[Dex Craig]

Hey, Tommmmmmmm —

So, I don’t have shine, but I was able to do something like you’re describing using CC Radial Fast Blur. Here’s what I did:

1. Put image for screen in a comp. Apply Basic 3D, tilt, distance from image to get the “screen” where you’d like it to be.

2. Duplicate this layer. Move the screen element to the right of the frame and increase the distance to image (or scale it down) to get a smaller “source” for the projection rays.

3. Add an adjustment layer with no effects on it.

4. Precomp (CTL+SHIFT+C on the PC — not sure on a Mac) the adjustment layer and the screen “source” layer.

5. Add CC Radial Fast Blur to the precomp. Set the “Zoom” perameter to brightest and the amount to 100 (or very nearly so). Place the center of the radial blur effect quite a bit off-screen and you’ll have streaming rays of light coming from the “source” point. Adjust placement of the center until it lines up like you’d like.

6. Put your projector element over the “source” layer, hiding the squared off repeat of the image on the screen.

That’s it.

Hope that’s helpful.

– Dex

[Dex Craig]

Hey, Tommmmmmmm —

So, I don’t have shine, but I was able to do something like you’re describing using CC Radial Fast Blur. Here’s what I did:

1. Put image for screen in a comp. Apply Basic 3D, tilt, distance from image to get the “screen” where you’d like it to be.

2. Duplicate this layer. Move the screen element to the right of the frame and increase the distance to image (or scale it down) to get a smaller “source” for the projection rays.

3. Add an adjustment layer with no effects on it.

4. Precomp (CTL+SHIFT+C on the PC — not sure on a Mac) the adjustment layer and the screen “source” layer.

5. Add CC Radial Fast Blur to the precomp. Set the “Zoom” perameter to brightest and the amount to 100 (or very nearly so). Place the center of the radial blur effect quite a bit off-screen and you’ll have streaming rays of light coming from the “source” point. Adjust placement of the center until it lines up like you’d like.

6. Put your projector element over the “source” layer, hiding the squared off repeat of the image on the screen.

That’s it.

Hope that’s helpful.

– Dex

[Dex Craig]

You’ll find CC lightsweep and CC Particle Systems under Effects/render and effects/simulation, respectively. If you didn’t install the Cycore effects when you installed AE, they won’t be there. You can go back to your install disk and install them.

Apparently, if you have the education version, Cycore Effects are not included; technically, they’re a third-party plug in that Adobe includes with the full purchased program.

You can achieve a similar effect to Light Sweep by making a second copy of your text, place it above the original text, brighten it up (using levels or whatever other method you like), add effect/channel/minimax operation: Maximum, Channel: Alpha and Color, radius to taste (to enlarge the brighter version of the text), and then apply a gausian blur. Change the transfer mode to Add or Screen. So, what this will do is give you a glow around and over your original text layer. Then you can create a mask that’s tall and narrow with a lot of feather to it. Animate the tall and narrow mask across the text and eureka, there’s a glowing shimmer that slides across your original text layer.

Not as easy as lightsweep, but if you don’t have the Cycore effects, it’s a way to do the job.

– Dex

[Dex Craig]

We have the XPS Gen 2. Nice machine — despite the tacky LEDs that glow all over the place….

I’ve been hearing good things about the LaCie drives (and they have up to 2 TB — yes terabytes! — available this month). The crash we had was a Western Digital, so I’m feeling a little shy about them.

– Dex

[Dex Craig]

I’ve just bought a Dell Inspiron PM 2GHz with Centrino set. I’ve edited on it for a week and not run into a problem. I did get the 7200 RPM 60 GB hard drive, but use an external firewire / USB 2.0 exactly as described above and it works just fine.

The Dell doesn’t seem to get terribly hot, and we have three of the Dell XPS Pentium M machines at work; they don’t get hot, either. They do have fans going and they do make some noise, but it’s not nearly as bad as my old desktop that sounds like a helicopter lifting off when I boot it up.

As for the dual monitors — I specifically bought the Inspiron because it has the WUXGA screen — 1920 x 1200 — plenty of space to spread all my toolbars and timelines and windows around. I don’t need an extra monitor (except for the NTSC monitor, of course, which attaches through the DV deck via firewire). I’m happy with my setup.

HTH

– Dex

[Dex Craig]

I’ve been playing with the liquify filter for fog effects recently, as well. That can go a long way toward giving the wispy elements of smoke.

Of course, you can also try out Particle Illusion. They really excel at smoke and explosion effects.

I did some effects shots of flying saucers attacking San Francisco and used PI for virtually all of the smoke. You can see that clip (Windows Meida only, I’m afraid) on my site. Here’s the link:

https://www.dexfx.com/Invasion_clip.htm

[Dex Craig]

CC Force Motion blur will do a good job simulating motion blur as Aharon mentions. There’s also re:vision effects reel smart motion blur plug in (about 99 bucks) that does a better job of simulating motion blur. Check out their site.

http://www.revisionfx.com

[Dex Craig]

I had a copy of PPro 1 and an AMD Athalon. I was unable to run PPro; when I tried to start it up, it told me something like “this computer will not run Premiere Pro. You need to have an Intel Pentium 4 chip.” Now, I know that PPro 1.5 does run on some non Pentium 4 machines, particularly on Pentium M machines, but can’t speak about it running on an Athalon.

Good luck!

[Dex Craig]

Thanks, everyone, for the input. I finally wound up deciding to get a Dell Inspiron with a helluvalotta horsepower. It’s more money than I wanted to spend, but I figure, I’ll be using this thing for a long time, so better to spend the money now and be happy than scrimp and be complaining.

The new computer should arrive next week.

Happy editing everyone!

– Dex

[Dex Craig]

And think about color space. Visualize a color wheel and consider using elements from opposite sides of the color wheel. Even just a tiny bit of orange in a largely blue animation will pop. It’s an old painting trick, actually….

HTH