[David Bogie]

(This is longer than it needs to be, sorry, feeling chatty tonight.)
It’s not really that difficult to get started but, yeah, some serious help would be good. How much does your company want to invest in the effect? TotalTraining’s AE series contains enough information on Card Dance to make it happen for you but you gotta buy the whole package.

You can start with a layer that contains, say, a 3×4 matrix of little picture of army guys. Apple Card Dance and figure out how to make 12 cards appear. You can then tilt the cards along the x axis so they stand up. Moving them up and down, left to right and elsewhere is accomplished by using compound effects by referencing grayscale images. For example, create a layer that is a white circle on a black background and point the y-offset at it. Your cards that are sitting on top of the white circle will rise up, those on the black background won’t.

Umm, yeah, it’s really confusing. I can’t think of any books that actually explain card dance but there used to be a HUGE section of the AE online help files dedicated to it.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

I think we’re all having trouble imagining the same result you think you see in your head.
Changing the depth of field in relation to the point of interest doesn’t seem to have a practical use. Tell us why you think you want to do this and someone will probably come up with a practical solution.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

I think we’re all having trouble imagining the same result you think you see in your head.
Changing the depth of field in relation to the point of interest doesn’t seem to have a practical use. Tell us why you think you want to do this and someone will probably come up with a practical solution.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

The question stimulates another question:
Why do you want to use MPEG2 out of After Effects?
As Chris says, there’s a probably a much better way but it depends on your end needs

bogiesan.

[David Bogie]

How important?

Demand to be supplied with the camera that shot the thing and capture form that. Or play the disk in a DVD player and route it through your DV camera/deck and capture directly as a FW uncontrolled device.

bogiesan

[Angela Boyd] “video that was given to me was shot on a camera that goes directly to DVD. I opened the Video file, and there are a few VOB files that I pulled directly into final cut. I don’t think this is going to wok very well for quality. THe video is much smaller than the Canvas viewer. Is there another way that I should be trying to capture the video from the disc?? This is a really important job.

“

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

[David Bogie]

[Slice11217] “At work I’m using After Effects 6.5 for an animated television show. We are rendering our compositions from a comp that is 720 x 486, D1 pixels, with lower fields to an animation compressor. < So far so good, but why are you using Animation? I'm asking because many people do not udnerstand it. > When we bring our Quicktimes into Final Cut Pro we have large jagged breaks in the image quality, not the smooth movement we expect. < If you are bringing in the raw Animation it won't play until it's rendered to conform to your sequence settings. > We tried switching to upper fields and got the same result. We’re using the latest version of Final Cut. My suspicion is that it’s something on Final Cut’s end of things and not AE’s. Has anyone else experienced and (better yet) solved this problem?”

Most of these issues are simple user errors. Fill in the blanks on the question me and debe have asked and we’ll have something to suggest.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Nope.
Umm, like what?

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Sorry, wasn’t watching the original thread. So this was the result of having a non-integer speed value that produced an odd number of frames?

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Sorry, this may be meaningless and useless but here’s what I’d do:
Down-convert the HDV stuff to DV (or your predominant format) and forget about it till you get the new machine.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Just heard the promo again, today, Tuesday, November 8. Program is called “All Things Considered.” check your local NPR station schedule.
“What I do is part short order cook and part brain surgery,” Murch.

bogiesan