[David Bogie]

A positive post, Harry, thanks for your contribution. Let’s hope it helps this poor guy out.

This doesn’t sound like corrupt files to me. It sounds to me like the capture was aborted instead of properly stopped. There is no header/tail information on these files.

And it appears like the production staff did nothing to test their proposed workflow. They certainly did nothing to protect themselves against (the now academic possibility of) failure. Recording directly to a hard drive is just so unreliable, not so much because the drive will fail, but because of the long list of weird stuff that can go wrong.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Sam Roberts] “Is this some kind of FCP bug???…it’s a real pain in the ass having to keep remaking the EFX Quicktimes every time I restart the computer. “

It’s not a bug but we have seen it happen before. You can search for the topic but I do not believe any of the OPs ever solved it to their satisfaction. It just stopped happening. Or they never bothered to report back (which happens a lot around here so if you solve your issue, please return and tell us how you did it).

Are you sure the files are being trashed at shutdown? Could it be happening at startup? Are they perhaps going to the trash during your edit session?

Suggest you trash your prefs and go through a new round of disk assignments. I do not know how it could happen, but it’s possible FCP has decided to place your render scratch files in the trash.

Winston’s observation about hard drive space is interesting; I’ve never known FCP to be smart enough to be able to tell disk capacities. It is far more likely to simply tell you there isn’t enough room rather than attempt to make room. but I’ve been surprised be weirder stuff.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Oh. That’s different. Glad we got that cleared up. So all you want to do is connect the dots?
Try Glue Gun (needs a mask or other path) and Lightning, too.
Do you have any other plug packages? Delerium has a great laser effect, similar to beam, but more stuff to tweak.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Christine, how does one go from “tracking a line” to a spiderweb? I have no idea what you’re seeing in your head so wipe your nose and try rephrasing the question. (You’re being issued a ticket by the Grammar Police: it’s is the contraction, not the possessive)

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Just make the behaviors the same length. But the ballistics of the effect will e sped up, compressed to fit the reduced time space.
Umm, just trying a few things in Motion…looks like it kinda depends on the behavior. Some won’t actually finish the way you expect them to if you compress the time they span.

Give us an example of the long and short text layers’ contents and the behavior you’re trying to apply to each.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

I speak for everyone: Makes no sense at all.
If you don’t want to create a 3D object that resembles a cube, you can apply Bevel Alpha and a light sweep layer to the the resulting edge.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

This looks more like simple (yet complicated) animation rather than a true rendering of Game of Life rules.

Game of Life emulators are all over the Net, you want to look for Flash and Java applications. Expand your search for “cellular automata” for mathematical and more realistic particle based simulations.

Are you familiar with the concept of competition in this game? One team accepts a design goal such as ending up with a bunny rabbit on the board and the other team tries to prevent it from happening by using a limited number of blocking bits and programmed foilers. Also appears in more than a few science fiction books that I’ve read but cannot recall at the moment.

You should be able to locate a Flash application or game that you can use for screen capturing. Then put a pixellation or Ball Action filter on it to reduce it to binary cells.

https://kotaku.com/5081257/sunday-timewaster-the-irregular-game-of-life

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

That sounds about right for a Magic Bullet Look filter. It’s doing a ton of processing and interpretation but you have not stated the format. For DV, that might be a bit slow. But for any HD format, that’s what I would expect. Is there any other processing being done such as format transcoding (say, from some weird MPEG2 codec to ProRes?) or scaling?

Setting up network rendering has never worked for me but others have found the stock Adobe AE rendering engine’s tools terrific for such heavy lifting.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

WaveWorld, Caustics, Colorama.
Three incredibly misunderstood and underutilized filters.

The best information about WW and Caustics is available from TotalTraining; Brian Maffitt invented them back in the Olden Days.

I use WW and Caustics often and I can tell you this: Real waves and real caustics are really fast (go visit a pool and watch the light play on the bottom) but the simulations always looks fake because they move too fast. I spend hours and hours slowing these effects down so the audience thinks they’re real.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[David Del] “Maybe I didn’t need to make the comp that big? Was there a better way?”

Can you create a transition to hide changing from the blackboard comp (at smaller siZe) to a the larger precomps that represent each of the photos?
Your blackboard doesn’t need to be any larger than the widest shot of it you ever see.
The individual photo precomps can be any size but, if you’re scaling them way down to fit the flying scene, you’re still wasting a ton of time processing them upstream of the blackboard.

You can also save tons of processing by prerendering all of your movies.

NTSC DV is about 400,000 pexels per frame.
HD is freakin’ huge, about 2,000,000 pixels per frame. The RAM and CPU resources required to process those pixels are not linear progressions, it’s a geometric number.

bogiesan