[David Bogie]

Depends entirely on your perception of the Aurora. Most people have never seen it in action so they have only a vague idea of what’s going on. Do you need multiple layers that appear to have 3D presence or is this a flat simulation?

Any of the many light stroke tutorials should give you the starting points you need. I think there’s one or two here on the cow that help recreate last year’s Sprint commercials.

You can also simply draw a curvey line and apply a vertical-only Gaussian blur to it. Adding the line back in as a copy of the layer and maybe using CC Light burst and the under-used Light Wipe can add superb reality enhancements.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

But you want to preserve the original clip’s alpha!
Once you start modifying the clip, you also apply your blurs to the alpha unless you really know how to control that stuff.
Suggest you make a separate alpha-only render pass when you export the chromakey footage.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Does it actually take an hour or does it finish more quickly? Sometimes that estimate is off by a lot.

You might just be looking at the time required to retrieve, stitch, and copy all of your media files to your target drive. this process is making a single, coherent, continuous file form hundreds of separate pieces and media that is scattered all over your drives.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

andrew, you needed to make these decisions long before you started editing. Heck, you needed to make them before you even started planning on talking about shooting.

We’ll try to help you out after you answer DRW’s questions but you need to brace yourself for some serious work. You may need to recapture your footage. You may need to locate another Macintosh. You may need to lower your expectations to fit your technical skills and available equipment.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

> I’m not looking for true 3D…just a way to warp and distort…like DVE’s used to do…and most compositors do standard. < > Is there any way…or plugin/script to allow you to manipulate and distort/warp a video plane to fit into a curved surface… < A "distort/warp" operation performed to create a "curved surface" requires 3 dimensions by my definition. If all you need to do is simulate perspective, that's easy. If you need to simulate a curved surface, it simply cannot be done accurately, it's merely a hack, just like in After Effects. an Motion offers no reality-based shadows cast by lights which makes the illusion even more difficult to fake. Your requirement for "easy" is likely to be trumped by the limitations of this underpowered application. However, the ability to create and store master templates can make virtual sets fast to recreate. We see this misperception about Motion's 3d abilities from newbies daily around here and, afterall, you did state you were new to Motion. There is an entire collection of distortion filters provided with the application. When you are finished learning how to use those, which operate pretty much like they do in After Effects and Ye Olde Squeezoom, try asking this question again. bogiesan This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Not really. Motion has no real 3d capabilities,it’s just sheets of paper hanging in a dark garage.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8013765&#8013765

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Kevin is correct that it might be easier to simply do this on individual 3d layers rotating/flipping. however, creating a gradient layer for controlling the flips is farily easy, too. you will use a 4×3 grid of boxes. Replace the boxes you want to move first with near white (say, r240g240b240) and the boxes you want to move last with black. Your group of boxes should be the same shade of gray and any boxes that are the same shade of gray will move together.

you can get a feel for the gradient control capabilities by using any checkerboard pattern that uses at least three or four shades of monochrome. It’s fun but it’s not intuitive!

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

You only need to create one master movie of your CC Spheres.
You will apply a solid layer to the comp and compose your map markings on it, precomp it, apply CC Sphere to it. You will need two copies, one to render outside and one to render the inside. Place your Master Movie between the two copies.
this assumes you don’t need precise interactions between the map and the markings layers.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Foam has a credible smoke preset.
Carefully examine some real steam on some real coffee. It’s easy to overdo these effects.
Better yet, shoot some real steam heavily backlit against black and lay it over the footage using Screen

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

simply reversing the time keyframes is a quick hack but this usually doesn’t work as expected since the physics are not actually reversed. The motion appears fake. Takes some experimentation to make explosive effects run backwards.

bogiesan

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