[Ken Latman]

Thanks Jon for the imput.

I did wind up doing just that. I have ProAnimator BTW not Invigorator, so there are some slight differences.

I just purchased John Dickson’s Making it Look Great 4 DVD and was watching for assistance. I would like to have the camera go over the sign really close and then back out to reveal the whole thing. Sorta like the way 20th Century Fox reveals there logo. John solution was to use ProAnimator inside AE (I was using it as a standalone app), with a null object parented to and a camera to do the trick.
However I’ve come across another issue now that I have my bulb layers now with glows. Since my bulbs are inside other 3D objects, the glows I apply to them come through the other object. I think track mattes might solve the problem.

I have one part of my 3D object that spins on it Y axis inside an oval sorta like those old gas station signs. I put that on another layer so the oval could have a glow. When I move the camera, the bar of the oval is no longer of course blocking the view of the spinning object. Not sure if my track mattes are set right, but regardless it is not correcting the problem.

Any thoughts?

[Ken Latman]

Photoshop doesn’t work with Leopard? Tell my system(s) that. What version of PHotoshop you talking about? Mine has been working with CS2 and CS3 from the get go.

Back on topic, I’m only bummed because I thought I spent alot when I bought the G5 2.7, granted right after I bought it the switch to Intel was made public. Same thing happen to me back when I purchased a suped up G3, three days later the G4s came out. Later I was able to swap our processor boards.
Hopefully I can not make the same timing error again.

[Ken Latman]

I did already looked at that. Checked the box on and off. Still doesn’t show up.
Thanks for the help though.

[Ken Latman]

Harry Frank over at http://www.graymachine.com has a preset for bad TV that might be what your looking for.

[Ken Latman]

Also checkout Layers Magazine for this article.

https://www.layersmagazine.com/shape-layers-after-effects.html

[Ken Latman]

You could export your “shapes” out as images and then open the document in Illustrator. If you put your “shapes” on a white background it will be easier. Run the Live Trace under the object menu and exclude white (as long as you don’t have white areas in the “shape”). Expand the appearance and then ungroup the new object. Select the object and copy. Go to AE and past the object information in a new solid (as a mask) or shape layer.

[Ken Latman]

Try to get a drive that is 7200rpm or higher (if you can afford it). Also try to get a large MB on board cash. Hitachi has a 7200rm with 32MB deskstar. You can get drives from NewEgg and other sites.
Personally I have had three Maxtor drives die on me in 3 months.
My G5 came with a Hitachi drive and I haven’t had much problems with it so I try to stick with that.
As of today it is my understanding that Apple ships in there MacPro boxes Western Digital drives.
Just my 2¢.

[Ken Latman]

You can make the very long image using photoshop. I just tried with a sample PDF of 10 pages.
1) Open your document in Photoshop. When the dialog appears as to which page you want to open, hold down the shift key and select all the images.
2) Your pages are now all individual documents on screen right? How many pages did you open? This is important. Next go under the File Menu to Automate. Select Contact Sheet II. A dialog will appear.
To make it easier on yourself set the units pulldown to pixels. Set the width number to the dimensions of project’s width (768, 720, 1280, 1440, etc). Check the Flatten all layers if you just want one document in the end. In the thumbnails section set the columns to 1 and the rows to the number of pages your PDF generated into documents for Photoshop. Now watch the little example on the side and adjust the number of pixels in height so you have only one document created (number of pages * comp width). You should see Page 1 of 1.
Make sure use filename as caption is turned off. Turn off the auto spacing as well and set the vertical and horizontal to center, so all your pages tile. Set you document resolution to 72.
3) Save document as PSD, TIFF, etc and import into After effects.

I hope the rest is self explanitory.

[Ken Latman]

Are you making “shapes” in AE? If so, is it as specified layer sizes, with the new shape layers in CS3, masking a layer, etc? If your just using a layer and have a mask applied to it as a shape, you could just keyframe the mask and animate the points over time.

[Ken Latman]

You might be able to get the effect using some techniques found in Photoshop for wraping objects with sort of a displacement map. If you can isolate the object you probably use the same trick you would in Photoshop and have your text run over the displacement map.