[John Cuevas]

I believe they used an adjustment layer, then a layer for the ramp. The adjustment layer effects everything below it. So I think you are right, they put the levels effect on there, since they were looping the video, this way they only had to do the effect once, rather then twice.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

Crushing the blacks refers to making the blacks, SUPERBLACK.

Take some video footage and apply a levels effect to it. Take the video imput slider for black and move it to say 50. That would be crushing the blacks. If you look you can adjust both the RGB or Alpha channel. They adjusted the alpha channel, and made the blacks superblack. This affects the video levels, but gives them a cleaner key. You can see when they crush the blacks, how the video level comes down, in the video.

The gradiet fill is achieved by creating a ramp. Create a solid, add the ramp effect, then lay it over your video. You can use the siloutte luma transfer mode, or the luma track mode of the video layer. Will give that soft edge.

Afterwards, they rendered it out with a alpha channel.

The elements have alpha’s, that how transparents are created.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

I use AdobeEncore, but I think the scripting would be the same. I found this in the Encore forum, hope it helps.

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?univpostid=753518&forumid=145&postid=753518&pview=t&archive=T

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

If I understand your question, just go to the timeline you created for your video, and under “end action” set the action to the chapter 1 of the same video. It will then loop forever.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

Take your 20 second clip and throw it into a timeline. Under the Disc tab, set the first play to your 20 second timeline. Then just set the end action of the timeline to your menu.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

Number of ways, but for the web, I just make a QT reference, then run that through Procoder and deliver a .wmv a total bitrate of around 300-350kbps.

Gives the client enough of a view, if they need more I’ll burn a CD at mpeg1 or they can come in to see it.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

You may need to find a ripping program that’s a little better then shareware. I can’t reccommend one, cause when we picked up the Digital Rapids Compression system, it included a demux with it that converts to Avid uncompressed. I would keeping looking for a good program to demux the DVD, I’ve never been overly happy with just plugging a DVD player into the avid and taking the composite.

For the future though, I would reccommend at a minimun keeping your MPEG2 files and burning them to a DVD as source material. Makes it a lot easier to change or update if you don’t have to demux.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

I don’t want to be too discouraging, but the best advice I could offer is to look outside of NYC. It’s the number 1 market in the country and most places you are going to look at there are going to want 5 years experience.

Just for comparison, about 3 years ago I interviewed for a position in Tampa and we started talking about my reel… came up that for this one position they had recieved over 200 reels. Imagine how much interest there must be to get a position in NYC. I’m sure most houses there recieve 5-10 reels a day, when they aren’t hiring.

IMO, look for a smaller market, then work your way up to NYC, just my .02 cents

Good Luck

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

This was posted by David Garret a little while ago. The tutorial there will help you out.

Name: David Garrett
Date: May 26, 2006 at 2:33:23 am
Subject: Re: How could I add a photo to my subpicture layers ?

look to Tutorial #9 of the advanced section of my site http://www.sitesled.com/members/doogs/downloads.htm it will show you how to go about it. Just adapt the process for your own needs (tutorial is for Encore 1.5

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

The skins have one small logo in the upper right corner. It’s pretty small and not really noticable.

What happens when you play the DVD from a DVD-Rom drive, the entire DVD lauches from within interactual player. You can set the size of how big you want the player to be, 800×600, 1052×720….

There are different ways to access pdfs, exe’s, websites. You can set a button, and .pdf’s, .jpg’s will launch in another window. For website links, it will launch in the main interface.

Also you can have things pop open as the DVD is playing. Say you were doing a DVD on some machine component, when the DVD reaches a certain chapter point, you could link it to a schematic jpeg that would open up to the side of the main playing window.

Pretty much to sum up, in launches in in the interactual player, but it’s not much different from launching in most desktop DVD players. And greetings from West Michigan.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net