David Johnson
Forum Replies Created
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Thanks much Todd. I should’ve looked there first.
All I had to do was disable the layer’s empty audio track!
Thanks also to Mylenium … a consistent saviour.
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Not sure how much help this will be, but it seems it is a throughput issue with your server so your AE machine is momentarily losing connection with that server. Personally, I avoid at all cost working in AE with files that are anywhere except the local AE machine … or at least a directly connected RAID or other external drive. I know it can be done, but is generally much slower and introduces more IT issues/support. Hope this is some help.
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If I understand your question correctly, you just need to make your mask layer an Alpha Matte (or Inverted Alpha Matte) for your graphics layer(s) … if your graphics are on multiple layers, you’ll need to pre-compose them since you can only use an Alpha Matte for one layer. You could also pre-compose your graphics and just make a mask on that precomp layer instead of using an Alpha Matte.
I don’t have AE open right now, but the Alpha Matte options are in your timeline right next to the other switches, although they may not show by default so you may need to right or option click to show them.
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I haven’t gone to CS4 yet (and may not since Adobe dropped some features I rely on heavily), but this is what I know about the question as it applies to CS2 to CS3 and my guess is that it’ll be the same with CS3 & CS4 …
I now have CS2 & CS3 installed simultaneously on a bunch of machines (4 at work & 1 at home … both Windows and Mac platforms) and they all continue to work flawlessly. Depending on how you work, you might run into a few minor inconveniences like those Mylenium mentioned, but I’ve had zero issues that affect my workflow.
You should double check your Adobe license to be sure, but last time I checked, the Adobe license actually allows you to install on two machines as long as they both belong to the same owner and are not used at the same time (the idea being that people can use the same software on a desktop at the office and a laptop at home).
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Yes, I have noticed that CS3 is slower than CS2 … I suppose its the price we pay for the interface improvements and other added features.
My guess is the rationale is that increases in software demands should be balanced out by improvements in available hardware specs between software versions … even though the reality is that many of us can’t afford to upgrade our hardware as frequently as our software, it probably wouldn’t be practical for software makers to base they’re new software versions on anything but the most current and near-future forecasts hardware, rather than last year’s specs.
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In your first post it sounded like you animated the tile in AE, which would make adding text to it much easier and realistic looking. Since it was animated elsewhere and u want to add text to that footage, you will have to motion track it in AE. You could move the text frame-by-frame with keyframes as you mentioned, but depending on the motion, it will probably be harder and may not look as believable.
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I don’t use P2 so I can’t answer to your general workflow but …
[Mike Raff] “I’ve read that OS 10.5 should be able to read files off of an NTFS formatted drive (not write to it, but read from it). If that’s so, I should be able to take their drive and copy the clips to my internal RAID. At least that’s what I’ve read. Is that right? Has anyone had the experience of copying files from a Windows formatted drive attached to their Mac?”
Yes, I do exactly that every day. Macs can read NTFS with no help, but they need third-party software to write to NTFS drives … oddly enough, I think it’s called “NTFS for Mac”, but I don’t recall who makes it (even though I have it since I’m not at my Mac right now).
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Another option I just remembered …
You could use the “Uber” key (hit U on the keyboard twice) to show all the adjusted properties, then copy those property settings and/or keyframes from one layer and paste them to all the other layers at once. However, you have to copy and past the properties and keyframes from each plugin one at a time … you can’t do them all at once since AE wouldn’t know where to paste what and would, therefore, just duplicate all the plugins you have copied. It’s very hard to explain without being able to show someone so I hope that made sense to you. I’d bet the AE help does a better job of explaining how all that works.
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Although there are also drawbacks and limitations to this approach, you could also apply your effects to one adjustment layer above all the layers you want affected, precompose all the layers you want affected and apply the effects to the nested comp instead of the individual layers, or any combination of both.
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I was afraid that would be your answer, Andrew … sorry I couldn’t be more help, but I’ve never seen the error in FCP that is just “Not Found”. Perhaps you have some corrupt render files or something like that … I know this would be a pain if it is a huge project that will take a very long time to render, but I’d probably trash all the render files and re-render everything. I think that’s my approach because I just don’t trust FCP render files totally … seen them do too many weird things with no explanation, although that is much more rare since the past couple new major version releases like Studio 2.