[David Bogie]

3 or 4 seconds is not very long to show an overcranked shot but that makes the task far easier. How fast will your camera hoot? You’ll want at least 60fp, 90 would be better because you can always speed it back up to fit.

You’ll want to shoot silk or fine polyester. You’ll want some fans to create the billowing effect.
The rig I’m seeing in my head has the four corners guyed out with fish line so you have some control.

It will always look like a simulation so be prepared for that sytlistically. We’ve been shooting miniatures and trying to make them look big for bout 100 years

This is an effect I’d hire a 3d artist to do for me.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

I would use neither.
Just use time stretch and enter the new duration. Or use time remapping.
Or open the manual and look up how to properly use either option.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Rudy Shalamar] “(stop animation style)”

Extending your stop action animation by a factor of 400% will alter—or completely destroy—the illusion of animation; all of the physics will be wrong and the movements will become coarsely gross or grossly coarse.
For me, the only obvious solution is to reshoot the animation now that you know what you need and should have designed the first time.

Mitch’s suggestion to let AE interpolate the pixels to create tween frames is interesting but the results are totally unpredictable because optical flow depends on analyzing pixel vectors. Much like progressive scanning codecs, there are no easily discerned vectors with still images.

But please return and let us know how you extended your animation sequence. The advice cold come in handy for future inquiries and I’d like to know more about the visual aspect of your project.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

I would say, “Thanks for the cool toys and thanks for participating on the user forums.”

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[John Graves] “Still, that shouldn’t be necessary! Why is this simple operation of a cross dissolve a pain in the neck and what am I doing wrong?”

It’s a common issue with AE newbies. If you do as Rholand suggests and add a layer under your white layers, you will see the bottom layer become visible during that’s because at the middle of the dissolve, both layers are at about 50% opacity. That doesn’t add up to 100%, it means you can see through both.

To perform a dissolve in AE, you need to think of it as a change in opacity on the upper most layer from 0-100 or 100-0%. That will either reveal or completely obscure the underlying layers.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

The lights from the precomp should work in the main comp. You won’t be able to move them around because they don’t really exist as objects in the main comp, the image of them is just being carried forward.

Just tried this with precomp that has some blinking lights shining on a stage plane. The main comp shows the lights shining and blinking on the stage.

Not sure what you’re doing wrong but this works as promised in AE.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Our first questions when we see similar posts is to insist that you satisfy our curiosity about where you got this copy of AE and if it has ever worked for you before this.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

I like Justin’s approach, read his post several times so you understand the nuances.

I don’t use CS4 for editing, I use Final Cut and we do all of our lower thirds using a collection of templates created in Apple’s Motion. The template is created using drop zones for the text elements. When the template is used in the Final Cut timeline, the drop zones are all accessible form with thin effect’s setting, directly inside FCP’s interface. If our project has more than, say, ten supers, we create a simple text file that contains the names and job titles and locations and then we just copy and paste from Text to FCP.

Don’t know if Premiere has a similar hook into presets from AE that allow access direclty to the text layers. However, I don’t see why you’d want to use AE for the text component unless you’re using some gee-whizzy text animation. use AE to create your backgrounds/straps/pills (whatever you call the lower third thingies) and insert the text using Premier’s text tools. Far easier to make changes in the editor than in an upstream motion graphics app.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

I’d look around for a Canon user group that deals with that camera. check the FCP7 marketing pages at apple.com to see if those filetypes are on the list of compatible files. Canon and Nikon are known for taking their own paths to video and raw image processing that incur gross incompatibility issues with industry norms. Bastards.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

I’ve never shot with the EX1, what codec is that? Is the 60i real or derived?

I shoot conventional DV and FCP’s time remapping and speed adjustment functions produce lovely results especially if I carefully select the segment and then have Motion run Optical Flow on it.

bogiesan