Jeff Bonano
Forum Replies Created
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First before anything else…is there a way you can get a little longer shot of the clouds? Also, what frame rate is it at? If the frame rate is low, you don’t really have many frames for the effect to do a decent job. You could try shortening the start and end time for the effect in the effects panel, but if you do it too much then it will look choppy. 10 frames per end is borderline for a smooth fade like what you are looking for in my opinion. If it’s captured at say 24fps, then you really only have 4 extra frames to play with.
Now if it was recorded at 60 frames per second, you might be able to slow down the image to get a longer clip without it being jumpy but maybe not for a full 30 seconds.
Jeff Bonano
http://www.bonanoproductions.com -
Hey,
It takes a secure man (or motion designer) to use pink!
I think though personal opinion matters most when it comes to what color you use. Kinda like using a blue or green screen. Also what colors are being filmed in that scene? Lastly pink stands out more for it being so far in the distant.
I actually have used a blue marker on a green screen (or the other way around) so that I could just key out the blue after I was finished with the green. Some people prefer white and I’m sure others prefer different colors. Whatever is clearly different in color allowing your motion tracker to distinguish the pixels is what I would recommend. That is probably what they did. They took a step back and recognized that for that shot, using that color would be the best and easiest color for them to track the shot with.
If anyone else has something to say about it, I too would love to hear what you have to say.
Hope this helps!
Jeff Bonano
http://www.bonanoproductions.com -
I could see how it could be done using AE, but only if you have patience to piece it all together without a template. This artist may have used a different program, but it’s hard to say without talking to him/her. They may have a third party plug-in for some parts and a creative gene for other parts. I myself am only familiar with After Effects and I can see how to do some of the effects. If you don’t have anything fancy, you might be able to sit down and key frame the movements while playing with a lot of duplicated layers. My suggestion for that would be using expressions and Null objects for both your multiple layers and camera movements to help from having a cluttered mess.
I’m not sure if this will create the effect you are looking for but Andrew Kramer at Videocopilot.net has a video tutorial on 3D Offset that could shed some light on some of the effects the artist uses.
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/3d_offset/
Eran Stern’s “Motion Design with After Effects” and “A New Solid” Might also help give you some ideas especially with using 3D images so that you could feel more comfortable in handling 3D images on your own.
And lastly, if you are not familiar with expressions, a book I recommend is “After Effects Expressions” by Marcus Geduld. It’s helped me out as well as all the other resources out there when it came to figuring out how to get an expression to work for me.
The only thing I’m not sure at the moment is what method he used for slicing up the pictures. He might have divided them into pieces and added an animator of some sort or an expression/set of expressions to do the work for him.
There are a lot of different effects here. Hope this helps out in your quest!
Jeff Bonano
http://www.bonanoproductions.com -
Thanks for the tips guys, good info that I’m sure I’ll look into. I’m still curious about the creative cow DVD’s though.
Jeff Bonano
http://www.bonanoproductions.com -
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I tried doing a quick Credit Roll in AE and created something that I think is what you are talking about.
Here is what I did:
I created a background and duplicated it. The duplicated layer, I created a mask and feathered it out on top. Then I created a bunch of text credits and linked them to a null object. Keyframed the null to move up over a short period, having it stop at ~Fin~ then dropped the opacity. Sandwiched the text between the background and feathered mask and there you have it! I hope this helps (or is even what you where looking for) 🙂
If you would like me to e-mail you the AE project file let me know! Have fun!Jeff Bonano
http://www.bonanoproductions.com -
Once you get familiar with that, you might also want to check out some of the video tutorials/podcasts that Aharon Rabinowitz has done for Creative Cow to improve the outlook of your keying as well.
Jeff Bonano
http://www.bonanoproductions.com -
I’ve had this problem before too. It happened twice for two different reasons. The first one was when I was having dropped frames because of a a fragmented hard drive, and a need to clear my RAM before I rendered it. I solved this by getting in the habit of defraging my hard drive on a routine basis and simply restarting my computer to clear the RAM (I know there are other ways to do this but when you’re frustrated, it works best for me). The second issue was when I imported it directly to Encore from Premier. I got in the habit of using a third party encoder like Sorenson Squeeze. Premier Pro CS4 also has a powerful Media Encoder that while I haven’t played with much, I hear it has a lot of spunk to do the same thing (Thanks for the tip Dennis). Apple also has Quicktime Pro that you can upgrade for a small fee that does a decent job too if you don’t want to spend much time with the settings.
Try giving these tips a try and see if they help you out. As far as I know, this was the root cause for my issues…and it might work for you too.
Jeff Bonano
http://www.bonanoproductions.com -
I would have to agree with you on the training video that Aharon has put together. It really is a great DVD and one can learn a lot from it. Unfortunately it came out before he could really dive into the Media Encoder that CS4 offers, hence why I haven’t used Adobe’s program a lot when working with video files. I think for me to get the best out of Media Encoder, the information on that video still applies and is a good tool to have. Thanks Dennis, I feel encouraged to play with Media Encoder a little more and see which one suits my needs. (Still like squeeze a lot though so I know I won’t give that program up!)
Jeff Bonano
http://www.bonanoproductions.com -
Have you tried applying a mask to the top and then feathering out the edge? From what I’m reading from your post, it sounds like that would be the easiest way to create a quick fade out.
Jeff Bonano
http://www.bonanoproductions.com