[Jay Lee]

Okay, just wanted to doublecheck.

The following are the specs I got for showing the image on the DVD player. So I make the image 720×480?

————————————————
For video distribution we will be using a composite video signal versus a computer RGB signal as we will be coming from a DVD player.
Brand: Samsung
Screen Measurements: h: 23.25″ // w: 38.6”
Resolution: 1024 x 768

————————————————
Thanks again!!!

[Jay Lee]

I don’t have Motion. Could I use After Effects and then DVD Studio Pro and do the same thing?

Thanks!!!

[Jay Lee]

Thank you, Darby! I can’t believe I didn’t see that. (I kept fiddling with the material options of the object casting the shadows.)

You guys are awesome.

[Jay Lee]

Is there a way to automatically center the anchor point?

I’ve been using the Pan Behind tool and dragging until I get the coordinates on the Info Palette to say Position: 0,0

But I get the feeling there’s an easier way? Thanks for any info!

[Jay Lee]

Thank you so much, Darby! What you suggested was spot-on.

After collapsing transformations, I turned on the 3-D switch in both the final comp and the nested comp, and my final comp retained its 3-D properties.

Love Creative Cow 🙂

[Jay Lee]

Since my last message on this thread was simply “I will try this,” I thought it would be good to give an update. What Steve suggested worked really well! Thanks so much!

One problem i was having was with the floor in the foreground, there was a lot of gradient banding when the shadows moved across the foreground and when the camera moved around. (i made the floor really huge so that I could zoom around/in/out with the camera.) I didn’t want to add too much noise but wanted to have the foreground a little blurrier perhaps to make the banding less visible. i think when i played around with the aperture it helped a little (not sure why though!)

[Jay Lee]

[Steve Roberts] “Try hitting the “collapse transformations” button for those sub-comps.”

[Darby Edelen] “enable the 3D switch on the layer inside those nested compositions as well…If there are any effects you had applied to those comps, remove them and apply them inside the nested comps.

Ah ha! I tried the “collapse transformations” earlier today but the columns kept losing their 3D properties in the final comp- So I need to have the 3D switch on for every intermediate comp? I will try this at work tomorrow and let you know if I get it to work! 🙂

[Jay Lee]

Thanks for the responses! I forgot to mention in my original project description that the wall of video screens will be slightly “curved” (so that it looks like a “C” from the top view)- I’m faking it by rotating each column by a few degrees.

I think this is where the pixelation problem arose: I had the images full-size in a 1024×768 comp, nested and dramatically scaled down four of those comps in an intermediate comp to create one column, then nested that comp into a final comp so that I could rotate each column. (Otherwise, I ran into the problem in the first sketch below when I skipped this intermediate step:

(note: each grey box contains an image) By rotating each screen individually, I couldn’t achieve the curved screen look which I got by tilting whole columns. If anyone knows a way of achieving the second look without pre-composing the columns, please let me know!

So I nested the columns and thus ran into problems b/c I was scaling down in the intermediate comp and then zooming in in my final comp. I tried to work around this by keeping my images at 100% size in my intermediate comp thereby making this comp 1024×3072 to fit four images stacked vertically. Then bringing this comp into the final comp and scaling down in this final comp only. Now when I zoom in and out, the images look fine. But I’m worried about the sizes of these intermediate comps. Now I have thirty-two 1024×768 comps which I then nest into eight 1024×3072 comps which I again nest into one 1024×768 comp- will this cause any problems?

[Jay Lee]

I’ve been checking out http://www.fubiz.net recently. They have a motion graphics section.

or youtube

[Jay Lee]

Okay, I’m an idiot. I tried it again and it’s glowing now. I’m not sure what I did wrong the first time, but thank you for responding.

Now I just have to figure out how to make it grow thicker as bends toward the camera and thinner as it bends away, without using Trapcode 3D Stroke…