Jeremy Allen
Forum Replies Created
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well, I’ll have to admit I stand corrected. I did some extensive testing on different AE text methods and I found that it does soften the text slightly when I push it back in Zspace and scale it up. It also happens when I precomp it, push it back and scale it up. The raw AE text at 100% looks fine.
The one thing I thought might make a difference is if I made sure to position the text on whole pixels (x=300) vs. subpixels (x=300.6), but that didn’t seem to make a difference either.
Honestly I guess I’ve never looked at it close enough to notice the slight softening.
Personally I think the middle text in your example looks better than the photoshop text. I would go with that.
Can anyone else explain the softening on 3D text in AE??
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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.2
DualCore G5 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11AE7 on both for now.
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As far as specs go, you really need to find out how they will be playing the animation in the showroom. Will it be played on a computer screen, thru a DVD player to a big ol Plasma screen, DVD player to a projector? The final playback really makes all the difference as far as how you need to set it up. If it’s on an old school tube TV then that will be one thing… HD plasma requires something totally different. So you really need to figure that stuff out before you even put one picture into After Effects.
As far as the animation, as long as the sequence of the picture and text really are all the same, you should be able to do that fairly easily. There are a couple ways you could approach it. This is just how I would do it.
1. Put your first picture out on the timeline, starting at frame zero.
2. Animate the picture in and out however you wish.
3. Create your text layer and animate that however you wish. I would keep the in point of the text layer at frame zero, even if it doesn’t show up until the picture has been up for a few seconds. Just keep the text off frame or at 0 opacity until it’s time to show up. Once you start duplicating and sequencing the pictures and text, it’s easier to keep them all lined up because the layers all start at the same point.
4. Now select whichever properties you animated for the picture and save it as an animation preset.
6. Now drag all the other photos onto the stage at frame zero.
7. With your playhead at frame zero, select all the pictures in the timeline and apply the newly created picture animation preset from the effects and presets palette.
8. Duplicate your text layer 29 times and change each to the appropriate words.
9. Now all you have to do is sequence the pictures and text in the timeline.
Keep in mind, this method assumes you know exactly how you want the picture and text to animate. If you have to go back and change something about the animation later, you will have to start the whole preset process over. I don’t think you can edit a preset once it’s created, but someone else may know how.
There are other ways you could do this by duplicating and nesting precomps so that you could change the initial precomp animation and all the other precomps would change accordingly, but then you end up with a ton of precomps. But if you’re fairly sure you know how you want the animation to go, you can use the method I outlined.
Anyone else feel free to correct or modify my method if I’ve missed something. 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 10.4.11AE7 on both for now.
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Looks like you figured out the picture button but maybe didn’t put in the right path to the picture. It’s not showing up..
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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.2
DualCore G5 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11AE7 on both for now.
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Thanks for responding Brett. I had already tried the “hide extension” option and it doesn’t seem to make any difference. The box is unchecked by default and it still comes up as “filename.” instead of “filename.mov” For some reason FCP thinks the extension should just be the dot without “mov” after it.
Also, I’m running 5.1.4, not 6.0.2
Thanks again for your time though..
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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.2
DualCore G5 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11AE7 on both for now.
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like Dave, I’m assuming you have motion in your billboard footage, and if so, you already know you’ll have to motion track it. Even with that, the first thing I would try is to make your text a 3D layer and play around with the positioning and orientation until it looks right. If there’s no motion, then you’re done after that.
If that doesn’t work, I’d try Dave’s solution..
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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.2
DualCore G5 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11AE7 on both for now.
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Not really sure what your text problem is.. AE text should stay crisp no matter what size or Z-depth. A jpg might help. You’ll have to upload the jpg to a server and in the response box, click the 4th button that looks like a little camera (B, I, U, camera, L).. then put in the location to the pic.
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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.2
DualCore G5 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11AE7 on both for now.
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Sounds like a job for Stroke to me… You have your circle on a layer and apply Stroke to it. Then you just animate the start and end points to keep up with the motion of the comet or what have you. You will need a path for the stroke to follow, so if you imported your circle from Photoshop, you would need to create a circle path around it.
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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.2
DualCore G5 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11AE7 on both for now.
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I’ve been running CS3 and Leopard for about a month now with no problems whatsoever.. I’d say go for it.
As mentioned, Leopard isn’t really life changing, but there are a few new features I have come to use quite often, and I miss them when I go back to Tiger on my older machine.
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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.2
DualCore G5 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11AE7 on both for now.
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Dave is right on… It’s alot easier to animate several separate masks than to animate a bunch of points over and over on the same mask. For me, the key to good masking is to really study your footage and plan out precisely where the points should be for the least amount of keyframing of the points. Adding and deleting points mid-animation can get pretty messy.
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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.2
DualCore G5 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11AE7 on both for now.
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I can at least take the credit for posting it here, but I can’t take full credit for the idea… Bill O’neill is the man.
Found the article here..
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/oneil_bill/shooting_3d.php
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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.2
DualCore G5 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM, OSX 10.4.11AE7 on both for now.