[David Bogie]

[Rich Ramazinski] “I actually used that masked solid trick until recently because I didn’t know better! “

Rich, thanks for closing the thread with a successful solution, hardly anyone ever does that around here.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Are you asking for how to find these products or just if anyone uses them?

I know of only two sources for finding Macintosh stuff: versiontracker.com and Plugin Pavillion

https://www.pluginpavilion.com/

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

It’s probably a characteristic of the filter and can’t be helped, but I have no idea what you think you’re seeing. You could try to contact Cycore, they’re cool guys, might have a suggestions for you.

I just ran CC Light Sweep on a text layer and a simple solid. I cannot figure out any way to remove the edge, it’s inherent in the filter and is desirable in most applications. There are innumerable other ways to get a light sweep. Suggest you pursue one of those since the output of CC Light Sweep cannot be changed.

What happens if you use the CUTOUT reception option on a duplicate of your layer?

In the olden days, we’d use a simple solid line (or a masked layer) and some blur and a blend mode.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

> Thanks for the info zane,
the timeline is 720×480 using the DV/DVCPRO compressor.
The logo is a PSD, the background video is HDV 1080 24 with that codec.
I’m working with mixed video, (HDV/SD) and logo’s
are layered in on top of it all. Does this help?
I have FCS2, do I need to use another program? <

Oh, we assumed you were working in the larger format.
Your logo, and all of your high def video, must be rasterized and then downconverted (way down) to the terrible DV codec which totally blows and why we seem to think it’s an acceptable standard is beyond me.

None of your stuff can possibly look any better than DV can deliver and that ain’t much. There is a good article on kenstone.net (search the archives, it’s old) by Philip Hodgetts that explains how to get the best text performance out of DV. Most of the advice applies directly to working with any vector art.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Any DPI will do, DPI is meaningless in video. There are only pixels in video.
There are way too many possible answers to the question. so let’s start with another. What size is the logo, in pixels, before you place it on the timeline?
And, what’s the image format of this logo?

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Missing any other filters?

Open the find dialog at the Finder level and use Spotlight to see if there’s anything called EXTRUDE anywhere on your machine.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

It is impossible to have more than one alpha channel in a video layer.
It is a simple matter to assign different grayscale images or movies to each of the four channels.
However, then you must be able to tell all of your alpha-processing filters to access only a single color channel from the video layer.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

If budget is not an issue, buy a better computer and make it a Macintosh.
You cannot get better performance in effects systems than After Effects offers unless you are going to be throwing money at a dedicated system and every dedicated system we’ve ever owned has gone out of business.

Yet I still have After Effects.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Pixel aspect ratio.
See the manual and online help system. They created their AI files for print using square pixels. Your video pixels are rectangular. There are two things that can go wrong because you can tell AE to correct the display without changing the file or you can tell AE to do both or neither.

This pixel stuff is NOT easy. Messes me up every single day. I push random buttons till i get what I think I want.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

No real idea what you want to do since AE cannot create 3d extruded coins. I’ve never used particular but there’s a Trapcode forum here on the cow, isn’t there? Maybe someone there can help.

Shatter can easily extrude circles into 3d space on a 2d layer (and place a nice ridged edge on them) but you can’t stack them up.
Card Dance can do wonderful things into 3D (on a 2D layer) but can’t extrude the coins and Card Dance’s ballistics are stylized, they’re not realistic.

I’d suggest you start trying to find a highly skilled 3D animator in your market area and expect to pay her handsomely for rescuing your project against a deadline she doesn’t own.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”