[Jeremy Allen]

I work for a marketing firm and we do email campaigns all the time. We used to put Flash directly in the emails until we figured out that most people weren’t even able to see it. Most email programs disable Flash in emails by default. And most people won’t even know to enable it in their settings.

The best bet would be to send out a simple html email that links to the animation online. The final output kinda depends on what the client wants. Flash does have the ability to play H264 files now. In some cases you can get a smaller file size with better compression than an FLV. You could just post a simple qt movie online and be done, but it’s not quite as elegant or feature rich as Flash. Again, it just depends on what they want.

Hope this helps some..

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.2
DualCore G5 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11

AE CS3

[Jeremy Allen]

Yep.

With Quicktime Pro, you simply open the video, set the in (I) and out (O) points of the section to be deleted. Then you just cut and save.

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.2
DualCore G5 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11

AE CS3

[Jeremy Allen]

Sometimes you just have to do stuff like this by hand. If you’re doing the text in the “light writing” style, it will be kinda jittery anyway, possibly hiding the imperfections of your linework.

You don’t need a tablet for this. Type out the text in illustrator, lock it, then use the pen tool to make the single line within each letter. A good knowledge of the pen tool and bezier curves will be indespensible here.

I’ve had to do this before, and it worked fine. If anyone knows an automatic way to get these basic paths inside the letters, please share 🙂

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.2
DualCore G5 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11

AE CS3

[Jeremy Allen]

Mark,
Thank you x100!

This is a great resource and surely these actions will get me going in the right direction, if nothing more than giving me a good idea of the possibilities.

Thank you so much for taking the time to help a perfect stranger.. The Cow RULES!

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.2
DualCore G5 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11

AE CS3

[Jeremy Allen]

And thanks to you mark!

I agree, the Charles Schwab stuff is a bit too smooth for my taste. I really like the more organic, hand drawn feeling that this video produces.

I think what also grabs me about this piece is the textures. I’ve always been big on texture and I think this example is quite nice.

Thanks for sharing your experience, especially the advice on blowing out the footage to the essential details.

As far as reducing the frame rate, how would you get it back to a speed that would sync with the audio? I guess you could undercrank when shooting which would produce faster motion, then reducing the frame rate would get closer to real-time?

I guess ultimately this is going to take a lot of trial and error.

Thanks again for the tips.

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.2
DualCore G5 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11

AE CS3

[Jeremy Allen]

Thanks for your reply Scott. I’ll check out the plugins you mentioned.

Believe it or not, I was actually able to get in touch with the artist who did the watercolors and she gave me a bit of advice on how it was done. You were right, there are several techniques involved.

She painted all the foreground, midground and background elements separately which were then composited together. As for the talent, she painted several “key” frames from the video stills, and then a professional animator (actually 3 of them) rotoscoped the rest. I’m guessing the animator just did the line work, and they added the watercolor textures in post.

I figured the quality they achieved had to be done by rotoscoping. I bet a professional animator could knock this out in no time, but I’m afraid it would take me forever! Time to brush up on the ol’ wacom I guess 🙂

If anyone has any advice on rotoscoping something like this I’m all ears!

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.2
DualCore G5 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11

AE CS3

[Jeremy Allen]

I’d say with a proper understanding of the puppet tool, it’s made for exactly what you want to do.

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.2
DualCore G5 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11

AE CS3

[Jeremy Allen]

Are you suddenly freezing the footage, or slowing it down to a stop? If you drastically slow the motion, there may not be enough information to make it smooth, and the result will be jumpy. Is the render jumpy all over the whole footage, or just in the places you applied the time remapping?

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.2
DualCore G5 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11

AE CS3

[Jeremy Allen]

You can move the Parent null at anytime, the same as you would any other object: keyframe it’s position.

But you can also move the child null at anytime, independent of the parent. That is one of the cool things about parenting. The child always follows the parent, but the parent doesn’t follow the child.

hope that makes sense.

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.2
DualCore G5 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11

AE CS3

[Jeremy Allen]

I’ve done a few of these.. It’s important to try to cover the whole screen with the wipe for at least a couple frames, although sometimes it happens so quick that full screen coverage may not be necessary. To make it easier in FCP, try to time the wipe so it covers the screen right in the middle of the transition. The longer the coverage, the easier it will be to place the wipe over the footage in FCP.

Make use of the transparency switch under the composition viewer to make sure you have transparency when you need it. As for output, just make sure you render RGB + alpha in the Output Module settings. Of course, you will have to use a codec that supports alpha channels, like the animation codec.

Hope this helps!

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.2
DualCore G5 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11

AE7 on both for now.