[Kevin Camp]

you can make your own by duplicating the layer and applying the drop shadow effect with shadow only to the lower duplicate layer. then apply a corner pin effect above the drop shadow, setting the corner pins as needed for the faux perspective shadow effect.

i also made a preset that will create a faux perspective shadow effect similar to that of google maps that you can download at:

http://www.mercuryjones.com/aepresets.html

it should be pretty easy to use.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

you can adapt Aharon Rabinowitz’s technique from his tutorial here:

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=2&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/text_wipe_on/index.html

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i’ve noticed a similar issue with blending modes. sometimes the blending modes won’t work on 3d layers unless i apply an effect. and i had noticed that even a disabled effect will work too.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i have to say that i’ve never thought ae made good mpegs, they’re fat and ugly. you’re better off with sorenson or another third party compression software. just render to a lossless or uncompressed codec, then compress.

the audio issue may be an audio rate problem, try a few different rates and see if that helps.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i would double check motion’s gpu requirements to make sure the onboard intel gpu will work.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

there are two areas where the mbpro would be better….

the gpu on the mbpro is faster and has its own vram (the mb shares ram with cpu – slower and takes ram from system). the gpu and vram are the primary performance determiners in motion.

the other is screen size. all the apps you’ve mentioned have lots of palettes, windows and panels. i think you may feel a bit cramped working in the mb screen.

one last thing… although not quite as big of a deal, the mbpro can hold 1gb more ram. although 1gb isn’t huge, it is 50% more than the mb, and more ram is a good thing to have in ae.

aside from possibly motion, i don’t think the performance differences would be night and day, but the mbpro would be the better choice for pro apps.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

how about the glow effect…

threshold, radius and intensity to suit
composite original: on top
glow colors: a & b colors
color looping: sawtooth b>a
color a: yellow
color b: black

i didn’t compare directly to photoshop preset, but it seemed close.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

great, that’ll save me some time trying to find a 5.5 manual… i know i have one here, some where.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

ae 5.5 may be interpretting your footage as having fields (later versions do), and removing those fields. ae also defaults to render without fields. so if you are bringing the footage into ae5.5 and rendering with default settings, you are probably de-interlacing your footage.

you should be able to set the render settings from the render queue… try clicking the underlined word next to render settings, usually ‘best.’ a window should open with the render settings, find one for fields and set to lower (ntsc-dv standard). that should put your fields back in order, and hopefully smooth things back out.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

you would like to avoid compressing and re-compressing your media to maintain the highest image quality for the final product.

so, keeping that in mind, unless you have the drive space to export a 1 hr movie to an uncompressed or lossless codec to effect in ae and then render that back out to and uncompressed or lossless codec to create a dvd or put to tape, you’ll probably want to effect just the clips you need and bring them back into vegas. if you can export clips as reference movies to ae you can save yourself some time and disk space, by not having to render them to another codec to import into ae (you may be able to exprt a reference of the entire movie to ae, but reference movies in ae are ussually rather messy, and difficult to navigate).

you may even be able to render effects and titles out of ae with alpha channels and composite in vegas. i’m not familiar with vegas, but if it has blending modes similar to ae (like ‘add,’ ‘multiply,’ etc.) you may even be able to create your lighting effect in ae and composite it with your footage in vegas.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW