[David Bogie]

Depth of field can be simulated using compound blur. The Crumblepop ShrinkRay filter is a prepackaged compound blur effect that dramatically simplifies the illusion. However, none of these are 3D aware and the illusion is easily destroyed by improper application of the filter’s blur ranges.

Motion 4 has a delightfully cool DOF function but it requires your guitar player to be a separate layer from the foreground and background elements.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

I am not of the “scorched earth” erase-the-drive school. I have successfully updated or upgraded all of my Macs for both OS and FCP products without any problems. (If I have ever had problems, I have forgotten them.)

The move from FCP5 all the way to the new Studio package has heavily impacted everything that is related to Quicktime but that should not have affected any of your text generators’ abilities to see your Mac’s font collections. Font issues are usually related to OS issues so can you use your fonts in other type-intensive applications like Motion, Word, Photoshop?

You might try the usual tool that sometimes fixes stuff like this and repair your system drive’s permissions. Might work. If not, try starting your system from your Leopard system disk and run the disk repair utility. This can tweak thousands of kinked files.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Erik Lindahl] “What David said might be a solution but it’s sadly a relatively complex project to split up and re-import. I will give that a shot tomorrow however. Another solution would be appreciated.
“

An import does exactly the same thing as OPEN so I’m not surprised it didn’t work.
You’ve probably got a bad piece of media at the bottom of the list or you’re trying to find a missing server or resolve some oddball URL. There are only a few things that can stop AE from opening a project successfully and none of them are immediately evident. AE7’s project format is being converted on the fly to CS4 and there can be some oddball parsing issues with third party or obsolete effects, codecs your new machine does not have (or has updated or has located in different places), or dramatic changes in the OS.

Super complex projects from AE7 may benefit from the collect media feature. You will end up duplicating all of the media files but you end up with fresh copies all in one place.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

I have no idea what you’re seeing.

The standard answer for such inquires is to Precompose and apply your last set of moves to the downstream setup.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

You can use Shatter or you can use individual pieces of the flower and animate them separately or you can wait for a few other folks to add their advice.
Explaining how to accomplish these effects with credibility is beyond the capacity of a post here on the Cow. you can easily research “blown away” or “text to sand” tutorials or just start scrolling down the huge list of AE tutorials till you find something that interests you.

Warning: Simulating natural phenomena like wind is much more difficult than you might imagine. AE tends to produce phony simulations if you use filters and effects without carefully studying thier application and often infinite adjustments.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Hope you get better advice:

Open the project in AE7, save five or six copies, carefully numbering them.
Open each of the copies and delete about 3/4 of the material in each one so that, when they are all imported, you have the entire project.

Go back to your CS4 machine and start opening them one at a time. any one that fails to open contains your problems; could be a filter that is obsolete or media that has gone missing.

If they all open, you can import them one at a time into an empty project, then rearrange it.
‘Tis tedious, yes.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

> I have the photos lined up in order with the flag center in each one but how do I go from still to still smoothly?< I read your original post as wanting to do a 360 orbit move around the flag in 3D space. But now it seems all you want to do is merely bring the still images in as an image sequence. That's a simple mechanical operation once your images are registered to the flag. You would do that as stacked layers in Photoshop and then import the images as a composition. The temporal resolution of the sequence is directly related to how many frames you have. Period. If you have Apple's Motion, you can use Optical Flow to smooth out the gaps between the images but the results will always be less than smooth and have a bit of stylization. The end result may require your director reconsider the look and feel of the effect. My suggestion is to present them with several versions of the movie, applying different timing and a few filters to each; you want to make some severe changes that help to mask or to draw attention to the still-image-to-movie effect. bogiesan

[David Bogie]

The idea is good but your approach is not appropriate. Study the sections in the manual on saving presets and templates.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Yar, advanced techniques require extended patience and experience. Stick with AE long enough and Caustics will become a favorite for all kinds of ultra-realistic simulations and fluid effects.

Radio Waves is far too regular to simulate droplets, ripples, or any natural phenomenon.You asked about simulating natural phenomena, you did not indicate that your effect’s needs included any flexibility for stylization. Next time, give us more to work on and you’ll get more applicable answers and suggestions.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

A dopey producer and a skilled but sadly ignorant photographer, sheesh.

You must first remove the flag from all of the still images before you stitch them together.

Then you will place a new layer into your 3D composition that is ONLY the flag. The flag layer will be 2D, it will have no thickness ,so you will need to decide if it turns to remain oriented toward the camera or if you will attempt to make it appear to have mass.

bogiesan