[Matt Gerard]

[Helmut Kobler] “You might consider getting Panasonic’s PCD35($2K) for your desktop workstation at the office. It is the fastest P2 card reader around. When reading data to a RAID, I transferred a full 32GB E series card in 4 minutes. You can also connect it to an ExpressCard/34 port with a $199 adapter, so it works on laptops in the field. “

I just ogot one of these, man is it crazy fast. But, where do I get this ExpressSlot adapter yo’re talking about? I can’t find it online.

Thanks!

Matt

Its more fun to ride a slow motorcycle fast than a fast motorcycle slow…

[Matt Gerard]

Thank you thank you thank you….

Its more fun to ride a slow motorcycle fast than a fast motorcycle slow…

[Matt Gerard]

Randy I did see that tutorial, and if I have the time I will use that in the start of my animation, but mainly this will show inside the deck. I’d like to use it and I can easily modify it to fit my needs. I love tutorials!

Adam-
Good ideas, I like the TP idea. I dread thinking of having to do it by hand, but if that’s the way to do it, so be it. I’d like to try my hand atTP, though. I have some experience dealing with particles in AE and others, so I have a handle on how they work, just need to know where the buttons are 🙂

I’m envisioning several emitters, including ones at the blade like you said. It will just be a matter of controlling and directing them. I have not used TP yet, but I’m itching to get my mitts on it. I’m pretty tenacious when I get a cool challenge like this. I think the look they are going for is a kind of slow motion organized chaos of grass particles.

Before I get there, though, I have one important question- I have made some decent looking grass with the HAIR module. Is there a way to cut the tips off the grass and keep the tips? Do they have to be 2 different systems, or is there a way to slice an object into 2 separate objects (animated)? The grass will NOT be moving. Just picture a single blade of grass that gets the top 1/3rd of it sliced off by a slow moving blade.

Thanks, I’ll be starting to work on this tomorrow and most of next week!

The whole point of all this is to match move this animation to superimpose over live footage of mowing decks. So being able to reposition the camera and shift the field of view and and such is a great thing!

Matt

Its more fun to ride a slow motorcycle fast than a fast motorcycle slow…

[Matt Gerard]

I hear you, but unfortunatly there doesn’t seem to be much out there for what we want to do. All the subtitlers out there either render your subtitles to the video track, or are setup for spotting titles, as in you have to manually type them in while you mark the ins and outs. Now, granted, I haven’t spent much time actually learning to use some other apps properly, but call me impatient, if I can’t figure out how to make the app do what I need it to after 2 hours of messing with it, I drop it. Especially if the documentation is scarce, which it always seems to be. I am using a modified version of the workflow that I posted above. Its a little trickey and has some gotcha’s in it if you do things out of order, so I’m reluctant to expound on it right now. I’m still looking for a better way to do it.

I would suggest to find a subtitle program that you can ‘spot” titles, and work with that and really take the time to figure it out, and use that.

FYI, an .stl file is just a text file with specific formatting. If you “SAVE AS” from numbers or excel a tab deliminated text file, (not a CSV, can’t recall why, but it doesn’t work), open it with a text editor and do a search and replace the TABS (double click and copy the tab from the document into the FIND field of the replace tool, if you just hit tab int he FIND field it will bump the cursor to the next field) with a SPACE then a COMMA then a SPACE (makes the formatting easier to read with the spaces) and replace all. –

Here is a copy/paste from one of my properly formatted stl files-

$FontName = Arial
$FontSize = 21
$Offset = -21

01:00:00;00 , 01:00:29;08 The TC indicates the start and stop of the subtitle
01:00:29;08 , 01:00:37;29 , ONSCREEN SUBTITLE TEXT HERE

Hope I haven’t confused you, good luck-

matt

Its more fun to ride a slow motorcycle fast than a fast motorcycle slow…

[Matt Gerard]

I used to use ours for our FTP server running Rumpus FTP server software. It was loaded with a small raid setup and a gigabit e-card and it worked great.

An yes, I’ have used another one for a stool our dupe room.

Its more fun to ride a slow motorcycle fast than a fast motorcycle slow…

[Matt Gerard]

I needed to do the same thing for airflow in a mower deck, and I found this plugin at the CGSociety.

https://www.tarabella.it/c4dbeta/plugin_detail.php?Id_plugin=18

The free version is fantastic, but the paid version is only 44 euros and adds a bucnh of cool stuff to it.

The only thing is that the arrow spline that you want to animate on the path needs to be at 0 for XYZ coordinates, as you can control where on the path the arrow is by moving the original arrow spline along XY or Z. I had a hard time figuring out why mine wsn’t working, then I zeroed out the coord for the arrow and bam, it worked.

Let me know if you need an example scene, I can upload one. Definitely worth a look, though.

Its more fun to ride a slow motorcycle fast than a fast motorcycle slow…

[Matt Gerard]

I just did a clean install on another machine so at some point I can swap it out for the drive in my machine and that might fix it. All I can say is that I reinstalled EVERYTHING from the FCS 3 package in 20 minutes.

How?

I took the time earlier to rip the install discs to dmg files and dumped them to an external HD. Mount all the dmgs and walk away for 20 minutes.

I’ll see if I have time next week to swap drives out and see if the clean install worked. Again, its a small PITA, but its still a PITA.

Matt

Its more fun to ride a slow motorcycle fast than a fast motorcycle slow…

[Matt Gerard]

Our 2000 had some of this going on as well straight out of the box. After hooking up the paintbox and doing some tweaking on the black levels and gamma curves, the grain went away. It was mostly in the shadows and blacks, but was noticeable elsewhere as well under certain situations.

So, you need an experienced engineer to look at the camera and set it up, or at least someone like me that LIKES to read manuals and futz with dangerous settings in the camera until I get it to look right.

Out of the box these cameras have some grain to them, but that can be taken care of if they are properly set up.

Matt

Its more fun to ride a slow motorcycle fast than a fast motorcycle slow…

[Matt Gerard]

Yes, I’ using Motion 4. I got FCP to leave the scaling alone, but it still is usinghte Aspect Ratio distort at 18.52 in the motion tab of FCP. I found that this mucks up the video less than letting FCp do scaling, which it is horrible at.

Even Apple’s NTSC templates that they built do the same thing for anamorphic. If THEY can’t figure it out….

Matt

Its more fun to ride a slow motorcycle fast than a fast motorcycle slow…

[Matt Gerard]

I get what is going on here. At least the confusion part of it. There are 2 ways to create a motion template for FCP.

1) Use the “Save As Template” option in Motion. this saves the file (template) into

USER/LIBRARY/APPLICATIONSUPPORT/FINAL CUT STUDIO/MOTION/TEMPLATES

This allows the “template” to show up in the MASTER TEMPLATES Folder in the effects tab in FCP I think this is what Ariane is currently doing.

2) Just save the motion project anywhere you want, drag it into the bin, or import into FCP when you want to use it and it shows up in the bin like a piece of footage. This is when it has access to all the columns, namely the ANAMORPHIC column, that would apply to standard video clips. The ANAMORPHIC column does NOT appear nor can it be accessed while looking in the Effects tab at the MASTER TEMPLATES.

I am having the same issue right now, I create a Motion template as anamorphic, save it using the SAVE AS TEMPLATE option in motion, and when I drop it onto an anamorphic timeline, FCP wants to scale it to 98.7% an sets the distort aspect ratio for 18.27. FCP timeline settings match Motion project settings exactly.

I’ve tried using square pixels with a canvas size of 853×480, and that doesn’t work either. I’ve tried all combinations of pixel aspects and canvas sizes and i can’t get FCP to scale it to 100% and leave the distort aspect ratio to 0.

Frustrating.

I’ll keep testing and post here if I find anything.

Matt

Its more fun to ride a slow motorcycle fast than a fast motorcycle slow…