[Martti Ekstrand]

I nearly always slap on a adjustment layer at top of the comp with

effect>video>reduce interlace flicker set to ‘1’

when I do my final renders. This stops most of the eye-gnarling flickers around horizontal edges. On very few occasions has the image gone too soft with this method. YMMV

cheers

[Martti Ekstrand]

One way of doing it is using a Null Object f

[Martti Ekstrand]

One way of doing it is using a Null Object f

[Martti Ekstrand]

[Reloaded] “How did you do that?”

Umm … having a real football on my desk as reference I started in PhotoShop with a 5 point hexagon for the top/bottom ones in a square image, added the lines coming out of the corners, distorted it with Polar Coordinates (polar to rectangular), squeezed the result to 25%, duplicated that, flipped vertically, lined it up at the bottom edge of the top for bottom part and ‘offset’ the bottom part horizontally by 1/5 of image width. (The important thing to remember when making textures for spheres is that the image wrapped onto the sphere has to be in 2:1 proportion.) The mid section I built by hand, imported to AE where it looked awfully funny and then by going back and forth between AE and PS with eyeballing I tweaked scaling and cylindrical distortion until it in AE roughly matched how the real ball looked. Finally I ‘bent’ the edges of the new mid black 5-point hexagons as the edges toward the ‘poles’ looked concave in AE. Could have tweaked a bit more but it looked good enough for what I needed and the hour I had assigned to do the job had gone. There’s probably some easy mathematical way of calculating this image but I left school way too early for that kind of math 🙂

cheers

[Martti Ekstrand]

[Reloaded] “How did you do that?”

Umm … having a real football on my desk as reference I started in PhotoShop with a 5 point hexagon for the top/bottom ones in a square image, added the lines coming out of the corners, distorted it with Polar Coordinates (polar to rectangular), squeezed the result to 25%, duplicated that, flipped vertically, lined it up at the bottom edge of the top for bottom part and ‘offset’ the bottom part horizontally by 1/5 of image width. (The important thing to remember when making textures for spheres is that the image wrapped onto the sphere has to be in 2:1 proportion.) The mid section I built by hand, imported to AE where it looked awfully funny and then by going back and forth between AE and PS with eyeballing I tweaked scaling and cylindrical distortion until it in AE roughly matched how the real ball looked. Finally I ‘bent’ the edges of the new mid black 5-point hexagons as the edges toward the ‘poles’ looked concave in AE. Could have tweaked a bit more but it looked good enough for what I needed and the hour I had assigned to do the job had gone. There’s probably some easy mathematical way of calculating this image but I left school way too early for that kind of math 🙂

cheers

[Martti Ekstrand]

Then you might be able to use this image I did long ago as a CC Sphere source. It’s by no means perfect but for a quick animation it does the job – otherwise feel free to use as a template (it might need some dirtying if you want it to look as a real ball, I used it in a graphic).

cheers

https://kashi.hamabe.org/images/football.jpg

[Martti Ekstrand]

Then you might be able to use this image I did long ago as a CC Sphere source. It’s by no means perfect but for a quick animation it does the job – otherwise feel free to use as a template (it might need some dirtying if you want it to look as a real ball, I used it in a graphic).

cheers

https://kashi.hamabe.org/images/football.jpg

[Martti Ekstrand]

[Bret Williams] “Am I nuts to be unimpressed?”

Check out AnandTech’s review – Mac Pro looks pretty impressive to me. And they get very different results in FCP and Cinebench than Barefeats.

https://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2816&p=1

[Martti Ekstrand]

If you got a BBC microcomputer laying about you could always use the original application for Auntie Beeb’s clock – I’ve nicked it off UK tapes more times than I can remember but that was back in the non-linear days.

https://www.pembers.freeserve.co.uk/Software/VTR-Clock/index.html

Not so helpful I know but at least you got a picture to use as a template

cheers

[Martti Ekstrand]

Unless you want to do fades from colour to B/W why don’t you desaturate the jpegs in Photoshop or such first? Should shorten render times a little as well.