[David Bogie]

You know how we used to do this before particle systems existed?
Shoot it.

Set up a tank in the studio. light it carefully, drop stuff in the tank. Use compressed air.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

This is rumor only, but we expect future versions of After Effects to start using much more of a graphics card’s processing and memory, much like Apple’s (incomplete implementation for) Motion. The iMac does not offer the ability to upgrade card or to add a second card.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

q[Lynne Desjardins] “There is movement under the existing text, so I will need to draw/remove the text frame by frame, and then add my new text in it’s [sic] place.”

Look up motion tracking and image stabilization in the indexes and help systems for Motion, Shake, and After Effects. The tough parts about gluing replacement video onto unstable base layers are precisely matching movement, surface textures, and lighting effects. If you need to sell this effct, there is not shortcut. Finesse is synonymous with time-energy-effort.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

I’ll second this, use a still camera. Results are far more flexible and controllable. google time lapse and timelapse to find dozens of helpful sites.
The two things you must master: exposer control and focus control.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Don’t rush this purchase.
If you do not know the differences between the various capture systems, do not rush to spend your money.
If you need to make capital expenses for tax reasons, talk to your accountant FIRST. Take a bottle of wine over to her house and ask her for a few minutes of her holiday time. You may be able to make capital expenditures up to April 15 but I DO NOT KNOW IF THAT IS TRUE FOR YOUR CASE and to listen to me when it comes to your taxes would be, umm, stupid.
If you don’t have an accountant, don’t spend the money.

Generally, I suggest people who have money to spend carefully work backwards from what they think they need to deliver, not what they’re producing with now. Figure out how you are going to be making your money and equip yourself to do those chores efficiently. Everything else will sort of fall into place later.

Buying toys to support out of date camera hardware or loading up a system that cannot support new production formats would be a shame.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

This same question was posted on other FCP forums. Seems the OP was asking about the filmstrip display in the timeline.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

In the biz we call those “lower thirds” and AE comes with dozens of suitable presets so be sure to look in Bridge. Creating a ribbon is difficult because AE is not a true 3D modeler. Making curved objects is easy but making them fold back upon themselves is almost, not quite, impossible.

Try searching the forum archives and the AE tutorials for “ribbon” and you’ll find a few helpful places to start.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Timelapse requires that you speed up the footage, showing more total clip time in a shorter span of sequence time. That means you must throw away lots of frames.

You will want to render the clip if you want to minimize processing resources. Render it and set the after-render action to reimport.

Most time-compression requires seemingly endless experimentation. The idea that your 60 minute clip needs to run in, say, 90 seconds is a good place to start but you may find the rhythm in the action is not what you envisioned. So you start playing around with lots of speed settings, tons of test renders. The best timelapse material is often a collection of several different frame rates with stylized or nearly invisible transitions between them.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

> Hello, there is nothing in the manual on how to do this –

Sure there is. Maybe you just don’t know what to look for so try searching the index in the manuals or the online help for some of these:
Trimming.
Scrubbing.
Jogging.
Stepping.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

FCP’s scaling engine blows, for one thing. But the scaling down throws away lots of pixels. If you’re scaling over keyframes of different values, FCP can get ugly. Can you do this scaling operation in Motion and then bring the movie into FCP. The results will be superior. However, trying to evaluate FCP’s motion rendering on a computer screen is not valid, you must view the results on a video monitor.

There is no need to deinterlace a still image, it has no interlacing.

bogiesan

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