[Joseph W. bourke]

So you are looking to animate an auger. Sometimes the best way to do a complicated project is the simplest. I would suggest getting an auger (would your client give you access to one?) and either shooting it stop motion with a still camera, or doing a greenscreen and keying it in to your shot. If you shoot stop motion, I would get at least 15 frames of it going through a full rotation, then you can use it at any speed you need.

Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV

[Joseph W. bourke]

Jimmy –
I have never run into any legal issues with the fontsets that I use. There are so many similar ones out there, mostly because of the fact that you can license a font NAME, but you can’t license a font DESIGN. Therefore people just copy a typeface they want, give it a new name, and put it on a fonts shareware sites. There are literally thousands of free fonts out there (search on free and fonts and see what I mean) that you would be absolutely safe with. The only caveat with free fonts is that often the ones that are free don’t have a complete unicode set; in other words, there might be a capital W missing, or something that would make you pay down the road if you want full functionality.

The real issue you will run into is with serif faces that “strobe”. Any typeface with fine serifs (that are angled or have strokes smaller than an NTSC scanline) can cause the strobing effect, similar to the “marching ants” on a selection tool. It makes the type hard to read and detracts from the rest of screen. The general rule is to use san-serif or slab-serif fonts in TV production. That way you won’t run into problems. If you have to use a serif font, try for the “bold” or “black” version; you’ll have fewer problems.

Issue three: the “legal” issue, has to do with FCC rules for using mouse-type at the bottom of the screen, especially political ads and stuff that has disclaimers. There are FCC rules that you can search for online – I don’t know the type size off the top of my head, but there’s a minimum type size in scanlines that you can’t go below. I hope this helps.

Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV

[Joseph W. bourke]

My guess would be that there’s everything in there from rotoscoping to 3D. That bull-riding shot just has an artificial look to it. It almost looks as if it was done in 3DStudio Max with motion capture information for the bull and a rag doll Reactor figure for the rider. There’s very little detail, even in the close shot. The climber looks as if he was rotoscoped out of a real video shot (the tight shot), and the skateboarder looks as if he might have been shot on greenscreen in a studio. The guys on motorbikes, on close inspection, have an almost Poser 3D look to them, as do the bicyclists. There are so many ways to skin the cat these days, from dirt cheap, to ridiculously expensive, that it makes sense to use a variety of options, which is what I think was done here. However it was done, it works, and it’s a really eye-catching look, with a simple concept behind it.

Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV

[Joseph W. bourke]

I was in 3DStudio Max when I gave the above answer. I just did one of these “reflective” floors in AE. I took all of the elements that I wanted to reflect into a new Composition, then took a copy of that composition with the 3D switch on and rotated and pinned it, with reduced opacity, until it looked right. I don’t believe there is any way yet in AE to do true reflections. Combustion has been doing it since day one practically.

Sorry about the wrong answer above.

Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV

[Joseph W. bourke]

I believe you just set your ambient color to white or black, then use the Flat Mirror map on a plane object.

Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV

[Joseph W. bourke]

There’s a nice, free plugin called Camera Flash at:

https://msp.sfsu.edu/Instructors/rey/aepage/aeplugs.html

Actually that link points you to it. You have to download the demo of Buena Software’s Effect Essentials, which will get you the Camera Flash plugin. When you think about it, the effect of a lightning strike (on the ambient light in a room, anyway) is very similar to the effect of a strobe on a camera: fast flash, fast decay. You might want to do some creative masking of the room, depending on where your windows would be, but by keyframing an on/off of very short duration, maybe 2 or 3 keyframes to almost full flash, then 3 or 4 keyframes for the decay, you would get close to it. If your windows have any cross pieces in them, bear in mind that lightning flashes throw hard shadows. Also keep in mind the color temperature of lightning…it tends toward the blue end of the spectrum. Good luck!

Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV

[Joseph W. bourke]

“Shouldn’t take that long” are famous last words. You will almost always run into a wrinkle with this sort of project (greenscreen was shot by someone who has never done key backgrounds, lighting is uneven, videographer forgot to shoot a clean plate, etc.).

We have all been burned by the “how long could it take?” thought that first hits us when a project comes in. What I generally do is a rough guestimate of the worst case scenario, then quote the client based on that time plus about a quarter more time for contingency fee (that’s for when the client comes back after you’re done and says “I love it, but could you just move the shadow a little bit to the left?”). Quote the client the high price, letting him/her know that it’s based on your knowledge of the project at this point, and that you will bill for actual hours involved (at whatever hourly price your market will bear – it’s $25 to $50 an hour here in NH, depending on the level of expertise needed – I bill $100/hour for 3D work).

Bear in mind that the client ALWAYS remembers the first price out of your mouth, so if it’s high, and you come in lower, the client is happy. If not, you won’t see that client again. Good luck.

Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV

[Joseph W. bourke]

I can’t translate for you, but here’s a site that will lead you to an answer:

https://www.retroleum.co.uk/PALTVtimingandvoltages.html

Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV

[Joseph W. bourke]

I think it’s a little bit of both: a prime example of the software driving the creative would be the overuse of the 3D Stroke plugin from Trapcode. You didn’t see a whole lot of burning 3D swooshes around (now they’re everywhere, prime example being the ABC on-air look) until they became easy to do. I’ve been making them for several years in 3D Studio using an animated texture map, but it takes a lot longer to make them. Now I have to be really careful when using them, because everybody and his brother is using them.

This, to me, is a case of the software driving the creative. The other side of this is that many of the developers of third-party plugins ARE artists, and they learn the AE Software Developement Kit in order to facilitate their own visions. Trapcode’s Shine is another example of an overused look, although it’s beautiful (and it can be easily done with the native plugin set with After Effects – although it takes longer) it’s any easy way around real work. As a regular user of the Cow’s AE forum, I see on a daily basis people requesting the easy way out. “Is there a plugin that does realistic 3D clouds?”, for example. There probably is, but the real challenge to the artist is to find a way to get the image from the brain to the pixel WITHOUT the plugin, or with a workaround that realizes the concept.

I am amazed on a daily basis by the toolset I have to work with now, compared with how I had to do things just a few years ago. Clients now expect the director’s cut of Apocalypse Now for the price of a local cable spot, so we graphic artists are pushed to the limit and forced to find the easiest way to achieve a look, often with a plugin. If we had more time for experimentation (who has gone through the entire plugin set that comes with After Effects? – not I), I’m sure there would be more creativity in our field, and fewer repeats of the raining letters from Matrix that are such a visual cliche now.

Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV

[Joseph W. bourke]

Ian –
I think it’s a combination of the above three, with item “a” being the prime motivator. After Effects, Combustion, Illusion, and a raft of other desktop driven effects and compositing software have given the user a wealth of tools at a cheap price. All the above come with the caveat “talent not included”, so some of the looks that have become the hip styles have only to do with the designer not knowing what’s “wrong”, or not caring, and shooting from the hip. It’s much the way the desktop publishing revolution took off in the 90’s: you had the people with talent and no money enabled to do great things, while at the same time you had people with no talent and the software making circus posters with all 36 fonts on one page.

I would say the second mover would be item “c”. Designers have been forced to jump into the driver’s seat to some extent. In the past, much of the process was done with a producer, artist, and editor. Depending on the chemistry, the artist and editor were either just button pushers (if the producer knew what he/she wanted), or actually were producing the project, with the producer as onlooker/approver. That changed to a great extent when you became able to do the same project on a ten thousand dollar setup that you could only do ten years earlier on a half a million dollar setup. The designers saw that they could take the project out of house, or work as a freelancer, and make more money than being on salary at an effects house. This move, after a while, turned the freelancers into the new post houses, as they realized that they could make even more money by hiring their own freelancers and billing at the principle’s rate, the same way ad agencies have gotten rich for years (the cub writer writes the spot for 10 bucks an hour, and the project gets billed at 100 bucks an hour). There’s also the issue that the consolidation of ownership in the big media market has cut a lot of jobs, and forced people into the positions of driving the creative software, with no training or preparation for the job.

Item “b” doesn’t have much weight, in my opinion, since the desktop revolution has less to do with a revolution than with competition among the top-heavy hardware makers (AVID, Sony, Thompson, etc.), who are desperately trying to keep up with the shrinking market for big boxes, by buying out the guys who are really making the mind-blowing advances in technology. “If you can’t compete in your own right, buy the company with the good ideas” seems to be the mantra of late. That’s great if you’re also selling plenty of your own ideas, but companies like AVID are learning (check their stock price since last November) that you also have to still be selling your big boxes in order to survive. You’ve got to sell an awful lot of Pinnacle cards to make up for the loss in Media Composer sales.

Anyway…these are just my thoughts on it, maybe not as clear as they should be, since I haven’t had my first cup of coffee yet. Good luck with the project.

Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV