Joseph W. bourke
Forum Replies Created
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It looks to me to be a couple of layers with Knoll Lens Flare, over (and at least one in Additive mode) a few layers of distorted noise. The distorted noise layers (could also be Particular effects) are the sort of smoky, feathery layers which are lit by the lens flares.
I’m thinking Particular may be making the smoky looking part, since they’re moving toward the camera in 3D space. Of course this can also be done with multiple layers moving in Z space toward the camera. It could also be done with Particle Illusion, or even one of the After Effects particle systems that come with AE, with a distortion setting on it. Another possibility for the smoky curves would be Sinedots, a free plugin by talented effects programmer Phillip-Spoeth that can be found at:
https://www.philipp-spoeth.de/aftereffects/sinedots2.php
Give these a try and see what you come up with. Sometimes trying to reproduce an effect you see everywhere leads you to something that you haven’t seen before.
Joe Bourke
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Joey –
George has hit the nail right on the head with his statement “don’t ignore the conceptual”. A strong sense of graphic design, composition, and typography will get you way further than a purely technical knowledge of which buttons to push, and which plugins to install.
Every design software package created should have a warning on the side that says “TALENT NOT INCLUDED”. There are far too many people who hang out their motion graphics shingle ten minutes after they’ve installed the software.
Joe Bourke
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia -
Steph –
I believe I read just recently that Particular had trouble running emitters on paths, and that the creator of Particular designed the software so that lights, which can be animated on paths, are capable of being particle emitters.
I think I may have read this on the VideoCopilot website, but I’m not quite sure. I may have seen it in one of the VideoCopilot tutorials on Particular. Hope this helps.
Joe Bourke
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Josh –
At the risk of not telling the insurance company everything – not a lie – I would keep some of this information to myself. The insurance company knows nothing about broadcast equipment, and to them, if it’s dead, it’s dead, and needs replacement with whatever will do the job; and that generally means the technology NOW available. They can’t replace what’s not being sold anymore.
My opinion on the HD side is to remain SD, at least for now. I had worked at a broadcast station for the last 14 years, until a recent layoff, and we had no plans in place to acquire footage in HD. All that’s being done is that the signal is being up-rezzed to make it the 16:9 aspect ratio, and it still looks as bad as ever; we acquire in DV, which to me is barely broadcast quality.
If a large broadcast organization can get away with this, I think you can, and sleep at night. The issues HD raises are many: your graphics and per frame of video size are going to go from about 1.2mb per frame to anywhere from 6 to 7mb per frame. Storage will suddenly become an issue, as well as throughput. Right now HD equipment, especially on the transmission end, is at its’ highest price. I’d go for SD and wait for the prices to drop. They’re already doing so in the camera market, and the features are getting better. Good luck!
I think you should get other opinions on this, though; there may be someone to weigh in who knows more on the engineering side than I do.
Joe Bourke
B/S Exhibits & Multimedia -
Hi Bryant –
All Broadcast colors does is limit your color range to the “legal” colors that can be broadcast in NTSC (or PAL if you work in that world). What it does is compress the high and low end of the color range to fit the legal parameters of a broadcast signal. The whites cannot be 100% white, and the blacks cannot be 100% black. If you’re looking at the 0 – 255 range, the blacks and whites are squeezed to 16 – 235, with 16 representing black and 235 representing white. When you see a bright white screen on your tv and hear a buzz in the audio channel, that’s what an illegal white does. Illegal blacks and oversaturated colors cause smearing. Here’s a good article on exactly what it does:
Joe Bourke
Multimedia & Graphic Design -
Obviously the best way to accomplish NTSC color matching is to hook up an NTSC monitor to your computer – assuming there’s a card on it which will output NTSC.
The other options involve calibrating your computer monitor, or profiling it to get as close to NTSC color as possible. Here are some options:
https://luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/monitor_profiling.shtml
Note, however, that this article is slanted toward digital photographers using Photoshop, but we’re talking about the same realm here.
There’s also the Pantone Eye-One Display 2, which calibrates your monitor to match a variety of situations.
That said, to me it’s all a matter of eyeballing the colors. I get logos from clients who aren’t even aware that CMYK and RGB aren’t even close to the same language. I always make it the clients’ job to convert the color space first – at least there’s then a chance that what shows up in NTSC (Never The Same Color) has a slight chance of looking right. Good luck!
Joe Bourke
Multimedia & Graphic Design -
Sorry I left this out. Here’s a great little treatise on why and how (in Max, anyway) you want to do seperate passes:
https://www.onion3d.com/tutorials/Render%20Elements%20in%203D%20Max.pdf
Joe Bourke
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Mark –
Anything is possible with a good 3D package. The questions are what is your budget, how much time do you have, and, if you haven’t done this type of project before, can you charge for your learning time, or do you have to eat it?
I’m a 3D Studio Max 8 user, and if I were doing this type of project, I would start out by asking the client (or searching the web, if this is for a demo reel) if he/she has a CAD file of the cassette tape (a .dxf would do it with Max – check which formats C4D takes for import. If there is no CAD file, take reference photographs from all angles, or even better, pull a cassette apart to find the discrete pieces which you will animate. Then build your model – I’m sure C4D has plenty of tutorials on polygonal modeling.
Once you get your model built or imported, set up your camera, and get ready for the fun! In Max, I would make sure that any element I want to animate separately is named, grouped, and on its’ own layer. Since the animation is a pretty smooth one in your example, it’s then just a matter of starting from the point that everything is in place, then working each element off the screen, making sure to save every iteration you do as a separate file. Then bring them in to your compositing software and set them to play in reverse.
If you’re going to a compositing program, you may want to render off each piece as a keyable Quicktime (or numbered Targa files). That way you can tweak the timing without going all the way back to the 3D world and tweaking the animation keyframes (which is tougher than just moving a layer in time in After Effects (or Combustion, which I regularly use as well). You may also want to do separate passes for any elements you need post-production control of, such as Ambient Occlusion, Material ID, Reflection Pass, Shadows…whatever you think may need to be tweaked or changed. Max does this easily; I don’t know about C4D.
Once you’ve got all your elements rendered, drop them into your compositing app and start tweaking. I hope this is clear. There’s somewhat of a learning curve, but once the light goes on and you get it, it’s merely tedious, then exciting once the project is done. Good luck!
Joe Bourke
Multimedia & Graphic Design -
Hi Than –
I would suggest trying a Quicktime export. It sounds as if you’re not set up to automatically link your AE project to Premiere (as in the Creative Suite), so that’s why you’re exporting.
I regularly get good results with a Quicktime Motion JPEG-A setting at Best quality. I use lower field first, but I’m working in NTSC on most projects, and it also depends on whether I’m using footage or doing all graphics. The QT codec should do the trick. Good luck!
Joe Bourke
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Roger –
If you have the CS4 suite, I would suggest you try outputting directly from the Premiere timeline. I had been jumping through hoops trying to get a DVD burned from Nero (have to create the .vob file, etc., pain in the neck).
All I ending up doing was exporting a QT file (M-JPEG-A, highest quality on the slider, 44.1Khz audio, lower field first – this was for NTSC). I dropped the clip onto the Premiere timeline and did an “export to DVD”, popped the blank DVD-R into the drive, and in about 15 minutes (the file was about 250GB – 4 minutes run time) I had a final DVD that worked on my computer, my Sony DVD player, and a couple of other people’s DVD players (in other words, it seems standard enough to play on anything). Good luck!
Joe Bourke