[David Bogie]

Yeah, it’s good stuff. Get the new one, too.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Get on the phone right now and find someone you know and like who has Final Cut. LiveType and Motion both have a lovely animated font that is perfect for skywriting.

However, your client may have some unreasonable expectations. You may need to find a very expensive 3D artist who can do this for you if you need to show the airplane or airplanes (modern skywriting is performed with 8 planes laying down dots of smoke) or if you need to show some of the smoke being disturbed by a passing aircraft.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Can’t tell from your post if this a real 30 meter tree or a tree in a scene in an animation.

It is relatively easy to create a long and narrow composition that has several discrete screens on it. Each screen can be a precomp.
Your problem is playing this thing back. You can record each of the screens separately and play the separate tapes/DVDs in tight sync or you can use a giant playout system that can talk to multiple displays.

So, it’s easy to do, just takes some planning. You must know exactly how you are going to deliver the movies before you startplanning your After Effects use.

(Trish and Chris Meyer used to have a tutorial on their site explaining how they animated a huge ceiling display in Las Vegas, don’t see that it is available anymore, though)

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

You can apply the effects later using Motion but they will never look as good as if you had shot as practical effects n the set. That’s the nature of stop action. If your style will accept post-production effects, do them in Motion.

However, as with all “fix it i post” solutions, pre-planning and previsualization are what make these succeed. You need to plan to have some practical lighting effects on the set that will be augmented by your overlays and special effects.

If you rent any of the Wallace and Gromit films (especially Wererabbit) or Nightmare Before Xmas you can see how the special effects differ form the live footage but you can also see how the sets were deliberately rigged to make the effects part of the show instead of having the appearance of being afterthoughts.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

To illustrate how weird this error really is, if you have a Finder window open and have a preview column visible and have your clip playing in that little QT preview window, FCP will assume the file is in use with another application.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Setting camera motion paths is usually easier done with nulls. Animate the null and parent the camera to point and stay hooked to the null. If you use a null, you can make lots of interesting moves and changes without having to rewrite the camera keyframes and you can accomplish moves that would otherwise be impossible such as a spiral crane-up move with zoom and tilt.
But after a while you get so you understand how cameras work and keyframing the motion path becomes easier.
I don’t know what you mean by your peculiar terminology: pulling up, using numbers, keying it out, perceptually off. Could be translation issue or you’re using non-industry terms.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Thanks for closing your thread on a positive note and with a valid 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]

These are great, thanks for the links, guys. Be sure t open the effects PDF that comes with the AE installer disk, there’s a large section in there on SHatter than you may not know about.

The way to learn Shatter is to dive in and work very slowly. Each one of the dozens of parameters can have remarkably complex effect on the results of Shatter. And then there is the ability to control almost everything with grayscale compound layers.

The BEST way to learn Shatter is to find someone who has the original Atomic VHS training tapes from Brian Maffit. After AE4.5, almost any AE series from TotalTraining will include about an hour on Shatter.

I recently spent a semester helping teach a class in AE to advanced Premiere students. We did an entire day on Shatter alone and only barely got started. Most found it too difficult to grasp even using the simple presets.

Also

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Quickly and easily?
Open the manual, look for masks and precomps/nesting.

Your post is not very clear but I’ll suggest you’re not looking for masking your comp, you’re going to build a masked comp for each photo and then pull these into a master sequence. You can put several photos in each upstream comp and wipe or dissolve (or any other transition) between them.

If this isn’t the answer you were looking for, try to expand your question a bit. and another sage will suggest something else.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Sure.
Never used Avid (Hey, what’s that?) but Stephen’s ideas surely can be transferred to another app with some imagination on the part of the viewer.
After Effects? You’re better off getting AE-specific tools. All of the motion graphics and motion-tab controls and functions in FCP are s-o-o-o totally lame compared to AE.

bogiesan

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