[Gareth Randall]

[Chris Northcross] “I don’t think that’s an unfair comment at all Gareth. You’re asking how to make your work look good”

I really don’t want to start an argument, but I do feel that I’m being misrepresented here. I’m asking about approaches to making a certain style of effect, which I think is a different thing to simply “making my work look good”. I’m not asking for an “instant nice” button. I want to understand the processes behind achieving organic-style particle effects.

“that is the same way Andy Kramer, Andy Neil, Mark Spencer, Simon Ubsdell, Nick Campbell, and a whole host of others did it. They put a lot of time and effort into learning how to make their work look the way it does”

But crucially, I doubt that all of them did it without any external guidance or tuition whatever. There will be plenty of incredibly talented motion graphics people out there who will have soaked up every tutorial and other piece of advice they could possibly find. And why not?

Yes, sometimes you *will* happen upon great effects by accident just by playing around with parameters, but other times you’ll see something someone else is doing and say “Hey, that’s great, how have you done that?” and you’ll learn something that informs your own work.

After all, we don’t all have unlimited time to just sit and play in the hope that we can create the effect we want, and there’s no point re-inventing the wheel with every project. And I’d say that some people *do* have their heads wired in a way that allows them to see connections between seemingly disparate parameters or filters and use them to create certain effects that would otherwise seem difficult or impossible to achieve without special plug-ins.

[Gareth Randall]

[Simon Ubsdell] “Sorry, didn’t mean to offend you”

I wasn’t really offended, but I did think “Aww, c’mon!” – many of us are here to learn, after all 😉

[Gareth Randall]

[Sandeep Sajeev] “I’d say that the example you posted is really not photo-realistic”

I’m not going to get into an argument about that. What I *will* say is that it’s an example of the sort of particle effect that there just don’t seem to be *any* Motion tutorials about.

“I’d highly recommend Ripple Trainings Motion 5 series (I bought the set) as a great way to get a deep understanding of what Motion is capable of”

I learned Motion and Soundtrack Pro through Ripple Training videos, and I think they’re great. But I do think the sections related to particles are somewhat lacking. Obviously it’s a huge subject all of its own, and there doesn’t seem to be a Motion tutorial package that really covers it in the depth you’ll find for the likes of AfterEffects.

I was excited when I saw that there was a separate standalone Ripple tutorial devoted to Motion particles, but when I looked at the lessons covered, I decided not to buy it, because my particular interest (geddit?) is in the more photorealistic or subtle applications of particle systems rather than the more “cartoony” (for want of a better expression) examples given in the Ripple tutorials.

[Simon Ubsdell] “By all means do the tutorials, – but you’re not going to get good at it until you put in the hours.

Motion graphics, huh? It’s a real PITA that it actually takes work to get decent stuff made ;-)”

I realise that’s a joke, but I think it’s also a bit of an unfair comment, Simon. Yes, it does take work to get decent stuff made, and that work is informed by knowledge and experience. Very few of us are Andy Kramer-style geniuses whose brains are wired in the sort of way that lets us work out how to do amazing stuff from scratch – we need to gain knowledge from somebody else. Show us how to build the basic effect and we can then build on that and develop our skills. But when it comes to Motion, the tutorials that would allow us to learn the basic skills of creating those more realistic or “organic” particle effects just don’t seem to be there.

Yes, you can just sit and play with the particle controls and see what happens, but that’s more likely to end up just eating time than getting the results you want. A bit of guidance and direction, “if you want to achieve X sort of effect you need to think in terms of Y”, works wonders.

Your examples above are great starting points, since I haven’t seen any tutorials that cover building those sorts of particle effects. If you could expand them into a proper tutorial, that would be fantastic. And if you could then go on and demonstrate how you’d turn those dust particles into realistic shimmery metal particles that twist and turn and catch the light, that would be awesome 🙂

[Gareth Randall]

Hi Thomas,

Due to our workflow here, the grade has to happen inside Smoke, it’s just not practical (for various reasons) to grade the ProRes files before taking the ARRIRAWs in to Smoke.

I understand that Alexa will allow recording of ProRes proxies to SxS cards at the same time that it is recording ARRIRAW to the external recorder? In that case, there would seem to be no problem – I can immediately use the proxies to cut the promo in FCP (I don’t need to apply a LUT to do the edit), using an XML to import the ARRIRAW files into Smoke for the grade.

[Gareth Randall]

I’d recommend buying Patrick Sheffield’s book “How To Cheat In Motion”. It’s got a whole section dedicated to ways of disassembling and reassembling images using Motion’s standard tools. Yes, particles are one way, but you can also use a replicator.

[Gareth Randall]

[Alan Okey] “The ability to tweak chroma keys or check for interlacing issues on a proper broadcast monitor while working on a composite or a motion graphics composition is critical”

Absolutely. It makes no sense that you can’t be watching Motion 5’s output on a broadcast monitor when building a motion graphics sequence. That’s one of the reasons I’m still on Motion 4.

[Gareth Randall]

Thanks Vishesh. Yeah, I figured I’d probably have to just cut things out manually and displace them in Z-space. I’ll have to find another project to try out Vanishing Point 🙂

[Gareth Randall]

[Shane Ross] “FCP can only media manage footage that is in an editing codec, or has a reel number

My media satisfies both those criteria. As suspected, it turned out to be the fact that it was using an MXF wrapper. I just rewrapped the MXF as a QT, reconnected, and now Media Manager has done its stuff – 41 GB reduced down to 413 MB.

[Gareth Randall]

I think you may have misunderstood my point. I only mentioned the subclips in passing as background to my workflow. The key issue here is that I have a 35-second promo cut using a 2-hour movie (a single 41 GB source clip) and I want to use Media Manager to create a new project and copy over only the 35 seconds of media actually used in the sequence.

I suspect the problem is that the source clip is MXF rather than QuickTime. I’m rewrapping it as a QT now, so I can take the MXF offline and reconnect to the MOV and see if that makes any difference.

[Gareth Randall]

If it was shot with a PD150 then it’s DVCAM. Since FCP can handle DVCAM natively, there’d have been no need to transcode it to ProRes before editing.

To convert it to ProRes you can simply export it from FCP and choose “ProRes 422” as the export codec. Alternatively, if you already have an exported QT file of the finished project, you can open it in QT Player or MPEG Streamclip and export it as ProRes. Or you can use Compressor, but that’s a little more involved since its interface isn’t necessarily all that intuitive.

Quality-wise, ProRes will look identical to the original.