[David Bogie]

There are three things that sell an effect like this that take your scene beyond the merely stereotypical. Umm, maybe four. No, wait, five.

1. Build anticipation in your audience that something interesting is going to happen
2. Satisfy the expectation you have established.
3. Make the transition effect subtle but unmistakable (unless you are trying to fool your audience)
4. In addition to the costume, a photographic style or lighting effect helps to distinguish the eras form each other.
5. Break the fourth wall in some unexpected but rewarding way. For instance, could there be an artifact that appears in both eras? Perhaps it is a book on a desk or a statue in a corner of the room.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Do you know anyone who has Final Cut? LiveType has a very cool odometer font that will do this very well and easily. The text characters are on individual odometer wheels so the concept is a bit different than the tumbling letter signs you are emulating.

However, in addition to Ian’s advice that the SFX sell the effect, you will want to use monospaced typefaces and you may need to box each character, as on a real sign. You can easily build the boxes using the Grid generator effect.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Good tips.

The time distortion effect is cool, yes, but achieving the effect is not easy.

You research the various techniques then figure out what you have the competency and tools to attempt. Then you experiment and change your approach as you discover your tools or available crew and talent can’t possibly meet the expectations. This stuff is hard.

So you change your expectations, redesign your effects and figure out what’s doable.

The lowest tech is the “shoot ’em in real time” method. Have your talent walk at a glacial speed then speed up the file in AE or you nle. As Steve Roberts noted, it takes practice but any dancer or good actor should be able to handle the physical challenge for a few minutes. The tough part, once you’ve got the pacing calculated, is limiting his interaction with the passersby.

Have you seen ye ancient video from The Police, “Wrapped Around My Finger”? They went the other direction, super slow motion sped up to normal speed. Sting had to lipsync and act at three times normal speed while the film camera rolled at 72 frames per second. It was beautiful

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

The foolproof way to do this is to render your movies as lossless files that are compatible with your vrsion of Flash and have Flas create the flv or swf for you.

Trying to use another product, even part of Adobe’s video suite, is troublesome now. Maybe in the next rev, CS3, all the glitches will be ironed out.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Creating the effect of light shining through stained glass is easy once you understand how to use AE’s 3d tools (not easy).

However, creating layers and objects that have the look and feel of translucent, reflective, bumpy-textured and reflective surfaces that have properties of glass is an entirely different challenge.

The tutorials at The Anvel are cool and approachable but you must understand lighting, cameras, and surface properties for 3D obejcts.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Foam can use an alpha channel (from any layer) to influence the flow of the particles but interaction with the alpha edges is not very realistic.
The floor of the CC Particle World will work but it is only one flat surface.

You need to forget trying to simulate this in AE (or get appropriate plugins) or consider working within AE’s limitations but use them as your approach to stylization. Figure out what you can do and then design your sequences around the available tools.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

> Now, it seems almost everytime I capture a tape I get random artifacting on the final captured file. < You will need to describe random. If you capture the same clip more than once and the glitch is randomly located on your capture, there's something wrong with your deck or your capturing process. (Might be dirt on the tape that is moving around but not likely.) If the glitch appears in the same place on the captured file each time you capture it, it's obviously on the tape. If it's on the tape, there's nothing you can do except demand a new copy of the tape. bogiesan This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

> some of the DVDs that I’ve compressed to M-PEG 2 have not been playing in quite a few different DVD players and laptops. they start out fine and then loop back to the beginning of the DVD after 30 seconds. thanks for any input.
< You want to be more specific in your subject line. This isn't about Compressor or FCP, it's about using Windows Media Player. No one else knows that at the moment. DVD players as in set top boxes? Or as in different drives? How did you get the MPEG2 onto the disks? Just drag and drop and burn? Toast? DVDSP? All relevant. The loop is not a Compressor issue. It's usually a media issue; bad disks. What happens if you use a real DVD player application instead of WMP? You might have placed a chapter marker into the FCP timeline. bogiesan This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

That’s pretty advanced stuff, buddy!
You could change the color of the globe in many different places in that brilliant tutorial so you’d have to be a bit more specific about what part you don’t understand.

You could, for instance, simply apply a tint to the map layer or build your sphere out of colored layers. You could use a colored light.

I suggest you try this tidbit about working in stained glass from The Anvel:

https://www.theanvel.com/free_aeps_detail.php?aeps=94

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Compressor does an interesting thing when you output following a certain path from FCP. Regardless of whether your sequence has rendered to the host settings (usually DV, yuck) Compressor will go back to the original source footage and re-render every frame before compressing it to MPEG2 on its way to DVDSP.

If you bring your footage into FCP as Animation files, Compressor will use the original footage to create the MPEG2. The difference in the DVD presentation between this re-rendered transcode and a conventional transcode from self-contained DV can be astounding. Sometimes. Depends on the material.

It’s all spelled out in the Compressor manual but it takes a few pages to explain.

bogiesan

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