Kevin Camp
Forum Replies Created
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Menu bar>effects>audio>audio waveform… or type waveform in the effects & presets pane.
there is a tutorial here too, that, at least part of, talks about generating audio waveforms… i think aharon robinowitz created it (maybe andrew kramer).
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the best way to know is to download the free trial, and try it out…
as far as trying to compare performance between ae and motion, that’s really tough, motion’s render enging is based on opengl, it is very fast with a good gfx card (although that acceleartion is subject to the limitations of opengl). ae does get a boost for some effects with opengl, but most of it is processor based rendering, and ae is really not trying to provide realtime interaction the way motion does.
but try out ae and decide for yourself. i think ae is a great tool to use with motion, i feel ae is a better compositor and there are more effects and plugins available. you can really use the strengths of both programs, imho.
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there’s no way i know of to ‘pump-up’ the anti-aliasing in ae… although if you have ae7 you can choose opengl 3d from the advanced tab in the comp settings window (assuming your gfx card is capable–check the previews pref in ae and click opengl info to see). opengl does calculate anti-aliasing a little differently (credit: mylenium). you will also need to select opengl render from the render settings for final render, if this works.
if that doesn’t help (and i kind of doubt it will), you can try to soften just the horizontal edges with a slight blur (in just the vertical direction). any number of blurs can be used: directional, fast, gausian… use it on a duplicate of your problematic image and place the duplicate layer behind the non blured layer (you only want the edge to be soft, not the whole image).
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one problem you may be faced with (at least using the shatter effect, which seems the most obvious option) is making you pieces of glass transparent. you can do a decent job of making them look reflective, with contrasty animated textures, and shiny, with material settings and lights, but i don’t think there is a setting for blend modes with in the plugin or any way to create transparency of the pieces.
i should probably check out that tutorial, maybe there is a way…
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great tips dave, i love learning something new (even if i rarely work with audio–i’ve found editors change the audio too often, thus my animations)
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its probably too late now, but to be safe, i would tell your mac not to go to sleep. you can always turn your monitor off if that’s an issue — unless it’s an imac, then you could set your screen saver to computer name, or something not too bright, if you need to sleep by your computer.
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there is a tool called the smoother, in the windows menu. select all of your keys (or the ones you want to smooth, 3 minimum), then you can use the smoother.
you might also only apply tracking data to one direction (like ‘y’) on your footage, then pre comp that and apply tracker data to the other direction to the pre comp. then you control those motions differently, smoothing one more than the other, or one not at all, etc.
you may also want to stablize your clip before tracking the points for rotation… just pick one point, and apply stablization to either, or both, directions to your clip, then track both points for your rotation.
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rather than ram preview, you can hit the decimal point ( ‘.’ ) on the #s keypad to preview just the audio (it will generally render the audio much faster than a ram preview. hitting the asterisk on the #’s pad will have the same effect that jonathan described (placing markers in the timeline). i think the audio preview is limited by default to around 8 sec., but that can be increased in ae’s preview pref.
you can see the audio waveform if you twirl down the audio layer’s attributes, then audio, then waveform. its not that great of a display, but you can pull the bottom of the waveform display to expand it more.
i suppose you could also create your own waveform from the the audio waveform effect, just turn the layer on when you need to use it and off when you render.
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in time controls, if the ‘ram preview options’ (versus the ‘shift-ram preview options’) are set to start the ram preview ‘from current time’ (check box option), and you are on the last frame of you comp, you will get this error.
uncheck the option or go to a different frame in the comp and ram preview
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you may be able to ‘export’ a wmv file using the ‘export’ function in the file menu (rather than trying to render via make movie or add to render queue). i have ae7 (pro) on a macpro, and i can see windows media and avi as export options. there may be limitations, i have not exported one and taken it to a pc to test, but it seems possible to create a wmv in ae.
i have heard that some are unable to find these options, but i don’t have anything particularly special on this mac, although i do have the free version of flip4mac’s wmv palyer inastalled, but that isn’t supposed to allow any encoding features, just decoding within qt.