[David Bogie]

I just finished a project that had two 5kx5k layers, a floor and a wall.

This is something we’ve been asking about since AE was blessed with 3D: the infinite plane. Ubiquitous in any modeler of 3D animation system, there must be a good reason it hasn’t found its way into AE.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Might work. I dunno, too much to read and I can’t imagine how you’d do this on a regular basis. Stop motion files cna be retained as still images separately from the image sequence media which can be backed up and relinked easily. You should not ever need to use the original photo files but they’re good to have aorund.

The concept of backing up and preserving mission critical information is not new. I(t can researched endlessly on the Net and from white papers from all of the manufacturers of backup software and drives. You’ve got to decide on the cost/benefit ratio of trying to do this yourself or just buying a turnkey system. Any archiving system that is too complicated to execute won’t get used and you will, at one point, need to perform a black start test to see if your process even works.

But backing up is meaningless if you don’t have an offsite copy and a hot site where you can upload and get back into business if your offices are destroyed or burglarized.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Note that the playback component from Flip4Mac is free but the ability to encode to wmv is $50 or $200 depending on the version you need.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Mark, using color is a cool idea, one I would not have thought of, never even opened it.

Thanks for chiming in and I, too, resisted the temptation to go on and on about the photographer.

bogie

[David Bogie]

Flickering is a word used to describe frame rate and field rate issues, not exposure changes due to your crew’s (likely sloppy) photography. Perhaps there is a plugin for Photoshop that you could use on your still images.

There are no automatic tools of which I am aware that can make those kinds of corrections without setting the parameters frame-by-frame. There are a few compression applications that will create custom color look up tables based on uncontrollably gross averaging of the pixel content but they are not intelligent; there’s no way to tell Compressor to change a gray area to the better gray but to not perform on averaging operation on that good gray area. And, of course, your idea of “gorgeous” will require a bit of change.

I hope you get appropirately helpful advice from someone here who knows of some obscure plugin that will save your project. There’s a book called “Fix it in post.” See amazon.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

The holidays, I guess you mean Easter?, have nothing to do with us helping you meet your deadline. Folks come and go around here. The reasons are known only to them, erm, us.

Shatter is a great effect for extrusions if you have the custom shatter map figured out. But you can’t necessarily get a 3D scene out of Shatter.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[andy levine] ” i am surprised there is no ‘word’ or ‘selection’ option for a behavior like a glow/highlight. “

Write one.

Try duplicating your entire layer with all of your behaviors and stuff, and just mask out everything you don’t want to show.

I’d approach this in After Effects by creating the highlight effects in a comp upstream of the movements. In Morion, create your stacked effects in the text group before adding your behaviors. If you can’t do that because of the effects/moves you have created, you will need to redesign the concept to fit your capabilities or the capabilities of the software at your disposal.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

After Effects>Vegas. Easy-peesy. You just need a vector line that represents the trace. You’ll need one application of Vegas for each line or a separate layer for each line depending on how well you understand Vegas.

This is far easier to simply shoot off a monitor.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

In the olden days of After Effects, text highlights usually just meant changing the color of one word. We did that with a matte behind the text. or we’d make a copy of the single word and place it exactly on top of the phrase on screen.
if you need to use glows or glints, you’re going to follow Stephen’s advice.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

“Crumble” or “crumple”? Huge difference.
Shatter, as Dave says, can crumble if you set the project up carefully so the gravity inclination is away form the camera. but if you want to crumple something. you don’t need After Effects.

bogiesan