Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
-
Oh, and you’ll also want to become increasingly aware not only of the work of others (how did they do that?) but also of the natural world and how it behaves/reacts/represents itself in Video/Film/Life =)
How could you recreate the look of old grainy film, for example? Look at old grainy film for some great hints!
-
[blakep] “a new way for me to look at old things”
Look for new techniques to approach problems you’re having. Sometimes when there’s an effect I want to achieve I know immediately how to do it (usually because I’ve done something similar before), other times it takes some hunting for the right technique. Pay attention to tutorials and try to think outside the box with the techniques that they teach you. For example, using gradients to control effects is a simple technique that applies to a wealth of the effects in AE. This allows you to achieve a different results for different circumstances, learn to pair the right techniques with your desired results.
-
[Rutger] “For example, say that I want to have an animation of a flashlight that shines in the dark while it is snowing. Wherever the beam shines I want to be able to see the particles generated by Particular.”
I don’t think this will work. At least not in the way you want it to. Particular plays nice with AE cameras, as you noted, but lights are a whole different matter. You can make the layer that you’ve applied Particular to into a 3D layer, which would allow it to be affected by lights. However, the lights will treat the layer as a single plane, which is not nearly as elegant as how Particular handles the AE Camera.
-
[blakep] “create an animation with glowie lights and stuttered motion”
Sounds fairly straightforward, but I’m sure it’s more complicated than it sounds. Are you trying to stutter the frame rate of the footage or stutter some other animated element’s movement? Is the rhythm of the stutter going to come from sound/music? Are you trying to add lights entirely in AE or emphasize lights that existed in the footage? What is the source of the lights? Are you attempting a laser light show look? Fireworks? Spotlights?
Lots of things to consider when deciding how to approach this =)
-
[JoNuggs] “Every single Mac that I’ve ever used for editing, mograph, etc., has crashed on me and I’ve lost data every time.
The PC that I built 3 years ago(!) for my editing needs has never crashed, ever. I’ve been running the adobe production suite on it and upgraded with every new version.”
I’m assuming that by ‘crash’ you mean specific applications have crashed on you, as anything beyond this isn’t normal for any computing platform and if you are experiencing something beyond applications crashing then you should look into reinstalling your system and removing 3rd party drivers and hardware to find the culprit regardless of your OS.
I’m also assuming that by ‘every time’ you mean that every time an application has crashed on you you’ve lost the changes to your data since your last save, and not that you crash every Mac you touch every time you touch it, the hard drives bursting into flames (if the latter is the case… consider yourself banned from my house).
If my assumptions are correct then you are experiencing what those in the industry like to call ‘bad luck.’ As a result of this you should also save more often. That said, I too experience ‘bad luck’ on my XP box: AE and PS crash on me at least a few times daily.
-
[Nender] “keyframe drawings I want to “tween.””
Ack! Flash terminology! I’ll try to answer as succinctly as possible, then go hide my head in the sand.
I think you’re referring to animating a mask (‘keyframe drawings?’) which would be done by animating the mask shape property. If you already have a few different masks that you want to animate between you can give them each a single keyframe, then paste these keyframes into a mask following the order and rate at which you want the mask to progress.
For example: copy the mask shape keyframe from Mask 10, paste it into Mask 1 at 3 seconds and the mask should animate from the shape of Mask 1 at 00;00;00 to the shape of Mask 10 at 00;03;00.
-
[npqster] “Am I doing something wrong?”
I can’t be sure without knowing exactly what you’re doing to begin with, but what property of the effect are you trying to keyframe?
-
It is almost definitely a pixel aspect ratio issue. If you select your footage in the AE project pane it should give you some information about it (as well as a pretty little thumbnail) in the upper part of the pane. One of these pieces of information is the pixel aspect ratio in parentheses after the dimensions of the footage, e.g. 720 x 480 (0.90).
If you’re working with 720×480 footage for NTSC then you want to make sure that the footage and your composition are using a D1/DV NTSC 0.9 pixel aspect ratio. To change this setting for the composition you’re working in press cmd-k (ctrl-k), to change it for the footage you must first select the footage and then hit cmd-f (ctrl-f) to reinterpret your footage.
In addition, when working in non-square pixels I advise that you toggle on Pixel Aspect Ratio Correction (button just to the right of the Camera and number of views drop down in the comp pane).
-
[thadtrick] “I purged all caches and memory….just in case.
What should I be looking at here?”Purging the caches usually alleviates any frame buffer problems I’m having. Usually my next step is restarting AE, then restarting my computer.
-
[Dave LaRonde] “Have you ever seen footage ramped up to speed over two seconds using time remapping?”
Sure, it can be an annoying effect (especially with audio involved), but also very stylistic and effective if it’s your goal. If you don’t think something is worth doing, that doesn’t mean it can’t be done =)