[Graham Quince]

It’s so short, my guess would be the easiest way to replicate it would be a reverse shatter for the collapse and some animated mattes for the initial burst.

Graham

https://www.shiveringcactus.bravehost.com – Free FX for amateur films

[Graham Quince]

I’ve had this problem too. Isn’t it just down to the fact that the stars are a pixel across? I’ve fairly certain when i outputted onto a DVD and watched it on the TV the problem wasn’t there. Although I can’t swear to it.

I always chalked it up to the fact that we’re dealing with fields/square pixels vs rectangular and you know not working at film resolution. I don’t know about Predator, but the early star wars films used a black cloth rig to film starfields.

I did output a starfield from Cinema4D with larger stars once, and it solved the problem, but the stars seemed cartoon-y

Graham

https://www.shiveringcactus.bravehost.com – Free FX for amateur films

[Graham Quince]

Thanks very much Chris, but I did have a small problem.

When I tried your method, I could still see the plane, but thanks to the keywords you gave me I found the answer on Maxon’s site:

Step 7: Once you’ve set up your shadow catcher to your liking you need to “hide” it so that only the shadows are seen against the background image. To do this you need to first apply the same Background material to the Plane object. With the Texture Tag selected, change the Projection to Frontal in the Attributes Manager.

Once I did that as well as your steps, the shadows fell into place and it’s amazing how much it helps sell the shot. Thanks again

Graham

https://www.shiveringcactus.bravehost.com – Free FX for amateur films

[Graham Quince]

I’ve made DNA in AE before just using CC Ball Action. If you create a rectangular solid and apply ball action and alter the ball size from the default to 50 and twist it on the x-axis, you immediately see the familiar spiral.

From there, I went to photoshop and created a similar shaped psd with colours down the outside and transparent sections – all conforming to a grid. Bringing that into AE, and using ball action finalised the DNA look.

If this is any help

Graham

https://www.shiveringcactus.bravehost.com – Free FX for amateur films

[Graham Quince]

Thanks Adam. in a way it’s a relief to hear I’ve not been wasting my time. Just need to make checking the multipass settngs part of my routine before rendering I guess.

Graham

https://www.shiveringcactus.bravehost.com – Free FX for amateur films

[Graham Quince]

I’d be tempted to completely rebuild your machine including a reformat of the drives. I haven’t had this exact problem, but i have to think about rebuilding about once a year. It’s a hassle, but it would solve these sort of problems.

Graham

https://www.shiveringcactus.bravehost.com – Free FX for amateur films

[Graham Quince]

Thanks Barend – I thought it might be a codec issue.

The person sending it to me was using iMovie and tried to set the output compression to ‘a sorenson thing’ apparently. I thought PCs had all three sorenson codecs but….

Graham

https://www.shiveringcactus.bravehost.com – Free FX for amateur films

[Graham Quince]

The easiest way I can think of is an animated mask. draw a mask around the foremost parts of your body then set a keyframe and a few frames latter increase the area within the mask. it’s a little complex to explain, but it is pretty easy to achieve.

Graham

https://www.shiveringcactus.bravehost.com – Free FX for amateur films

[Graham Quince]

Null frames, I bet that’s it! Previously I’ve imported screen captures as flash files, but this time I’d wanted to edit them in Premiere first.

Thanks for the suggestion Alan, I’ll check that out

Graham

https://www.shiveringcactus.bravehost.com – Free FX for amateur films

[Graham Quince]

Repeated posting by accident