Joseph W. bourke
Forum Replies Created
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Ian –
I haven’t seen an update to this pdf file from Chris and Trish Meyer, but the original still holds up (it was written for AE 5.5) as one of the best overall views of AE tips, tricks, and keyboard shortcuts ever written:
https://cybmotion.com/sharing/AE5_5_HiddenGems_3.pdf
While you’re on the site, check out some of their other articles, many written for DV Magazine; they’re worth their weight in gold. Have fun!
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV -
There’s a software package called Genuine Fractals that, if you can get a single frame that’s 15 to 20mb, you can get an image that will cover a billboard and hold up just fine.
Take a look at:
https://www.ononesoftware.com/detail.php?prodLine_id=2
Read the sidebar line which says “How many pixels do I need?” and you’ll get an idea of what it does. I regularly send out images from After Effects and Photoshop (bitmaps that are from 72dpi frames) that are used to make everything from 36 x 36″ lightboxes to bus wraps. As long as you can give Genuine Fractals a reasonably good image, you can get a great image on the other end. It’s only $159. and you can probably get it paid for by your client, since they shouldn’t expect a hi-rez image out of a low-rez project. Good luck!
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV -
Here’s an article that may shed some light on the issue:
https://members.aol.com/ajaynejr/vidres.htm
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV -
Both have their strengths. That said, here’s where I’m coming from: I’ve been a Combustion beta tester for both V1 and V2, and a Combustion user for both. As of about 3 years ago, our parent company standardized on After Effects, and I quickly got up to speed on AE, having to recreate many of the projects that I had previously done on Combustion. At the time, Combustion’s color correction, tracking, and keying completely blew AE out of the water. Now, knowing that AE CS3 is coming, I would expect some catching up on AE’s part, and some advances on the Combustion front. Combustion was always weak in terms of audio handling, although that may have changed with releases 3 and 4, which I’m not familiar with. After effects isn’t exactly an audio suite, but I can do at least five tracks of VO, SFX, and music without getting memory errors.
Once I got used to After Effects workflow, I found that there were many, many shortcuts that got my work done more quickly than Combustion, but that the interface was less than elegant, as Combustion’s is. Once you know one, you can pick up the other pretty quickly – how many ways are there to build a compositing package? AE’s color corrector is way behind Combustion’s of two releases ago. That’s because many of Combustion’s features were ported directly from Inferno, its high end cousin. Good luck with your choice. I think the integration Adobe is presenting with the CS3 Suite should play a major role in your choice – it’s pretty amazing how Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects will play together.
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV -
It’s very possible that this was done using Combustion’s tracker, or one of the high end Discreet (Autodesk) products such as Flame or Inferno. I’ve done some almost impossible stuff in Combustion, tracking motion-control camera shots (in which the motion control data was not provided). There was still a ton of frames that I had to place by hand to get the effect on the money (this was a :30 second flyover shot that I had to place video into television screens which had tracking dots on them).
Now that I think about it, if this WAS done properly with a motion-control camera, and the data was preserved, it’s a simple matter of bringing the data into Combustion, or maybe AE (I don’t know if AE can import MC data – I’ll have to check) and then applying it to the composition – done – with no tracking.
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV -
I assume you mean the drop shadow that’s on the map, the deep perspective shadow from the speech balloon, and not the small soft drop shadows that are on the icons to the left of the map. If so, there’s Eye Candy for After Effects (they also make it for Photoshop) that has a filter called “perspective shadow”, which does this and a whole lot more. It has a number of nice presets too, if you’re short on ideas.
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV -
Heather –
If I remember correctly (and it has been a Looooong time since I’ve hauled out my Viewmaster from the closet), the view presented is of a box with smoothly curved corners (squarish, not really rectangular). Although I haven’t specifically gone for this look, I often create 4:3 boxes with curved corners either in photoshop or Illustrator. I make a black box on a white background (it’s easier to control the corners of the box in Illustrator), and then import the graphic into AE, put it at the bottom of my timeline, and use a Compound Alpha, using the luminance value of the box graphic (or inverse luminance – I can’t remember which) to cut the corners of my clip. The compound alpha is much easier than putting the box above each layer I need clipped and then using that as a mask channel (although you can do it that way). Have fun!
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV -
Hey Grinner –
I love your no-bull**** approach to the reality of AVID ownership. We went from a Discreet Edit* Matrox version to an AVID Adrenaline Newscutter (think someone bought the wrong product for commercial production?) to do multi-layer spots with audio sweetening. Not to mention the fact that just logging in takes 10 to 15 minutes, the capture menu is buggy (way more timecode errors than our 7 year old Edit box ever had), the audio has to be rendered anytime you do anything to it, the audio waveform takes 6 months to refresh if you have anything longer than a few seconds, and it generally takes us twice as long to do just about anything we ever did on our Edit* box. Not to mention the fact that the Newscutter was at least twice the price of the Edit system, and does less than half of what our antique Edit did in realtime.
We have begun calling our move to AVID “THE GREAT LEAP BACKWARD”, but we’re not laughing.Joe Bourke
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At least two of those images are woodcuts or linoleum cuts, made by cutting the inverse image into a block of wood or linoleum, then using the block as a printing plate.
One way you might go is to make your image black and white, then use the brightness and contrast filters to simplify your grey levels, then make a selection from the black or white that’s left and paint using that selection. You might want to do a couple of passes using variations on the brightness and contrast. This could also work separating the color channels and working that way. Experiment!!
If I remember correctly, there was an Adobe Gallery Effects filter called woodcut that may still be in Photoshop.
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV -
The general solution I use to make the text work over any background (dark or light, as you said)is to use white text with a soft drop shadow at 70 or 80 percent opacity, then spread the soft drop shadow so that it covers all edges of the white text. You end up with sort of a black, transparent cloud that kicks out the white text when it’s over a light background, but dissappears when you’re over a black background.
You can also set your white text with a hard black drop shadow, offset a few pixels from the white (depending on where you want your light source to come from), then put a glow on it, and change the glow color to black. This gives you a few more options than the first solution, in that the glow plugin in AE has lots of settings tweaks. Always err on the side of readability. Good luck.
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TVI