Eric Barker
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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The biggest reason is: there’s no reason to.
AE already has tons of ways of drawing lines, stretching them, yatta yatta, either with masks, with “write on” effects, etc. The fact is, yes, underlining is very bad form, but there are ways of using it well in animation, but those ways are typically going to need to be separate from the text itself, in order to work fully. Things like horizontal lines that jut across the screen and under text (I do that quite frequently in spots). You can’t do that with simple underlines, so why even bother with them?
You’ll notice that there’s a lot of simple things that you can’t do in AE because AE is designed to be a more robust, involved program to do more complex operation. You can do ANYTHING in AE, but simpler stuff tends to be more complex then it would be in a simpler program. You can make and manipulate underlines just as well, you just have to do it yourself.
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Well, you’re going to have to be more specific on how you want to present yourself, and what the final arrangement is going to look like when the animation is finished.
Are you putting the books in a fan-like arrangement, with say 5 books each half/covering the one next to it? Or are the books just filling the screen, completely obscuring the ones behind it?
If they’re obscuring the books behind it completely, one idea is to spin up the book quickly with motion blur, and then during the spin, it dissolves into the new book so that by the time it stops spinning, it shows the next book. Sorta like how old movies like Citizen Kane would have a scene of headlines flying at you. Just a thought.
Books and CDs… I’d keep it fairly simple, too flashy is probably going to a bit disingenuous in this case. You might try for “classy” instead of “wow”. But I really don’t have a good sense of how you’re trying to present this.
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Even easier (and less combersomb) Use the effect “Linear Wipe” and then give it a large feather, and boom, you’re done.
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That’s an interlacing issue right there. If I’m correct, only the thin horizontal lines are jumpy, right? If so, you’re in luck. There’s a wonderful little built-in effect called “reduce interlace flicker” that fixes just this problem. Throw that sucker on your schematic layer and set it to between 0.5 and 1 (if the layer is scaled to 100%… if it’s scaled down, you might need to go higher). I use this effect so much, that I put a duplicate in my Premiere Pro plugins folder, and use it in there all the time. What it does is applies just a slight amount of vertical gaussian blur. 0.5 will be good enough for most problems, 1.0 will stop interlace flicker dead in its tracks (only go higher if you are scaling down the image).
Hope this helps. If it’s not that, then I’d have to see it to get a better picture of what we’re dealing with.
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Well, unfortunatly, I’ve never worked with Avid. I work mainly with Premiere and Final Cut, myself. Not sure what that “maintain” thing is about, either, anyone an Avid expert?
I’m guessing that there are presets somewhere that are more along the lines of standard video formats. For TV/DVD, you’re going to want NTSC which is:
– interlaced video (not progressive scan)
– 720×480
– 4:3 aspect ratio, with non-square pixels (0.9).
– 30 frames per second (which is 60 FIELDS per second)You’re also going to want to exchange the files in one of two ways: DV compression for standard video. And uncompressed video with “millions+ colors” if you want transparency (alpha channel).
In After Effects, at the bottom of the viewer window, there are 4 little buttons on the far right. The left-most button toggels the aspect ratio correction.
What may be happening is that you’re completely fine. If you don’t have an external TV monitor hooked up, you won’t know for sure until you burn a DVD and play it. What may just be going on is that the aspect ratio correction in the Avid viewer window may be pretty crappy, but what really will go on TV will be fine. Test it out to make sure.
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Ahhh, that looks like an aspect ratio issue. I’m seeing, what looks to be, tearing from horizontal stretching.
Are you going to be ending up with NTSC? PAL? HD? Or square pixel format (computer/web)? If you’re working with NTSC (which I’m guessing you are, from the resolution of those screen shots), remember that you’re working with non-square pixels (width is 90% of height). This means that if you want the best conversion quality from After Effects to Avid/FCP/Premiere, you’re going to want to start with an NTSC (0.9) 720×480 composition. Right now, it looks like it’s having to drop or stretch some of the virtical lines in order to match the resolution of your Avid project.
It could also just be on your monitor. AE has a “Aspect Ratio Correction” button on the viewer that attempts to account for non-square aspect ratios on a computer monitor (square pixelx). Avid might have a similar thing. When those options are turned on, the software doesn’t bother to do any complex resizing, so usually it just discards one pixel every so often. So it could just be the product of viewing NTSC resolution material on a computer monitor.
Give me an idea with what format you’re working from in After Effects, and what you’re going to be working with in Avid. That doesn’t look like a compression issue at all.
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That is true, however, if you have more than one mask, resizing them independantly changes their relative position, which can be a nightmare if you have 20 masks on a layer (like, with tracing lines and the like). Then resizing each individually becomes about as inefficient as just starting over from scratch.
But this should probably be renamed “how to resize a group of masks.” Thanks for bringing this up.
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Not sure, but I think there’s a section missing from the tutorial. There’s nothing in there that defines the initial rotational value of the first Link. Basically, what the expression “chain” is doing is looking to the previous layer for its rotation, but if the rotation of the first layer (“Link 1”) is defined as “0”, no change will occur.
I was able to manually get the chain swinging back and forth by turning off the expression for “Link 1”, and then moving it’s rotational value, but there’s nothing in the tutorial that actually makes it “swing”.
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Well, first off, you don’t need blood. In the Star Wars universe, it’s explained that lightsabers automatically cotterize wounds, although this was probably just an excuse so that Lucas Films didn’t wind up with an “R” rating slapped on the series. But, never-the-less, you’ll never see blood spurting out from a lightsaber wound. Doing so here would make it look “not quite right” if you’re trying to make it “authentic”.
Secondly, if you have the opportunity to shoot again, or haven’t shot yet, I’d figure out how you were going to do this before hand. This will greatly enhance the quality of the finished product, and make your life a lot simpler.
A head doesn’t just fly off, it’s probably going to roll off forward or backward as well, and tilt as it’s going. Shoot the scene twice, once for the body motion (does his headless body fall backwards?), then reposition him in the same spot to get the head motion (falling forward or to the side will be the easiest; have him turn a bit too). Since you’re only going to be working with 8 or so frames, and this is a quick action sequence, I wouldn’t worry too much about it being EXACTLY in the same place; after all, you’re just going to be super-imposing the head and placing it manually anyway.
Afterwards, you’re going to want to first make his head dissappear, but then copy that same video track, and mask out just the head. If you have him turn or move, you’ll have to keyframe the mask shape, but this shouldn’t be more than 7-8 frames (heads fall fast), so it shouldn’t be too much work. Oh, set your anchor point to the middle of the head, because that’s the head’s center of gravity (when it’s decapitated), so it’ll rotate around that point. Then simply animate it’s path off the shoulders and off camera, using the actor’s head movement as a reference of where the head should fly.
Hope this helps.
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Median affects all 3 channels, so you need a way to get the default luma channel back before you apply Channel>Channel Combiner again and go back from YUV to RGB.
And how would I do that?