[David Franklin]

Well, I’m pretty sure the background processes aren’t quitting because I’m talking about RAM previews about a minute or so after each other. Try something, RAM Preview, make a change, RAM Preview… Like that.

And I’m definitely not doing ANYTHING else with the computer. I agree that this totally stresses the machine out.

I also need to play with it and am under a deadline right now, so haven’t gotten around to it.

But thanks for your thoughts. I’ll post again when I’ve made a more serious investigation of the problem…

[David Franklin]

However, before you get too excited about the possibility of rendering using multiple instances of AE on your MacPro, several of us have been having issues with the multiprocessing feature in our new CS3 software running on Intel Macs.

See thread here:
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=2&postid=912045&threadid=911927&pview=t

And yes, as far as anyone I have talked to has said, 3GB is the effective maximum that AE can address. At least it’s running as universal binary and we’re not dealing with Rosetta anymore!

[David Franklin]

I would be into that. I’m a little swamped this week, but if no one else has posted anything by next week, I’ll get something up there.

Thanks all for the feedback. Glad to know I’m not crazy…

[David Franklin]

Your problem is how you’re thinking of your footage. If you’re editing 16:9 native, there ARE no black bars at the top to put a title in. Imagine, for a second, that you’re going to hook a deck up to a wide-screen TV and play this footage back. The footage is going to fill the widescreen frame top to bottom and side to side. And then where are your bars?

The black letterbox bars only appear on 4:3 sets when they’re displaying a 16:9 image. They aren’t actually part of the 16:9 image itself.

So, for example, the clip you linked to on YouTube is not a 16:9 clip. It’s a 4:3 clip with 16:9 footage parked in the middle of it. So if you want yours to look like that, you’ll have to do the same thing.

Make a 4:3 comp, drop your 16:9 comp into it, resize to fit comp width, and there you are.

Once you’ve got “black bars” on the top and bottom, you can create a comp sized solid of whatever color, place it on a layer below your main 16:9 comp, turn it red, and there’s your red letterbox.

The title works similarly. Just place it outside the original footage in the area designated as your “letterbox.”

Hope this gets you where you want to go.

[David Franklin]

That would be motion tracking.

Check out how Andrew uses it to keep the sky in the “same position” relative to a moving foreground in this tutorial:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/kramer_andrew/sky_replacement.php

[David Franklin]

Here’s a link to a Dan Ebberts tutorial about building a random array of binary numbers.

https://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/binary-block.html

Perhaps you could use this as a starting point, only instead of reducing your string to base 2 as he does, keep it in base 10. This seems to me like it would do nicely for generating random strings of actual text.

[David Franklin]

Maybe, but I wouldn’t be quite so certain. All the live action looks like it was shot stop-motion, which would make using practical lighting techniques in-camera a plausible way to go.

And then there’s the fact that this is becoming a popular technique. Read the following exchange, and the articles linked to within…

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_thread.cgi?forumid=2&postid=910639&univpostid=910636

[David Franklin]

This should probably be in the FCP forum, but the trick is that after you connect the camera to the tower with the firewire cable, and put the camera into VTR mode, you have to hold down the button on the camera that switches from camera to vtr mode for two more seconds (or however long it takes until the camera mounts to your desktop as “NO NAME”). Then copy the entire contents of the card onto your hard drive, THEN import into FCP.

If you were to add the step of exporting from FCP and importing to AfterEffects, then maybe this post could stay in this forum. 🙂

Made With Care In Brooklyn, NY

[David Franklin]

Well, there’s a LOT going on here. But I wouldn’t say that an audio “spectrum” is what you’re looking for.

The two main components seem to be audio “waveforms” which are animating in time to the music, and video of Justin which has been degraded until it looks like television scan lines.

A basic form of the audio waveforms can be created using AfterEffects by applying the audio waveform effect (found in Effect > Generate > Audio Waveform) to a solid, and using your music as the “audio layer” in the effect control panel. This layer can then be thrown into 3D, duplicated a bunch of times, and distributed in z space, to make the textured contours you see in the video. These won’t have quite the look of the waveforms in the video, but they give a basic idea.

The second element, video degradation, is similar to what AfterEffects’s “Bad TV” animation preset will achieve, though they’ve got a lot of additional masking, warping, movement, and “particular” effects thrown in for good measure.

What you’re looking at here probably took a team of people several hundred of man hours to achieve. At least that’s how it looks to me. But the basic concepts are definitely achievable in AE.

Oh, and when the waveforms become lines which dance around? I’m going to guess they used Trapcode’s 3D stroke, or else a similar piece of software for a completely different platform.

Anyone else have ideas?

[David Franklin]

I’m in the “inconsistent service” camp. I have a MacPro tower, and I was running AE7 under Rosetta, and as is amply explained in the sticky post at the top of the forum, AE7 + MacPro Tower = Crashing.

So I’m one of those who has been champing at the bit to get my hands on AE8 or CS3 or whatevertheh*llthey’recallingittoday, since the beta version I had downloaded wouldn’t run any of my Cycore Plug-ins.

When I first called about upgrading from AE7 to CS3 I waited on hold for over 45 minutes, and finally had to give up the call because I had another appointment.

The next time I called, the phone was answered within a minute by a helpful guy who was definitely able to understand me and everything I said, curteously took my order, and I received the box with my upgrade on Monday of this week.

So one day terrible, the next day fantastic. All I can say is I hope someone over there understands that bad (or even inconsistent) customer service alienates your core customers. And then they switch products.

Like I recently did with Avid and FCP. (Don’t get me started about Avid’s customer “service.”)

Harumph.