[Matt Davis]

I see so many good answers with your name attached! 😉

[Matt Davis]

There are some styles of animation that you could play with, but if you’re looking realism, I agree with Dave.

[Matt Davis]

Any site that sells templates will not sell “exclusive” templates to one buyer, the whole point is to be able to sell to a lot of people. You’d have to pay one person to make you something and then give it (and the rights to use it) to you. Which means you’ll pay a lot more. It’ll make it hard to get that money back from your client too (especially if they know you essentially just played middle man with another designer).

What you can (and should) do if you want to go the template route is open up the hood, so to speak, and play around with the settings and assets.

This can make your project somewhat unique at least and can help you to gain a greater understanding of how to create your own projects. Replace pieces of it with your own photos or graphics, change parameters, add additional effects etc.

If you haven’t already, run through some online tutorials (video co-pilot was one I leaned on when I started out – and I still do). And when you’ve finished a few of them, play around with what you’ve made so that you gain an understanding of how it works and what else you might do with it.

Templates are a good way to get a project off to a quick start, but if you want to make this a profession you need to be able to bring more to the table than that. Imagine if the client wants a small change to the template (can that move from left to right instead of right to left?): will you know how to change it?

But don’t get discouraged, it takes some time. Have fun and keep at it.

[Matt Davis]

Sorry, can you include more detail of what you’re trying to do? Are you trying to create an animation of your character turning his head from left to right using three stills?

[Matt Davis]

I have not. Other than Photoshop and After Effects I’m new to most Adobe tools. I will definitely be looking into it. Thanks.

I work in a government shop, so our install of CC is incomplete due to some issues around buying software on subscription models..don’t get me started. 🙂

Whenever we want a new software or update we need to bring in the IT people, which irks me since it has always been my area before. I will learn more and see if this would justify summoning the people of the IT. 🙂

Thanks again.

[Matt Davis]

Maybe a bit late to the party here…

As an alternative to InDesign, people could also use After Effects. It shares some of the clunkiness of doing it in Premiere but with some very important differences.

Here’s what I’ve done in the past, especially when I don’t have a set of Ins and Outs for the subtitles, like if I’m laying those down myself from a translated transcript or something.

Bring your final video into After Effects, either from Premiere or as a video file. Add a text layer and extend it the full length of the area needing subtitles. Copy and paste all of the text for the sub-titles into the text layer.

Depending on what you decide for the layout and spacing of the subtitles, cut (Command+X or control+X) all of the remaining text that won’t be on screen for the first subtitle. Find the point where the next line of subtitles should happen in the video, place the playhead there and then Split the text layer (Command+Shift+D) Select the text in the new text layer (after the split) and paste the rest of the text you’d cut.

Rinse and repeat. Tedious, but better than Premiere on it’s own.

There are lots of 3rd party plugins, but many of them need the subtitle file to be formatted. Which doesn’t work well with my workflow, because I receive text files from the client usually.

[Matt Davis]

I suppose I should mention that I’m running Premiere CC.

🙂

[Matt Davis]

It’s CC.

Sorry for the late reply…but for some reason it has stopped doing this.

I still have no idea why.

[Matt Davis]

Nobody knows? It’s annoying…

I’ll be in my timeline, working away and then I’ll go to grab an effect…say a three way colour correction filter…and as I move over to that window to grab it, the timeline advances away from the clip I want to put it on.

Make it stop.

Thanks

[Matt Davis]

Yeah, that would’ve worked as well, thanks.

As it turns out, the client had some comments which ended up eliminating the “magnifying” effect anyway…at least the effect of it moving around. Which simplified the AE build at least. Still don’t know why the Rotobrush conked out like that.