David Bogie
Forum Replies Created
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Masking or write-on with the paint effects. Easy but tedious.
The critical thing with cursive is knowing form the start that crosses, dots, bars and any overlaps must be separate layers, separate paints, or separate masks.bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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The article listed in the thread is interesting but it’s not the whole story. We’ve been dealing with light sabers since AE was a little bitty application. The secret is not in getting a plugin or filter. The secret is knowing how the big dogs do them, how the fan filmmakers do them and how you can do it even if you have to fake it.
Googling carefully for LIGHT SABER will give you many hours of interesting reading but you can filter down to the Star Wars tribute filmmakers and their blogs to get some useful tips. You will find it’s all about how you prepare for the shoot. The post production just puts in the color.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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Be aware that trying to reverse-program the physics of any particle system is difficult. They’re all designed to thrust and spew, not suck and chew.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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Most newbies to AE are disappointed in AE’s audio preview method and assume 4-8 seconds of audio preview is an unworkable and lame interface design.
As much as you think you must hear the entire audio portion of your sequence, you cannot work on more than a few frames at a time in After Effects. A few seconds is all the audio you need.
Another mistake newbies make is assuming After Effects is useful as a nonlinear editor. It’s an effects system, not an assembly platform. Trying to edit in AE is frustrating at best, a total waste of time at worst. Create your individual effects shots and pull them back into your nle.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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The biggest conceptual mistake newbies make with this effect is assuming their artificially time-stretched slow motion will look as faboo as it does in those big-$$ commercials. That stuff was probably shot on 35mm film at 72 or more frames per second.
Re-timed video, unless processed with some expensive software like Twixtor, always looks clunky. You can’t fight it so you embrace it. If you don’t have the money for slow motion video, you need to go into the project knowing what it will look like and make the look part of your stylization.
There are hundreds of threads here and on other AE forums on the topic of stretching time and ramping frame rates to achieve “that car commercial look.” You can search for many interesting discussions and solutions.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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I have no help to offer, just an observation because these these frame rate and interlacing questions always puzzle me.
I’ve been shooting standard NTSC for almost four decades. I’ve been using nonlinear since Media 100 v2 and AE since it was CoSA and I’ve rarely had any trouble with interlacing on anything I’ve ever done.
The problems I have with interlacing are almost always caused by someone else’s footage or improperly rendered effects handed to me.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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After Effects is, at its core, a 3D wannabe. Everything in AE is utterly flat 2D but the flat layers can be presented in a 3d space. We call it “sheets hanging in a garage.”
yes, the effect you are looking for can be faked. Create layers that contain small numbers of falling glass and place them at various angles to the camera. But the illusion is easily compromised if any of the glass shards turn an edge to the camera or passes through another layer. They will not physically interact with other objects.
These kinds of projects need to be stylized to fit the available resources. For instance, mavbe you need to move the camera faster so the falling glass doesn’t have a chance to appear in its true 2d self. You could then look down and see the shards falling away down into the gravity well. Shatter does this quite nicely.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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> My problem is that the majority of the files I need to render need to be an .mpg or .m2v,< Why are you providing those formats? Those are generally highly compressed and lossy release formats. They are usually encoded at the final steps in a production pipeline. I'd ask the next person in line why they think they want mpeg, in any form, from After Effects. bogiesan This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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Danger.
Bigger than what?
If she wants something bigger than you shot, all you can do is make the pixels bigger. She can do that on the playback computer.bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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I’m not at my FCP machine right now but those little blue check marks affect how clips are auto-tagged.
This isn’t what you want to hear but we’ve found accepting some quirks in FCP is far easier than trying to break FCP’s sillier and more presumptuous interface elements. I have gotten very good at deleting FCP’s logging mistakes but I have also found the incremental numbers to be much more useful than i thought possible, even if they are completely unrelated to the logging of the clip. Gives me one more searchable datapoint.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”