[David Bogie]

CC as in closed caption?
As long as the clips have no rendering involved, noe at all, the line 21 data will remain intact all the way to output.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

The real trouble with spatial simulations in Motion (as compared to After Effects) is Motion’s inability to display true shadows. No matter how well you design your camera movements, you will never achieve more than an illusion of space. In After Effects, the illusion is far more compelling. But, of course, the shadows require huge rendering times.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

You want to install software on your PC that will allow you to read the Mac drive. That’s the best way to do this.
bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Search the After Effect forums for NEON. We see the topic often. The question is confused by the needs for simulation of a realworld object or to deliver an incorrect but conventionally accepted version of “neon.”

Needlessly pedantic entry: Stimulated electrons inside a glass tube either excite the enclosed gas (neon is just one of many) to glow or they cause a coating on the inside of the tube to glow. The glow is not atmospheric; there is no halo around a neon tube unless there’s dust or water vapor in the air.

Visit a few neon signs and take a close look at how they’re glowing.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

The drive will handle the load just fine. After Effects is not a playback environment, you’re not editing, you just creating and then rendering files.
If you need to view your HD content real time, you will need RAID or proprietary cards. Your professor needs to be VERY specific about the formats he expects you all to be using. The school should be providing the resources required to do the editing. Demanding you provide your own multi-disk, multi-thousand dollar RAID is unconscionable.

720p is not very demanding but the issue is that USB is not designed for continuous data streaming. USB ships in packets and allows long waits for other traffic or CPU activity. That makes video playback choppy and unreliable.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Mr Mercury is cool but it cannot really simulate the surface tension and gravity effects of a droplet forming and letting loose and then falling from an eyedropper.

I’d shoot video of a real drop and use that footage as guide for hand drawing it. However, searching this forum for water drop and droplet should return some interesting conversations,. We have seen the question often over the last many years.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

did you describe the reflection? Can’t recall. If it’s just some green stuff, you might be able to just mask off a copy of the footage and apply a color change filter to the offending pixels.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

It’s not worth doing but you will be attempting to motion track an object that will obscure the reflections.
Motion tracking is accurate and easy to perform bu understanding how to use the targets and apply them to an object takes practice. If it’s important enough, you will have to budget about two hours for each clip. You will motion track the fglasses and then transfer the data to an object. That object will need to be manually created, moved, blurred, skewed or otherwise adjusted for each major change in head angle.
It’s impossible to make this look good, IHNSHO. It would be far easier and the end project will much more elegant if you just reshoot it.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

There’s a perfect demo project in Trish and Chris Meyer’s book “AE In Production.” They use lots of doodads to simulate an HUD and many tracking points. Look for chapter 4, AUTO TRACKER. You should be able to easily adapt and modify this project to your needs.

https://www.cybmotion.com/training/bookcontent/AEP2/AEP2_Contents.pdf

You may also wish to google Heads Up Displays to see examples of fighter and other aircraft HUDs. You also want to look for flight simulation games that include high tech warplanes.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

I have nerves of mush but I also have not a single customer service oriented bone in my system.
The question doesn’t bother me but it implies a vacuum in your working knowledge about your chosen video format and how MPEG2 works.

Scaling of your HD video footage can take place anywhere in your workflow. what format does your camera shoot? What preset are you using to ingest your footage? What are your sequence settings in FCP?

“Read the manual.”
That’s my standard sig file, I really don’t care if you read the manual or not. But to assume you can just dive in and use a system as superbly complex as Final Cut Studio is, umm, silly. Video is hard. Good video is harder. Good DVDs from good video is harder still; compression is very complicated. But bad DVDs from bad video? That is a no brainer.

bogiesan

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