[Michael Duff]

coming up with a design and look that suits the company and products is probably more important than what effects you can use. If it is for medical products, maybe they don’t necessarily want something full of lens flares/shine and particals – come up with a nice clean look and then maybe use plug-ins or effects to boost that design. Don’t just put shine on something because that’s what everyone does.

[Michael Duff]

well interlaced footage is “smoother” because you are getting 50 different (half) pictures a second (rather than 25). But it will only look smoother if it was actually rendered interlaced. If you render without fields (full frames) then play on a TV, technically the footage is interlaced, but the two fields are made up of the same frame split in two….
confusing……

so….

interlaced footage is “smoother” – and is how most video is recorded is played back. – but most people will agree that is had a very distinct “video” look

full frame footage is not as smooth, but most will agree it has a more “film” look

For most things we render full-frames (non-interlaced) because we prefer that look.

[Michael Duff]

maybe you could try Mr. Mercury – I haven’t used it before so I can’t help you too much, but do a search for it in the archives

[Michael Duff]

maybe you could try Mr. Mercury – I haven’t used it before so I can’t help you too much, but do a search for it in the archives

[Michael Duff]

setting the work area has nothing to do with how the effect is applied. It is more for setting your render/preview length.

If you want to apply an effect to only a part of the layer there are a few things you can do:

1. Slit the layer (ctrl+shift+d) once or twice and only apply effect to the part you want

2. apply the effect, and then use keyframes within the effect to say when to have it on or off

3. put an adjustment layer only over the time to want to effect….then add your effect to the adjustment layer.

4. There are most likely more ways to do this, but these are just a couple that came to mind

[Michael Duff]

slightly off topic…… but I wish you could set a different location for your autosaves……

[Michael Duff]

probably your best best is 3D stroke from Trapcode. Do a search for 3D Stroke in the archives and check out the trapcode website.

Alternately, and probably better is to use a 3D program. You can have more control over your lines and the benefits of true 3D space. If you have a 3D program try playing around with sweep nurbs (I think that’s what they are, I can’t remember)

[Michael Duff]

you would make a black to white ramp on a solid, using the ramp effect.

Then precompose that layer.

Then put the precomposed layer above the arrow

Then on the arrow layer in the track matte box(next to blending modes) select “luma matte”

What that does is tell the arrow layer to look at the layer above and use the darkness and lightness to work out to transparency.

check out the manual and read up about “track mattes”….I’m sure you’ll find them most useful 🙂

[Michael Duff]

when you render make sure you use the render queue – then select a codec to use. I’d say at the moment you are rendering to uncompressed or animation codec. Much too big for 88 minutes. Maybe you should try to render it to DV. “Normal” DV (DV25) makes one hour about 13Gig (I think).

if none of that makes sense, read these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_codec

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dv

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animation_codec

[Michael Duff]

use a mask – for a square or round one hit “Q”, to draw one with the pen tool hit “G”

draw it so the mask covers about half the arrow

then feather the mask (shortcut “f”)

alternately you could do things like making a black to white ramp, pre-composing it, then using it as the luma matte for the arrow.

But i reckon a mask is easiest/quickest