[Mark Suszko]

I think the way most people approach this, if they don’t just do it all in Lightwave or Maya or something like that, is to do it in AE, by recording the path or strokes of the words being written, say, with a wacom tablet, you then put your pens on a layer above that and have the stroke information drive the animation path of the pen. It may look like stop-mo but isn’t really.

If you don’t want to draw it out, or are not an actual artist/calligrapher, you can derive strokes, I believe, from a pre-existing piece of line art in vector art file format (.ai )like from Adobe Illustrator, stands to reason AE should be able to take the data from the sister Adobe application and work with it… but this is speculation on my part, I’m not an AE guy. You should ask about this in the AE forum for actual implementation notes.

You can combine the 3-d CGI and 2-d compositing and get something really realistic if you wanted to. Pens and virtual camera in lightwave, the paper in AE, for example.

A real stop-mo program I like a lot is Boinx iStopmotion. It can do stop-mo as well as time laspe and includes chromakey, onion-skinning, looping, a lot of pro type tools. On the PC side, try anim8tor.

[Mark Suszko]

That’s not a real light, she’s green screened over a computer-generated effect. You can find premade stuff like that at digitaljuice. Are you asking how to make it yourself from scratch? There could eb several ways to do that, using anything from 3d CGI to a simple plug-in.

[Mark Suszko]

Sorta. You can do it with simple chrioma keying if you keep the layers separate enough, but if you want a little more interactivity and messign around in z-space, you shoot this with a motion-control rig that can duplicate moves and timing precisely. Shoot the background action, then the foreground action, roto the foreground person and make your composite.

[Mark Suszko]

Well for compact and low power this job seems to call for LED lightpanels, however, I’m still wary of their color fidelity and here you are trying to shoot food, one of the most color-critical things in the world.

[Mark Suszko]

You want to be careful how you implement 2-channel mono because you then have the potential to create a phase-cancellation problem, and this will bedevil you with overall level control problems all thru the project. Ask me how I learned that, or just guess:-)

[Mark Suszko]

It is no help with E&O, but what I hear some folks do for the gear is cover it using something called an “inland marine” insurance policy.

[Mark Suszko]

“Out of about 5 years of doing this (at a great investment of time by all involved), there were 2 years where we were left off the credit list (printed and spoken at the end of the show). It was incredible. Each year we bit our lips and convinced ourselves it was still helpful, that we were helping the advertising community…yada yada. “-Chris Blair

Well, to be fair, Chris, weren’t those the two years where you had Debbie Allen do a protracted, choreographed interpretive dance number, in tribute to “screen-captured interactive database application demonstrations”? That was a rough night. It still haunts my dreams on cold winter nights…

🙂

Seriously, There are and will be horror stories, but I have to believe they are exceptions and not the rule. I still say that particularly early in the career, these awards are a good thing to strive for. Just don’t let chasing the award drive all your creative choices and material. Meaning, don’t throw a bunch of extraneous and unrelated eye candy into a client’s project in hopes of winning an award; the first goal, and what the project should really be judged on, is how effective a communications tool it is. Did it do the job it was designed to do. I will always grade functional over flashy. Do your best for a client. Then, if its good, and good enough for you that you think its your best, enter it. At least one time. And if you’re asked to judge and you feel capable, agree and give it the same maximum effort.

[Mark Suszko]

Yes, the trim by one frame tool is there. You highlight the edge of the clip and (doing this from memory at home without looking at my work machine)press the { and } keys for 1-frame trims plus or minus. Or maybe its the : and ” keys… What helps me is I specified a Logic Keyboard with all the main FCp functions printed on the keys, helps a lot. But you can also find these yourself by finding the “keyboard mapping” in FCP and see what each one is pre-set for.

Moreover, if you want to keep your Avid habits, you can use this feature to re-map the FCP keyboard shortcuts to be identical to what you used in Avid.

And yes there is a 2-box rolling trim mode, try pressing and holding the mouse between two clips, then dragging. or select the rolling trim button on the right hand side of the screen. Some features you want to use require you hit the apple-cloverleaf-looking key or the control key at the same time.

[Mark Suszko]

If the talent wears something with yellow in it, finding a clean key will become more difficult with the melon shade background. Khaki pants or shirts may show thru in spots, for example. Nobody has worn chromakey green since around 1972, so its a safer choice.

[Mark Suszko]

Ever try to get a PBS station to play something of yours? I don’t know anybody that passed the PBS QC on the first try:-) I also remember doing betacam dub runs and getting a call from one guy out of 200-odd stations, complaining that his copy has to have audio on just one particular track, because his in-house automation system used the other one for beep tones, he was sending the dub back to us to “fix” it, because he didn’t have time to erase one track. I asked him in all innocence: “But don’t you erase whatever is on that track during the process where you add the beep tones anyhow?” He hung up on me.

Buddy, I’m having enough trouble making 200 perfectly identical copies on one standard, now I gotta remember you need the low-sodium kosher in-flight meal instead?

I feel your pain, brothers. I think there’s plenty of blame to go around. Analog formats handled overdriven audio more gracefully, plus the decks often had limiters that were left on all the time, so you had some room to mess up and yet it could be saved at the end of the chain.

With digital there is no soft fail: you clip, you’re lost. But my own experience has been that it’s not easy to make the transition even if you had a decent analog background, many things like levels and procedures for audio are different, and documentation is scattered and confusing, Db meters don’t act the way we’re used to… you need to often buy a specific book to learn how to set things up right. Then once you finally do, the next bozo to use the gear will change everything on you:-P .

Also, the kids these days, as they say, don’t get any grounding in such details at school: since for so long some invisible someone or an unseen hardware device has been making up for bad settings down the chain, some people in production don’t really ever learn how to set up their system to proper levels in the first place, and don’t really have a sense of, or respect for standards. They’ll compensate by cranking an amp for the near field speakers instead of the waveform on the timeline. I like to point it out to our high school interns when a local cable spot comes on with audio buzz because a too-high white level is crowding the audio subcarrier. THEN they start to get a glimmer of why standards are important.

I blame Premiere:-) (grinning) Many casual Kids and “auteurs” consider bars, tone and slates and counts to be merely visual appendixes to their work, they are the kinds of folks that use Premiere’s academy leader on the front of their home movies to “make it look professional”, with no clue what the academy is or what leader is for or what a 2-pop is. I’d rather there be no bars or tone on a video than tone and bars unrelated to the actual program levels. You get a more honest setting by using actual program levels, if the editor didn’t set proper signals to start with. I’m tired, gotta go hang a fresh onion on the old belt.