[Kevin Camin]

You could actually do it with Photoshop Extended but it wouldn’t be ideal. Photoshop sucks at 3D, but you could work on your model in PS and then import it into AE as a PS Live comp. It would be a headache to make it work like you want it, but I thought I would throw out a potentially free option for the short term.

You couldn’t do every 3D animation in the video, but things like rotating objects could be done.

Best regards,

Kevin Camin

[Kevin Camin]

I did something similar recently and aligned the lights along a spline while performing the ‘Duplicate’ function. I created my splines inside Illustrator by first creating outlines from my type and then creating copies that I would shrink down. I think that would be a better environment to prep the splines in.

I brought it into AE and used the position data of the bulbs for real AE lights in connection with Optical Flares and got a pretty good animated result.

Best regards,

Kevin Camin

[Kevin Camin]

What do you mean by ‘the empty background as well’? Do you mean you want an alpha channel with the render instead of black? If so, in the Render Settings there is an alpha channel check box.

Best regards,

Kevin Camin

[Kevin Camin]

@Andrew Somers: I dig your list of plug-ins.

@OP: Since you are doing this for “fun”, I see where your perspective of not wanting to spend money on plug-ins comes from. I agree that you can learn a lot of how the program operates by building these things from scratch. And Walter is right. A fundamental understanding of the program is required first. I remember doing some advanced tutorials when I first started AE, and though I could follow along, I really didn’t understand what I was doing. And I couldn’t tweak what I built because I didn’t have an understanding of what it was that I built. Learning the fundamentals first is a good idea. There are a lot of free tuts out there, or if you are looking for something comprehensive, Lynda.com is $25/month and has 8 hour basic courses for AE.

My perspective with plug-ins as a working professional is that I look at it from a financial/time perspective. If it takes me 5 hours to build a lens flare rig from scratch, versus purchasing a plug-in for $130, I need to look at it from an opportunity cost perspective. Is my time worth more than $26/hour ($130 divided by 5). Yes. Plus whatever I build won’t be as feature rich as a product made by Red Giant or the Video Copilot guy. I’m in enough situations constantly where I need to figure out how to build things that 3rd party plug-ins can’t address, so if there is something solid out there that looks beautiful and works beautiful, I’ll add it to my tool kit if the Return On Investment is there.

Best regards,

Kevin Camin

[Kevin Camin]

Unfortunately a lot of amazing tools for After Effects are third party plug-ins. I think the mind set of “not going to pay $100+ for plug-ins” is a counter productive one. Especially in the case of lens flares. The default ones are not very good. Video Co-Pilot has a feature rich plug-in for around $130 and Red Giant has one for around $250 I think.

Welcome to After Effects. You can do most things without plug-ins and can make really amazing work without any plug-ins actually. But if you get into a situation where you need the program to do something extra, like 3d motion tracking, advanced particle work, or JJ Abrams-like lens flares, then you’ll need to spend some money.

Good luck!

Best regards,

Kevin Camin

[Kevin Camin]

Camcorders and DSLRs are different rivers that have crossed just of late. Their technologies and ways of operating are very different. That’s my guess. I believe you can’t just stick a DSLR sensor into a camcorder without overhauling the entire video camera.

Plus DSLRs overheat after about an hour of continuous use which doesn’t sit well with consumers. DSLRs are still cameras first, that happen to shoot video and is full of caveats. Canon recently revealed a 4K video camera and RED has a camera coming out that has a reasonable price point. The age of DSLRs shooting video is almost over imo, because companies are creating cameras with these nice sensors that are fully functioning motion cameras.

Best regards,

Kevin Camin

[Kevin Camin]

Again, it’s not a good idea to make h264s from After Effects. You’ll typically get a much better result from a compression application like Quicktime Pro 7 or Adobe Media Converter. It’s not professional to make h264s from After Effects. You’re asking the program to render out footage then heavily compress it. After Effects is not good at walking and chewing gum at the same time. The farthest I might go is making a ProRes file from AE, it tends to do that okay in my experience (this is if you have file size storage issues), then go to h264 from a specialized app.

I would take the above advice and render out files with the animation codec and them make your h264 with another program. Just do a test and check out the difference.

Best regards,

Kevin Camin

[Kevin Camin]

You’re going to lose quality whenever you transcode, unless you are going to an uncompressed format. That’s why you often transcode in the first place, to reduce the file size so it’s more manageable during the edit or for final output.

You can think of codecs like file types. In Photoshop you can make jpegs, tiffs, pngs, gifs, psds, etc. A tiff, psd, or png is lossless, meaning it is uncompressed and unaltered. These files can be big. Whereas a jpeg will create a very small file by performing an algorithm to simplify the visual data; I believe it averages clusters of pixels and reduces the number of colors. In video, the ‘animation’ codec and ‘png sequence’ codec is a lossless codec. No compression is taking place and the files tend to be big. A QT h264 file on the other hand is very compressed and creates smaller files which tend to work well for computer playback and streaming.

I agree that Quicktime Pro 7 is the best $35 you’ll spend. If you need to make a .wmv for PC, you can buy Flip4Mac that works seamlessly with Quicktime Pro 7. Flip4Mac is more expensive but is necessary (and thank god it exists) if you need to make PC compatible files.

I tend to favor Quicktime Pro 7 over Adobe Media Converter for transcoding. I find I get better results for unknown reasons to me.

Best regards,

Kevin Camin

[Kevin Camin]

Thanks, Randy!

Best regards,

Kevin Camin

[Kevin Camin]

If the screens are flat, why don’t you just set up some nulls and bring it into After Effects and apply the video footage there?

Best regards,

Kevin Camin