Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
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[jimmybee500] “Put an adjustment layer on the top of your final render comp and apply levels and set blacks to 16 and whites to 235 (not 236!)”
To clarify, set your output blacks to 16 and your output whites to 235. The Adjustment Layer at the top of the stack will apply this to all of the underlying layers (which is what you want).
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
No process/application in Mac OS X can use more than 3GB of RAM, this is a limitation of 32-bit applications in a 32-bit OS.
The upside of having more RAM in your machine is that you can use other applications and without drawing RAM from AE (or resorting to paging files, which are slow). In addition, in CS3 the multiple processor/core support opens multiple instances of AE and each of these instances can use up to 3GB of RAM, so if you have more than one processor/core you should turn this preference on and see some pretty big differences in rendering/RAM previewing.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
I think I may not have been clear when I said that Levels works with numbers between 0 and 1 before… It’s not binary (on or off), 0.5 for example is ‘half on’ or ‘half full value.’
If you want to deal with values in the range of 0-255 (standard 8bpc)you can simply divide your values by 255, resulting in the proper floating point value.
255 / 255 = 1
128 / 255 = 0.502
0 / 255 = 0Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[cmcilwain] “There must be a workaround, though. Precomposing? A null object?”
Sorry, I thought I gave you the work around. Make sure you’re wiggling your values between 0 and 1. Wiggle() will generate floating point numbers so it should work fine with Levels (Individual Controls) as long as you wiggle between 0 and 1.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
If you have the lightning already created you can duplicate the layer. Then make sure the blending mode is set to Add (it probably should be Add for the source lightning layer as well). Now add a Box Blur to the layer with settings close to radius – 8, iterations – 3. This will give the lightning a nice glow effect that you can pull back by lowering the opacity on the blurred layer.
If you wanted the whole screen to blow out you could add a solid at the top of the stack with Add blending mode and flash its opacity, you can mask this solid with a feathered mask if you want. A white solid should work well for lightning, but you can make it any color you want.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
Using a particle system for the displacement should work well. You can even create two particle systems, one with green particles and one with red, pre-comp them and use them with the default Displacement Map effect (red = horizontal displace, green = vertical displace) to get some interesting subtleties in the distortion.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
I assume you’re using the Levels (Individual Controls) effect. Well my friend, Levels works in strange ways! 0 is equal to 0, but the maximum value of a pixel in a channel, as far as Levels is concerned in non-32bpc, is 1.
So when you wiggle your value make sure you’re wiggling between 0 and 1, not 0 and 255.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[bogiesan] “However, any particle system that requires you to create a believable illusion of smoke is far more difficult than you can possibly imagine.”
Just FYI, Particular in combination with some of the blur effects (vector blur, box blur as well as the built in motion blur) does a pretty fantastic job of creating believable smoke/steam effects.
You are correct in your estimation of the cost though.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
That’s one of the better muzzle flashes I’ve seen created in post in terms of execution. If you really want to get crazy you should look at reference material to see what a muzzle flash from a gun like that (but more… real) would look like.
If I have any advice it’s to lower the smoke’s opacity some, add a cartridge popping out the side of the gun (which could be as simple as a light solid masked and moving VERY quickly with motion blur on) and maybe look at adding a tiny bit of light flash on the shooter. There shouldn’t be very much light flash on the shooter as your footage is in a bright environment already, it would have to be subtle to look ‘real.’
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[cyprusx] “the tape is a Hi 8 and the digital is a Kodak dx6490 4m”
I think you want to go with the Hi-8, has better resolution and the capability to capture at 30fps.