[David Bogie]

You can use CC Drizzle to create grayscale movie map of raindrops pattering and creating basic ripples and then use that movie to drive a compound effect called Displacement Map.

Or you could use the Drizzle movie with Caustics to create ultra-realistic ripples and surface reflections and refractions.

Beware: These are not beginner’s effects.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Jason Brown] “I just have a hard time staying focused on reading.
“

Ritalin, Wellbutrin.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

To use AE’s cameras well you must first understand photography or movie camera operation.
If that expertise is safely presumed, I believe the best camera training in AE is with Trish and Chris Meyer’s many books. the Adobe CIB series is also superb. What I did was find one 3D exercise I liked and then I started applying everything I could find in all of the camera options and menus including zooming, depth of field, orientation, changing anchor point positioning, and, the most valuable lesson, learning to create “camera rigs” to which a camera could be parented.

I admire your desire to pay for and travel to training but I think you can do just as well or better with a good AE book.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Mathieu Champagne] “So, this seems as though it should be an easy task, but I have not been able to find a viable way of accomplishing it without faking it. What I have to accomplish is having a simple flat 3d layer rotate”

A “flat 3D rotate” is an oxymoron.
There’s nothing easy about 3D.

You must first create the head as a 3d object which is impossible so forget it. So, you must mask out the head and shoulders and remove them from the background. The head layer must be made 3D and positioned forward of a new background plate.
Then you must create the counter as a 3D object and position it so its anchor point is at the geometric center of the head. Parenting it to the head won’t help since the head is not actually going to rotate around its 3D y axis, the movie is simply going to play as the subject turns his head.

You will rotate the counter around the anchor point as the head moves.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Just to let you know a bunch of us are seeing this stupid artifact on our renders. Could just be inexcusably lax quality control on Apple’s part. But it’s difficult to determine where the fault lies since, in my cases, the glitches do not appear in the same place; they seem to be random. That usually rules out bad media but does not eliminate data disruption during media read or write cycles which could be caused by data bus issues, wonky connectors, a bad rendering engine, or physical drive issues.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

If you create movie of a bill as a layer that is wrapped around a cylinder or sphere and roll the thing around (you’ll need two surfaces of the bill, of course) you can use the movie as a particle source. But they will always be flat objects.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Yar, this is EXACTLY what he was told on apple.com.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[April Henderson] “Well you know “

I don’t know this as a bug at all; it just doesn’t seem to be an issue for most of us. My layers are always positioned in 3D space exactly where I place them. The user can easily get confused by the conflicts between world and object coordinate systems but the object’s ultimate 3D world placement is always exact in my compositions.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

This is a common misperception of how video works; DPI is meaningless in video, there are only pixels. Your photo is likely to be quite large, pixel-wise, say, 1000 or more pixels in both directions. Your DV timeline has a far smaller number of pixels, about 800×500. Your still image is being scaled down to fit the timeline and FCP’s reduction algorithm has always totally sucked. You can disable or override the scaling in the Motion Tab for the selected still image. You may get better resutls for yoru images if you scale them to appropriate video dimensions using Photoshop or even iPhoto.

It looks good in the Browser’s Viewer pane because that’s upstream of the timeline. Your Canvas displays your image after it has been processed to fit the timeline’s settings.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Dunno, there must be a way to script the Add Marker with a regular timing increment. I do not do scripts.

In the olden days, we’d record a click track (mic and a metronome, really high tech) and display the audio waveform.

bogiesan