[Kevin Dearing]

Cool – I’ll check it out – good thing for me is that, at this point in my life, this is only a hobby – so most of what I do will be ok (perhaps even funnier) if it’s a little cheesy. And if I try this for a video, it’ll be something funny. But then again, I am considering getting back into video production work – I miss it too much…

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Thanks Mike,
I guess I wasn’t too clear.. I don’t want to change the time at all – just want to increase the duration leaving the speed constant…

I’ll check out the link to motionscript.com that you pointed me to and report back on whether it works with CS3 or not..

Thanks for your time..

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Makes a lot of sense.. Guess I’ll have to get better with Blender if I want to do this someday!

Thanks Ron!

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

BTW, please have patience with me if I’m not understanding what you are suggesting.. And thanks again for your time!

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Thanks again Roy,
That’s originally what I had tried to do – essentially I used the Keyframe assistant -> sequence layers to offset multiple layers for me. But the problem was that the blending of the layers kind of multiplied each other and I wound up with fog that got brighter then darker etc. I tried playing around with the layer’s opacity to get it right but it just wasn’t quite cutting it. I wonder if Dan Ebberts has an expression for blending two partially opaque layers to maintain the overall opaqueness.. (did that make sense??? 🙂 )

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Thanks Ron,
I haven’t really thought about using the time remapping – but you hit on why it wouldn’t work in my situation – the fog does indeed move in one direction.

But my problem isn’t really making the fog loop though – I’ve got that working (setting the evolution times around to the same number, or multiple of the evolution cycle setting), I’m just not all that happy with how realistic my fog looks. I like Andrew Kramer’s fog but it’s footage and not looping. It’s also 20 seconds less than I need.. That is what I’d like to loop if possible.

So my question, hopefully more clearly stated, is:

a) How would I loop a quicktime file of fog

or

b) Can anyone offer suggestions on how to make my own fog look more realistic (I’ll have to post a less compressed version of my example later)

But thanks again, maybe I can play around with the time remapping and Andrew’s clip along with cross fading / opacity tweaking to get something decent…

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Whoops – I didn’t realize how compressed that sample file was.. I’ll have to replace it tonight when I get home..

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Don’t know why I put ‘Dynamic Twist’ for the effect, I meant the Turbulent Displace effect…

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Not sure if this’ll give you what you want but try playing with the Shatter effect – I’d imagine that you’d have to crank up the gravity settings and probably viscosity.. (I’m quite new to AE also, so I don’t know if this effect has enough flexibility to allow you to make the pieces fall naturally.. )

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

I’m not 100% sure I know what you are looking for but I think that Andrew Kramer’s tutorial ‘The Healer’ should show you some techniques to work with..

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials.html?id=97

–KTFA