[Jimmy Brunger]

Thanks Mark..I’ve read something similar on Adobe Forums since..will have a look at that. Cheers.

[Jimmy Brunger]

Looks fine to me! But then I can only see the first picture…

In After Effects, when you import an AI or EPS file from Illustrator you need to click the ‘continuously rasterize’ icon for that imported file’s layer in the timeline. It is a little sun icon. This means you can then infinitely scale the Illustrator file up or down in AE without losing any detail/definition. Hope this helps.

Oh – I noticed you’ve got quite a thin keyline around your character. On TV if this is very thin (1-2 pixels) it will look pretty nasty and will fizz or twinkle. To fix this either make sure your lines are thick enough or you can sometimes put a very light motion blur on the offending parts and that will remedy it.

Have fun!

[Jimmy Brunger]

I believe if you have a Dual Core or higher Nucleo Pro in conjunction with AE will speed up your rendering/preview times no end and render on the fly in the background I think?

Still on a single core meself (boo) so haven’t sampled the delights as yet..

[Jimmy Brunger]

That should be in one of the presets in AE when you go to Composition>New Composition. It is in AE7.0 anyway.

If not then just set it up yourself:

1440 x 1080 width & height
frame rate for PAL: 25
Aspect ratio: HDV 1080/DVCPRO HD or just use 1.333

[Jimmy Brunger]

Was that meant to have an SH.. on the front of it Arson? Or is Zaxwerks actually really good!? Haven’t got round to buying it yet, we used Ligthwave and XSI on a separate machine for now, but I am intrigued by ProAnimator for text animaton within AE…sounds like a time saver.

[Jimmy Brunger]

MPC – of course, knew I was missing a main one.

[Jimmy Brunger]

You could try turning off visibility for any layers you are not affecting at a particular time? Or just solo the ones you are working on. There’s always shying layers you’re not working on which helps avoid clutter in the timeline window, but *I think* they are still displayed the in the comp window (not got AE open to check, but try it.)

If it’s crashing when you render all 200 layers then just hit caps lock before the render and then it won’t try to ‘draw’ the frames visually, it will just use their info for the render. This also speeds up render times in many cases aswell.

I’m probably telling you stuff you already know, but tis worth a try!

[Jimmy Brunger]

Have you looked at NewTek’s Toaster software/boards? Not sure exactly what benefits you would have over playout from Premiere via Decklink or similar, but the NewTek stuff is designed for live broadcast and has a RT switcher and a bunch of other stuff. We only really use it for MPEG capture and simple edits for DVDs, etc…But have a look on their site and see if it’s any good for you.

I can have a look at some stuff on ours if you know what you want to check..

Jim.

[Jimmy Brunger]

The biggest of boys in Soho are probably places like: –

The Mill
Framestore CFC
Rushes
Smoke & Mirrors
VTR group

Some of those (Mill & Framestore esp.) are mainly film-based, but I think both do some TV aswell. You’re probably looking at Inferno/Flame or similar for a main VFX/Compositing position, then I guess a few seats Shake/DF/Nuke/poss AE for support work?

Good luck, as soon as I decide that London is no longer an ugly prospect to live in then I’ll probably end up tapping at their doors aswell! Meantime I’ll stay on my more modest jobs up here in the North!

Jim.

[Jimmy Brunger]

Great tute Pete!

The anchor point expression thing came in really handy today on a 5hr roto job of a couple of people jumping in the air legs splayed….Just a shame the client didn’t really notice the resulting 3 second animation! Might aswell have used a still! Bah! It’s what they asked for though…

The time we spend on the littlest things eh? Will anyone ever notice?!