Joseph W. bourke
Forum Replies Created
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Emil –
I agree with what everyone else has said. For an open, there needs to be more movement, and while your logotype is cool looking, the star of the open is the name of the company. I think that an effect by which the name starts out large, then parks into place, followed by the flare, would help things.
The sound effects are nice, but for an open I would pick something more dynamic – this looks like a piece which would dissolve on at the end of a movie or show to acknowledge the production house. I can also see the possibility of using the black in the logotype to mask a reveal bringing in the content of the demo.
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com -
In the world of digital audio, clipping is forever. The distortion cannot, to my knowledge, be corrected. Here’s a rundown on clipping:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipping_(audio)
It appears that if the clipping is not too severe, there may be some fixes. If the clipping is severe, the audio information is lost, and there’s no way back, short of re-recording it. Good luck.
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com -
It seems that whatever tool you are most comfortable with, you will use, unless it is demanded by the workplace you’re in. Here’s my experience.
I’m a motion graphics artist, and worked at a broadcast facility. We made the jump from linear A/B roll systems to Discreet Logic Edit, which, for the money, was an incredibly powerful system, especially when used with Combustion. A few years later, the ownership (a large magazine corporation which also owned a chain of TV stations) was sold a bill of goods by AVID – they were told that they could do workgroup editing on News, magazine format shows, promos, and commercial production, and it would all be accesible, real time, and if one workstation went down (they also sold us an extremely expensive Unity storage system) nothing would be lost. To put it short, editors who were creatively fluent in the art of editing had to be sent to AVID school, because nothing was intuitive on the AVID – you had to pay to learn. AVID fosters an “I’m an F-16 pilot” mentality among their trained editors, mostly because of an obsolete, arcane, interface, and icons that would confuse an AVID software developer. You have to spend a huge amount on education, and support, or you’re screwed. And we were. Our editing staff became at least 30 to 40 percent less efficient, the “nothing ever gets lost when a workstation goes done” turned into to a relinking nightmare, where much was lost, and often one workstation crash would crash the whole system. We spent more on support calls and visits than we spent on four Discreet Edit systems. At the time we made the purchase, we (editors, art director, and others who knew what was available and good, AND how to use it) begged our Engineering department to consider the Adobe Suite (at the time in its’ first incarnation). They laughed at us.
Five years later the word went down that several of the stations put a moratorium on AVID purchases, because the resellers couldn’t configure them to work reliably, the down time was excessive, and productivity was at a huge low.
We managed to get one Adobe Creative Suite in house, and it became the go-to machine for all the editors. The AVIDs were quickly being used only as capture stations. As of now, the owners are in the process of transitioning all of their stations to Adobe products. Regardless of the cache in the AVID name (much tarnished, unless you buy the highest end products), there’s a need to be fast, have little downtime, and get the product to air. The AVID systems which were sold as fast, upgradeable to HD via a new card (never happened), and capable of doing everything needed in a broadcast facility, never lived up to their promise.
That’s my experience. I’m now the onwner of my own business, doing motion graphics, 3D animation, and television production, and am using the CS4 Production Suite, waiting for CS5 (especially Premiere) to become a bit more stable. It gets the job done on a timely basis, and not one of my clients has asked for an AVID system. Yes, there’s something to be said for the number of trained users available when you own a multi-suite facility, but if the software interface is intuitive, you don’t have to be a jet pilot to fly it. Just my two cents.
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com -
This may not apply on a Mac (but I think it does). I’m on a PC with an NVIDIA graphics card, and updating the video card drivers did the trick for me. I was getting a crash every time I started AE (CS4). The second startup would work fine. Good luck.
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com -
Ed –
There are a couple of far less tedious ways to go on this, but both involve plugins. Either Knoll Light Factory Pro (now owned by Red Giant Software), or Video Copilot’s Optical Flares, will take an animated series of dots and attach lens flares to them.
Although I use an older version of Knoll Lens Flare, this feature worked quite well (I think the module was called Spectacular), but I don’t know if the new version still allows this.
I do know that Optical Flares will do it, and from what I’ve read on the Video Copilot site, the feature set seems to blow away Knoll Lens Flares (Light Factory Pro I don’t know). I plan to buy Optical Flares soon – there are just too many cool features to pass up. Good luck in your choice – you’ll save the price of the plugin with all that tracking and attaching you’d otherwise have to do.
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com -
Ernie –
If I remeber correctly the Soul Train animation was hand drawn 2D cel animation, more like 50 to 100 THOUSAND dollars range. I would angle toward the 3D side of things (if you own and know any 3D package), since you’d have more control over the animated distortion of the cars and engine, and the camera FOV and angles that I remember from the Soul Train open.
It sounds to me that you know EXACTLY what you need – how about writing it down here for some more accurate input?
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com -
Gerardo –
Walter got it right – I pre-render my layer(s) which I intend to reuse, then categorize them carefully in Bridge. This allows me to sort or filter any elements I may need in the future. I don’t know of any way to see inside of an AE project for effects, etc., short of opening the project.
What Walter suggests, saving your commonly used effects, is a good idea. I do this all the time. There’s no reason to recreate a lens flare which comes up from zero opacity, moves left to right, and then fades out, when you can save all of the effect settings, and even the opacity/intensity keyframes as a preset. I would suggest both pre-rendering elements which will be reused, AND saving any regularly used effects as presets. Once again, naming conventions become critical. It’s a lot easier to figure out what an effect named “Flare_Blue_Fade_R_to_L” is than “My_Lens_Flare_1”. The more you can prepare for the next rush job, the better.
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com -
Gerardo –
Here’s where the much maligned Adobe Bridge can come into play to help you organize your elements. My last job entailed an entire “toolkit” of elements which were used, re-used, re-purposed, and catalogued using Bridge. I would create and render off from AE all of my master elements, and create categories in Bridge with names like “background”, “flare”, “logo”, anything which described a group of elements which I could then filter out in Bridge, find easily, and use.
Between that and the Collect Files option, I was able to manage literally hundreds of elements for opens, promos, bumps, rejoins, and other broadcast news pieces. Bridge is your friend – the hard part is coming up with a naming convention that will make it easy to get your hands on the elements. Once you find the elements you need in Bridge, minimize it, and drag and drop into AE. It makes life a lot easier!
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com -
Derek –
Don’t worry about Blender on a 32 bit machine. It will still run, but won’t take advantage of the 64 bit capabilities. Give it a try. It’s a bear to learn, but the fact that it’s free and very powerful may be a good incentive to take the time to learn it. There are plenty of free tutorials out there, and some of the new fluid and smoke simulations are pretty nice looking. I’m pretty sure it will both open and output .3ds format, the basic Max file format which works all the way back to the DOS version of Max, and can be imported by quite a few other packages. It’s one of the true 3D file format standards.
It’s also worth your while to play around with Photoshop Extended’s 3D capabilities as far as texture mapping and animation. It may do the trick for you.
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com -
Derek –
Here’s what I believe to be the case with AE, although I use 3D Studio Max and AE as my workflow:
I don’t believe it’s possible to bring a 3D model into AE and then fly around it and do real 3D moves on it, unless of course you import it into Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator, in which case you have a plugin which can access 3D models. That said, what you can do is import an animation from 3D software in RLA or RPF format to AE, then convert the 3D information from the file into a camera in AE. You will not have control over that camera, you will simply have the animation from the 3D software, which will allow you to use elements created in AE with the camera from the 3D software. I don’t know what formats SoftImage is capable of exporting, but just about any 3D package worth its’ salt will output either an RLA or RPF file.
On the Photoshop side, you can do the same thing with the extended version, you can import various formats of 3D models, then use the Animation feature to create an animated logo which can be exported to AE. I don’t know if the Linking feature between Photoshop and AE allows for the 3D animation to be tweaked from the PS side, but that might work. As of now (and I’m refering to AE CS4 –
I haven’t made the jump to CS5 until it’s stable and the first service packs are in) I don’t think there’s any way to get true 3D short of 3D Invigorator.Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com