Joseph W. bourke
Forum Replies Created
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Hi Sarah –
I am doing for several clients just what you are talking about. To avoid some of the pitfalls of creating for a smaller format, and then having the client request a larger format (say, from the web to a wall of monitors) we originate all of our HD projects at 1080P. This gives us an uncompressed master that we can then down-rez to generally whatever we need (640 x 360, flash and H.264 for the web and iTouch hand held, for example). The beauty of this system is that, once the master is created (in Camtasia, AE, and edited in PPro), we output the master once, then encode what’s needed in Adobe Media Encoder.
I have saved presets in AE Media Encoder that match the various clients’ needs. That said, you need to make sure at the outset of a project that the client knows what is entailed in the output of ancillary formats (web, DVD, iTouch, etc.). I generally figure about an hour’s time for each additional output (sometimes a bit more), and build that into the project. Since I don’t want to keep all the various pixel formats in my head, I use my HP IPAQ to hold an Excel worksheet with all of the various standard (and non-standard) formats that I use, or might need to use. I can pop open the file, then, referencing my spreadsheet, I can look at the possible formats I can create without changing the aspect ratio.
As far as going from HD to SD formats, this creates another can of worms, and I usually suggest letterboxing to go from HD to SD. The potential problem there is with any graphics, action, or CGs that fall outside of the SD title safe area. This is why I suggest letterboxing – the graphics and other key elements are preserved. If you have to crop HD to SD, you’ve got problems. You see this all the time on TV, where the lower third or bug is cropped out of and HD to SD conversion. There’s also the fact that there is no TV safe on a web video, so the space is not alsways optimized. Luckily, as of CS4, After Effects contains a compound title and action safe grid that has BOTH HD and SD, so you can figure out in advance where there might be problems. Many TV stations keep all their graphics inside the SD safe area so cropping is not a problem – it just looks clunky.
As far as the whole graphics issue in general goes, always try and find out from your client if there is any repurposing planned (if only to force them to think about it). A full screen of bulleted text that reads fine in HD, may just about disappear when it becomes 640 x 360. This will call for a redesign of the page in which the bullets may have to be separated out as individual full-screen graphics, and you might have to make sure the voice over speaks the bulleted text just in case it’s too small for some to read. Lots to think about, but if you make it clear up front to your client that it just might cost the price of a full re-edit to repurpose the production, they WILL think about it! I hope this helps.
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com -
My first suggestion would be to use a gradient wipe, with blob shaped gradients (maybe created with Fractal Noise and left as a still) that would approximate the random way in which snow melts. The only thing missing with this would be the soft shadows on the edges of the snow as it melts into separate blobs. If your transition isn’t too long, you might paint in a soft shadow on the sides away from the light source, so as to enhance the effect. This would only work if the two shots are identical when superimposed.
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com -
Hi Robin –
Shatter is one way to do it easily. Have all your pieces in a comp where the pieces are where you want them to be at the end of the animation. Drag that comp into a new comp and apply the Shatter effect, with a custom shatter map which is the layer you just brought in. If there is enough contrast between your layers, you should get a shatter that blows all your layers out/up. You can animate several elements in Shatter that will randomize things, and give you a highly controllable result (gravity, force, center point, etc.). If you don’t want the layers to look 3D, just bring down the thickness setting. You can also control what is on the back and sides of the layers, if you want to.
The only glitch is that you will have to render out the comp, then play it backwards, as far as I remember. Have fun!
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com -
Dima –
I have had the best luck with Max rendering out my animations at 60fps. After Effects has always brought them in at the correct speed, and I have no interlacing problems (when I output from Max interlaced, lower field first, there always seems to be a problem).
You are correct with thinking that you should render out of AE uncompressed (I use Quicktime Animation, millions of colors), and then encode with a third party package. I am currently using Adobe Media Encoder, and, other than the pain of setting up presets (which you’ll get with any encoder), it does the job very well. I’m sending stuff out for the web, for the Ipod Touch, for DVDs, and have had no problems. The time consuming part is reading up on which encoding is optimized for which medium (but there is lots of free information out there on that issue). All the projects I’ve done are 1080P, and the file size is huge for the uncompressed master, but it gives me a file I can use for any purpose, and I can queue it up for multiple versions with Media Encoder.
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com -
Kevin –
The best advice I can give you is to go to this site:
https://generalspecialist.com/2007/02/troubleshooting-after-effects-7.asp
It’s not just for AE7. The advice there will enable you to think though all the possible shortcomings and settings of your system. I found that the “secret settings” for rendering, and the RAM advice were most useful to me. What jumps out at me immediately is the fact that you don’t have much RAM at all (at least for the quad core system you’re running – I think the common minimum is at least 2GB per core). Good luck – you’ll find the answer at the above link.
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com -
Hi Jeff –
Since you’ve already done the pilot, I would hope that you tracked your time on that phase of the project. One way to do the quote would be to decide what you’re worth an hour (it varies depending on the market you’re in, but you might want to charge anywhere from 75 to 125 dollars an hour for your time), then figure out how much time you spent on the pilot, and add about 25 percent to it for contingency purposes (client changes, color correction changes, mistakes in the closed captioning that aren’t your fault, etc.).
You don’t say whether you’re doing the edit, so I assume that you’re part of a team, and are providing the “look”, or graphical toolkit for the show, as well as doing color grading and CC. If you’ve been carefully tracking your time, you may want to bill out at different rates for the motion graphics design, the color correction, and the captioning aspects of the project.
I would think that anywhere from 3 to 5 thousand per show would not break the client’s bank. Remember, this design work you are doing, is also being licensed by you to the client for usage in North America – that’s no small thing, and is worth a chunk of change in itself. My last job was at a broadcast facility close to a major market (Boston), and before I started doing the on-air graphics packages, they were regularly paying upwards of 100 thousand dollars to have the package designed by an outside company, and this was just for usage in New England! It included opens for the various News franchises, graphic designs (lower thirds, OTS boxes, full screen graphics, transitions, etc.) and a “toolkit” which gave us the ability to do updates periodically. This is a big project, so don’t give it away.
Also, make sure that you get a chunk of the money up front. 30 to 50 percent of the total is not unusual, and it will protect your investment of time. These licensing deals have a way of going south from time to time. Good luck!
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com -
Daniel –
I believe the gaming systems are specced out so as to display the maximum number of polygons, which is why they are so good for 3D software, which is really just a real-time 3D system of sorts, as I understand it.
I’m currently running CS4 successfully with Vista 64-bit on a sixteen hundred dollar Intel Quad Core system. Here are the specs:
Intel Motherboard – DP45SG – this has an ESATA connector for a RAID array if necessary
Quad Core2 Q9550, 2.83GHz, 1333MHz, L2 12M
8GB of PC3-10600 CL9 DDR3 240p DIMM RAM
GEForce GTX 260 – EVGA graphics card
2 – 500GB Seagate SATA2 7200rpm hard disks – one for OS, one for Applications
2 – 750GB 7200rpm 32mb SATA2 hard drives – for media files – this is NOT striped – at some point I will probably add a RAID array for doing HD
600watt silent fan power supply – this thing is really quiet – I can probably do audio recording in the same room with this running.
Case – X-Cruiser Black system chassis – this is a gamer case with plenty of room for expansion.Thus far I’ve done a 1 minute animated motion graphics technical illustration with well over 30 layers in After Effects in 1080P – no problems – could use more RAM. I’ve done several 3 to 4 minute tutorials in 1080P in Premiere (all CS4 by the way – waiting for the first bug fixes to pull the trigger on CS5), and am having no troubles at all. I recently had to upgrade the NVIDIA drivers; I was having a crash now and then – drivers seemed to do the trick. I’m also working with 3D Studio Max 2010, and Terragen 2 on this system with no problems at all.
I think a pimped-out gaming machine may be overkill. Read a bit more on this site – there’s been loads of discussion on CS4 machines. I would have liked to go with the high-end NVIDIA card, but since it’s mostly realtime for Premiere, I could live without it for now. Also read up on CUDA technology if you have the time – it’s going to change the face of editing and graphics production.
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com -
Never consider ANY age too old to change careers…it’s people that feel trapped for one reason or another that make broadcast news top stories! I just changed careers at 60 years of age. I had been Art Director at a broadcast station (and Senior Motion Graphics Artist as well – a working art director), and was laid off over a year and a half ago. Prior to that job, which lasted fourteen years, I had been a writer/producer. Prior to that I had earned my living as a musician for almost twenty years. I have now gone into business with a partner who does exhibits, large format graphics, and photography, and we’re just getting rolling with our own successful business. I’ve been doing everything from 3D animations to high-end motion graphics illustrations, to Camtasia based tutorials for the web. There’s loads of work out there, especially on the industrial side.
That said, you may want to get into graphics through the side door. At the station I worked at, Directors and TDs were always given the chance to cross-train in areas of interest. We even had people from Master Control sometimes move into the News production side of things (which never interested me). There may be a chance to land a job which will pay you AND train you in your areas of interest. There were always jobs at our station which were combination jobs, such as a PA/Graphic Artist. They spent four days a week as PA, running camera, prompter, being floor director, and then they were the weekend Graphic Artist.
I honestly don’t think that you need to go back to school, with the wealth of teaching materials which are available through the web, and various tutorial sites (Lynda.com immediately comes to mind), both paid and free. I would suggest that you learn and get advanced with Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Flash (which is a lot closer to AE as of CS4), and maybe a 3D package (I have worked with 3D Studio Max for about ten years, but Maya, Cinema4D, and others do the job). Also get up to speed with the audio side of things – I use Soundbooth now, but am familiar with a number of other technologies from the broadcast world. Everything you’ve learned on the technical side will serve you well on the creative side. Knowing the nuts and bolts makes you more valuable as a creative.
Start out duplicating other people’s work, and stuff you like that you see and say “how did they do that?”. You’ll gradually come to develop your own ideas, but at the same time, when a client (or News Director) asks for something they’ve seen (they never have an original idea that I know of), you’ll be able to do it. Look at those amazing showreels and figure out how they did it – it’s not magic! Most of the coolest looking stuff these days is a combination of 3D, motion graphics, particle systems, and lighting effects, composited together so that the indidual effects look seamless. Look on the Focal Press website – there are loads of books on effects and compositing. I really believe you can be self-taught, but there are those of us who can sit down with a manual and figure it out, and those who have to be shown. Figure out which type of learner you are, and go from there. Good luck!
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com -
As I understand it, a 3D layer from Photoshop is no longer true 3D once it hits AE. From the AE help file, it says that if you want a 3D camera animation in AE, you must make it in Photoshop. Here’s a link to the Adobe help:
https://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WS510B8F17-8644-43ce-977F-96784840A64B.html
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com -
I know Fractal Design Painter had the same feature, and they are now owned by Corel, and Painter 11 seems to be the most recent version. You could record strokes, and the natural brushes in Painter were always way ahead of Photoshop’s brushes.
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com