mac dual G4 tower”
The CS3 apps will work on this, but I think you might be a little disappointed with the performance on such a machine, it’s now over 5 years old which, by my standards, is a little ancient. Unless you meant a G5 tower, in which case it’s not the most up to date machine, but it should work well.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
I would go for Cinema 4D just because there’s more that you can do with it that falls well out of the range of possibilities in AE alone. Particular is fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but it still lives inside of AE and has some limitations.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[Alexei] “What size should it be created / rendered in to be seen well on a TV screen? What is the best practice?”
That depends on the devices that will be used to view it. If you’re making an SD DVD in the US it should be NTSC DV or NTSC DV Widescreen. Elsewhere it should probably be PAL DV, although I believe Japan and some other Asian countries use a variation of NTSC.
Make sure you pay attention to your title and action safe zones!
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[Steve Roberts] “If you’re just dealing with DV, firewire drives are okay.”
I have to say, I was never on the RAID-train until I RAID’d my three new 500GB hard drives together. If you’re going to be working with video a lot I would recommend putting some thought into a few internal drives for a RAID.
Steve is right about the graphics card. You might want to look into a nice IO card if you’re going to be doing any heavy capturing/printing to tape.
About the RAM, I don’t recommend buying your Mac with extra RAM. It’s usually a fair amount cheaper to buy the RAM after the fact from a site like:
https://www.datamemorysystems.com/
You can get 4GB for under $350 there, where as it costs $700 to take your Mac Pro to 4GB TOTAL on Apple’s online store.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
If you’re using the Animation presets that Andrew included with the tutorial then I’m really not sure what the problem might be.
The preset is based on the ‘Beam’ effect, which generates its own alpha by default. Check to make sure you haven’t accidentally changed any of the settings on the lightsaber layers, and make sure that you apply the preset to empty solids above your video footage.
Those are the only suggestions I can make without knowing more about the situation =)
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
Yes, it is… It’s been discussed some already with no easy answers. It appears to be related to layer groups in the PSD document. Out of curiosity, what system are you running?
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
You should also look into smoothing the chroma channels of your footage a bit. The easiest way to do this is to apply a Channel>Channel Combiner effect and go from RGB>YUV, then apply a Blur & Sharpen>Channel Blur effect and blur the ‘Green’ and ‘Blue’ (the chroma channels in YUV) some. Then apply another Channel Combiner effect to go back from YUV to RGB.
The more complicated but technically more correct way to do this is to use Median to smooth the chroma components. This becomes more complicated because you can only apply Median to all of the channels of the footage at once (in YUV this means both the Luma (R) and two Chroma (G & B) channels) so you have to apply more effects to round-trip the footage:
Channel Combiner:
RGB>YUVMedian:
2-3Set Channels:
Source Layer 1 = Your Layer
Set Red To Source 1’s = Luminance
(this takes the luminance from the source RGB footage and replaces the smoothed ‘red’/luma channel of the YUV with it)Levels:
For the Red/Luma Channel Only!
Red Output Black = 16
Red Output White = 235
(this is necessary to bring the RGB luminance values from the previous step back into the YUV range)Channel Combiner:
YUV>RGBThat might be more trouble than it’s worth, but the results should be good!
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA