[Filip Vandueren]

Go out and rent “Weird Science”, or perhaps something like “Wargames” or”D.A.R.Y.L.” if you need pseudo technology.
Great fun to be had 😉

also check out this site for commercials and 80s sitcom intros etc.:

https://www.retrojunk.com/

also Music and especially bad synthesizers will go a long way to give you that 80s retro feeling.

[Filip Vandueren]

You can always go to your os X system prefs and in the “Appearance” pane, Turn off test smoothing for font sizes 12 and smaller.

Also, take a look at “tinkertool”, that will perhaps enable you to choose another font that kerns better without antialiasing.

[Filip Vandueren]

Have you tried roughen edges ?
If you up the scale, you can get it to softly jiggle the depth of the stroke around your text, combined with the right font, and a bit of position/scale jiggle (path text or tex-abimators) and you’re halfway there.

[Filip Vandueren]

You can use Photoshop’s Crop tool to ‘unperspective’ your shot of the winding pathway.
So it becomes a top-down view.

Then composite your perfect CU-shot into that, and then try Mike’s suggestion by using the result as your floor, with the house set up in the distance.

[Filip Vandueren]

You can use Photoshop’s Crop tool to ‘unperspective’ your shot of the winding pathway.
So it becomes a top-down view.

Then composite your perfect CU-shot into that, and then try Mike’s suggestion by using the result as your floor, with the house set up in the distance.

[Filip Vandueren]

The pixelation is probably the result of using non-system colors in your comp.

On the whole: you should never use the GIF-export of AE.

If you have it, use Photoshop/Imageready to convert a sequence of picts or psds or whatever to a gif. It will calulate the best palette for your animation.

[Filip Vandueren]

Depends on what you want,
if you want the texture to be “locked/glued to” each letter as it stretches, blurs, animates, etc. then: no.

But you can ofcourse always have a texture layer that uses text as it’s alpha track matte.

[Filip Vandueren]

Though I have not used it, the plugin:

“FreeForm AE” from Forge

seems the best option.
I think Serge has mentioned how to use it in a few of his tutorials.

Basically it gives each corner of your layer 3d bezier controls so you can bend them any way you like.

[Filip Vandueren]

Try adding a wave warp set to only horizontal and do a whacky animate of it’s keyframes to mimic the loss of sync when rewinding.
Add some noisy layers that move up and down, perhaps add more noise, and check out Aharon Rabinowitz’s tutorial on a TV-screen look.

[Filip Vandueren]

FCP should have a checkmark “anamorphic” that you can set in the item properties of an imported clip, this will take care of the correct pixel aspect ratio.

I’ve only worked with FCP 4.5 on Pal projects, so I hope my info is still up to speed, otherwise, look it up in the manual, or ask on the Final Cut Cow