Joseph W. bourke
Forum Replies Created
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Thank you, Tim – you’re in a tough position there, and the scarcity of events such as this reminds us of just how hard you struggle to remain hands-off. I can think of only two of these in the last few years (bearing in mind that I only frequent a dozen of the many forums). I generally learn more here from the people I initially disagree with than vice-versa, and it’s the openness to the occasional call down or cat fight that keeps the COW lively.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Sorry I missed the bottom of your post – I jumped right in to view the example and missed it completely! It appears to me that it is either of two possibilities. One, the text was all created in Illustrator, then imported into AE, where it (as of CS6) is a simple matter to actually animate the two bottom nodes of the “t” and “h” to make them longer. Or the text was customized in Photoshop, adding extensions to the bottoms of the t and h. From there, it looks like a simple wipe from the bottom to the top of the two letters. It’s very delicate timing, but that looks to be how it’s done.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
As far as I know, there is no DSLR which has the ability to put a live time stamp on the output. The time information exists in the metadata of each file, but it sounds as if that’s not enough for your needs.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
It’s called Kinetic Text (or Kinetic Type), and there are many ways to do it. It can be done entirely by hand, usually putting together the overall layout in Photoshop, then importing it into AE and converting the PS text to AE text, so that the animations can be done in AE. It’s a combination (at least your example) of text animation and camera animation, timed to the voice over.
If you don’t want to do it entirely by “hand”, there’s a script called Type Monkey, which will greatly simplify the chore, but limits your creativity a bit:
https://aescripts.com/typemonkey/
As for the camera moves, VideoCopilot’s Sure Target can make the camera animation side of things simpler as well:
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/sure_target_2/
There are many ways to skin this cat, but everything depends greatly on the planning stage. If you don’t know what you want the type and camera to do, it’s going to take a long time…
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
I would suggest using the Noise effect, with the size settings fairly high, so that your seeing areas of color rather than small dots. A good way to get something you like quickly is to use the Brainstorm button to quickly get results you like:
https://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-after-effects-cs6/brainstorming/
If you need to control the color in your screen “doppler” display (say, different from the standard red/yellow/blue), you could bring the saturation down so you have greyscale splotches, then use Tritone to color them the way you want them (white/midtones/black settings). To show the enemy base being wiped out, you might have to create a custom graphic for the display, so that when the storm passes, there is nothing there.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Tom –
An easy method would be to simply use text on a path, using the period symbol for your dots (unless of course those Photoshop dots you refer to are customized). I use this all the time when I’m doing workflow diagrams for clients, and it seems to be the quickest solution. I often use square dots in my diagrams, but you can choose square or round periods, depending on the typeface you choose.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Charlie –
You might want to take a look at PlaneSpace, from Red Giant. It allows you to do all sorts of effects along the lines of your reference, and will also allow you to animate size, position, and other aspects of your layers without keyframes:
https://www.redgiant.com/products/all/planespace/
Granted, there’s a learning curve associated with PlaneSpace, but with it, you can achieve stuff in hours which would take you days to do with keyframes.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Todd has it right – the cheapest route is the gel route, not always great, especially if your gel has wrinkles in it. When I was Art Director at a broadcast station, anything I output for use on the studio monitors would have an added effect preset which warmed the content in the monitor. So if you have control over what’s in your monitors, this could work quite well. If your monitor signals are going through a switcher, even the cheapest switchers often have built-in color correction. From what I’ve seen in the monitor settings, most monitors have the ability to change color temperature, but it was never quite enough to match the tungsten warmth in our studio lighting setup. But it would help a bit…
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
That should not be a problem at all, Evan. Anything you create using a plugin is your intellectual property. Where you would run into problems is if you try to sell effects presets which were created by someone else as part of their collection (for example some of the Red Giant Particular collections). What you create, however, is yours to use/sell/or do as you wish with.
As a matter of fact, I see “effects” footage being sold on Pond5 and other sites which is just the basic settings of the plugin (quite a few built in particle system effects) with little or no creative put into it. Not much more than set up on a solid, and rendered. I don’t know whether any of these “base” effects are selling, but I’d sure be surprised if they are – ten minutes with AE could create many of them.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
That’s the limitation of free or almost free special effects footage. If they let the smoke go to where it’s dissipated, then you’d have a hard edge on the smoke where it goes out of the frame. If they had shot it wide enough to give you the full effect, letting the smoke rise and dissipate, you couldn’t use it in a tight shot. It’s a trade off, suitable only for quick cuts type of usage.
My suggestion would be to do a cutaway to a different shot – maybe a closeup of the person’s face who is in the mine field, or a detail which moves the scene along. There is no really good (realistic, that is) way to use a partial effect, other than cutting away before it becomes a still frame. You’ll notice in their demo reel of explosions, the effects all fade out before the still frame – not at all realistic…
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com