[Filip Vandueren]

Hi Roland, Andrew,

as soon as I saw the tutorial, I thought the same thing: use transmission to get a faux shadow that looks like it’s a reflection.

The expression for having the shadow fall towards the camera by having a spotlight orbit inverse to the camera is not that hard.
Fact is however, you just don’t get what you want:
the shadow always radiates out from the ‘casting layer, instead of being parallel like a reflection would, a nice effect, but it definitely doesn’t sell as a reflection.

cheers,

Filip

btw, here’s the expression:

code for the position of a spotlight:

poi=thisComp.layer("Camera 1").pointOfInterest;
campos=thisComp.layer("Camera 1").position;

p=2*poi-campos;
[p[0],campos[1],p[2]];


the point of interest of the spotlight should be the same as that of the camera:

thisComp.layer("Camera 1").pointOfInterest


[Filip Vandueren]

Hi Roland, Andrew,

as soon as I saw the tutorial, I thought the same thing: use transmission to get a faux shadow that looks like it’s a reflection.

The expression for having the shadow fall towards the camera by having a spotlight orbit inverse to the camera is not that hard.
Fact is however, you just don’t get what you want:
the shadow always radiates out from the ‘casting layer, instead of being parallel like a reflection would, a nice effect, but it definitely doesn’t sell as a reflection.

cheers,

Filip

btw, here’s the expression:

code for the position of a spotlight:

poi=thisComp.layer("Camera 1").pointOfInterest;
campos=thisComp.layer("Camera 1").position;

p=2*poi-campos;
[p[0],campos[1],p[2]];


the point of interest of the spotlight should be the same as that of the camera:

thisComp.layer("Camera 1").pointOfInterest


[Filip Vandueren]

Thanks for these results…

We all know multi-processor support is not super in AE out of the box, so if at all possible,
could you do a multi-processor test using nucleo or with a render engine + AE on a watchfolder ?

Or perhaps that doesn’t work under rosetta ?

regards,

Filip

[Filip Vandueren]

Yeah, very much so, unless you also slow down the music…

BTW: of course if your comps are all pure animation stuff, with no actual PAL 25i video footage used, you’ll get great results by just dropping your comp into an NTSC comp and scaling to fit.

Anyway, search the archives for pal ntsc conversion. You’ll find different solutions.

I’ve also heard some video-veterans say that nothing comes close to dedicated hardware standards conversion boxes: if you have a lot of work to do, might be the cheapest and best way to find a facility that owns such transcoding equipment.

[Filip Vandueren]

Well, it seems like every time this is asked, the replies tend to be: just film it or photograph/scan it in…

Not much use in spending 4 hours twiddling with some plugins for something that can be done with some paint and white paper in 5 seconds, is there ?

If you do want it all digital: There are some ink splat photoshop brush sets out there on the internet, one’s on adobe excahnge if I remember correctly

[Filip Vandueren]

If the footage is 25P, then IMO, the best quality way is to interpret them as 24 FPS, rescale to fit in an NTSC comp also running at 24FPS, then render them out using pulldown to 30i.

You slow down the footage to 96%, so this may be not be the best solution for all kinds of movies, but it is the most ‘losless’ way of doing this.

Of course there are a few plugins that do this stuff, you will find many discussion about this subject in the archive.

[Filip Vandueren]

All the time…

seems that the app is too slow: you click, then move the mouse and AE thinks you’re dragging with the mouse still down: hence the multiple selection…

Adobe is always very slow with releasing bugfixes in my experience, we’d be lucky to get 7.0.0.1 one year after it’s release 8-(, if ever…

[Filip Vandueren]

It works a bit faster in that you don’t have to collect the project and make sure your settings allow for multi-machine rendering etc.
Nucleo does all of that for you at the press of a single button, and you’re not limited to still-sequences.

Once the render is going though, it should be exactly the same speedup as running N+1 renderengines on your machine where N is the number of processors.

[Filip Vandueren]

Maybe they’re also set as guide layers -> guide layers don’t show up in final renders

[Filip Vandueren]

Weird buggy thing on os X:

if both 7 and 6.5 are open at the same time, and you drag a file to be opened in 6.5, it does open there, but 7 comes to the foreground.