[David Bogie]

Unless you need high end functions and have the time to learn Maya, Blender.
Free. Huge community.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Good lord, that hurt.
Couldn’t tell if the bump was synced to a discernible audio hump. I’d use Magnify instead of Scale and maybe even a bit of Optic Compensation along with just enough motion blur or CC Force Motion Blur to be subtle yet visible.
Magnify will let you vary the center, similar to Scale and offsetting the anchor point.

Just be careful you don’t over work this effect.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

If you can do it, I can do it.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

We’ve been entertaining a rash of recent anti-aliasing issues, mostly with text, which starts out as vector. .
For me, if I start with a sold and apply a text effect and then apply almost any effects filter to the layer, the text stops being vector and rasterizes to a jaggy, stairstepped relic reminiscent of FCP’s terible rendering engine.
I can’t figure it out and the AE wonks over on adobe.com seem to imply it’s a user error
bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Don’t understand your use of the term “track.”

> The effect is supposed to look like ooze coming from her pores. Eventually (in another shot)
> they become airborn. < Your particles would be set to emit from a large area, not a point. The CC Sphere effect may not do what you want since it is not a 3D effect although, if the face is a matte, you can wrap the CC Sphere around an interior flat layer. You would make the particles rise by keyframing and changing the physics of the system but to get a 3D illusion you'd be adding more layers of the particles in layers that are closer to the camera and can cast shadows on the face layer. Stay tuned, others will offer some advice sooner or later. If you are crossposting, please come back and close this with your working solution. bogiesan

[David Bogie]

All depends on your need for quality and finesse of the basic techniques. Your ability to drive AE will determine the level of class your effect has, might just be a dumb cliché if you’re not careful.

Creating the halo object is easy. Importing it is easy. Tracking it to your character is fairly simple if you know how to do rotation and corner pinning while tracking (and throughfully provided something to track in your makeup or costume designs). Masking the halo object so it passes behind the head and interacts realistically with other objects in your scenes is tedious but fairly simple. Applying glows and radiating light effects is a bit more complex but all those other steps must be completed first. You will be using CC Light Burst or CC Light Rays so visit Cycore and download the documentation for their effects. A bit confusing at first so give yourself lots of time to work on the details.

To elevate your illusion to the next level of cool, you should have included practical lighting effects in your scenes that suggest the presence of a light producing object floating over the character’s head.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

I’ve never used Avid.

You send him/her uncompressed clips, Animation is the universal exchange codec. If you use an Avid codec, your AE artist may not be able open the lcips or encode back to the same format. Animation creates huge files because they’re lossless and the codec carries an alpha channel.

Before you jump into anything, wait around here for a couple of hours for someone else to offer better advice. Round tripping to AE is standard procedure for may Avid editors, you might find a simple and precise solution it he Avid forum. If you are corssposting, please go back and close all of your threads with your solution.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Highly recommended by FCP user David Saraceno is FotoMagico.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Usually caused by not properly viewing the QT. Be sure you have “high quality” enabled in the user prefs for QT.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Thanks, Kevin, my mistake.
Gonna have to try it again when I get back from vacation.

bogiesan