Kevin Camp
Forum Replies Created
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i have found that there is a problem with opengl accelerated effects and intel macs — well… at least the mac pro. other opengl accelerated features are ok, like blending modes and motion blur (the feature, not the effect).
the safest way to work is to just turn off opengl and use adaptive resolution. but i have found that if you apply an opengl accelerated effect to an adjustment layer it works great. although that means if you want to, say, fast blur a layer, but not the layers under it, you will need to pre-comp that layer and apply your fast blur to an adjustment layer in the pre-comp. you can get a list of opengl accelerated effects and features from the help menu, there is only about a dozen accelerated effects.
i have been noticing (now that i have turned opengl back on) that there is occasional wierdness with some of the opengl effects… color adjustments occasionally ‘flicker’ for a frame or two, 3d anti-aliasing is not too good (my card supports anti-aliasing but the rendering is rough), and scaling of square pixel images in non-square comps isn’t as good as ae rendering.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
what are the specs for your mac…
intel macs have some issues running ae under rosetta particularly if you have 3gb of ram or less. there are also issues with cc effects (cycore effects that came with ae) and probably some other 3rd party effects with intel macs. there is also a strange opengl issue that i’ve found that will cause a crash any time your apply an opengl accelerated effect to a non-adjustment layer (apply the effect to an adjustment layer and it works great).
but you can try the usual fixes… turn opengl off in the preview pref, remove 3rd part plugins and effects, remove quicktime components found in the library>quicktime or posibly users>user name>library> quicktime (not the quicktime folder in the system folder), set the secret pref (hold shift while selecting any pref, then check the pulldown menu) to purge frames at a set interval (like 10 frames). and if you have an intel mac, quit all non-intel mac applications (i.e. any adobe product).
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
if you are talking about trapcode’s 3d stroke, yes, sort of… if your talking about ae stroke applied to a 3d layer, not really, but you may be able to fake it.
with 3d stroke, your masks will be 2d (on x-y plane), but you can rotate that plane to create depth, either by rotating the masks via the tranform properties in the effect or the camera settings in the effect or adding a 3d cam to your comp and setting the effect to use the comp camera. your stroke will still be on a x-y plane just rotated in space.
with ae stroke, you’ll have to make the layer 3d, turn it or rotate/postion the camera to create depth. but you will need to try to compensate for the flattness that you will encounter and there will be limitations.
you could, however, create a line with a 3d particle system, like trapcodes particular. the emitter can draw line and its position can be animated through 3d space. check out andrew kramer’s tutorial for ipod nano like light streaks.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
i have created neon signs using just 3d stroke and glow on vector art that i created in illustrator and then pasted in to solids as masks. it worked really well… using 3d stroke did allow me to feather the edges before adding the glow, but you could try blurring the sign before adding glow if needed.
also you can add another glow effect over your other glow eefect if you just need to pump up your glow.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
i don’t have powerpoint, but check the powerpoint help menu for media file types that powerpoint works with. or try microsoft’s site. my guess is that it will take an mpg, wmv or avi. quality, frame size and frame rate will probably be dictated by your system limitations, but most systems can handle playback at dv data rates.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
‘spacebar’ will render to disk and play from disk.
‘zero’ from the #s pad will render to ram and playback from ram.
since ram is access is faster than disk access you have a much better chance of realtime playback by hitting the zero on the #s pad.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
try changing ai clipboard pref from ‘preserve paths’ to ‘preserve appearance.’
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
if you just duplicate the emitter, particular will use both (or more) emitters to generate particles, and they will seem to interact since all of particles are being generated within a single instance of the plugin.
and, since andrew used a wiggle expression, you don’t even need to change the postion (the duplicate emmiter will have a different random seed, and thus different postions based on that seed). however your particles will have the same color.
if you created separate comps (to create a different color, prehaps) and put both particular comps in a new comp, you may be able to make them seem to interact by setting the blend mode to add.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
if you have illustrator you can do this, although it will be some work to create single line text boxes for each name. but after that it’s easy to make them threaded (so the text flows from one box to the next).
once you have the threaded text boxes, you can cut and paste the entire list of names into the top threaded text box and create outlines of the names. now each name will be grouped, so you can select all of the names, then release to layers (sequence) from the layer palette. each grouped object (name) will be put on a separate sub layer. pull all of the new sub layers out of the top layer from the layers palette. if needed, you can use the align features in illustrator to align all the names.
now you can import your ai file into ae as a comp, with hundreds of layers, each with a name on it.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
in my experience your ai file will import as it looks in ai. so if you see your path as black 1 pt line, when you import into ae, it will look like a black 1 pt line and you can effect it from that point.
you can also cut & paste vector data from ai in to ae, the vector will be pasted as a mask on a solid. you then could use stroke to create line thickness and color, then glow over the top of that.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW