Matthew Keane
Forum Replies Created
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Hi,
This may just be another example of me trying to use particles for everything… but how about using a custom particle (your lens flare flash) and using a particle system (Trapcode, CC Particle World) to randomly distribute them across your comp. With all the velocity options set to zero, nothing would move. Keep the life really low, and the emitter settings high, and you’d just get random flashes all over the place.
Matthew
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In that case, and if the potential project is interesting (creatively/financially) enough, I’d be tempted to make a quick mock-up in AE from a photograph and see whether it meets your – and the client’s – expectations for the quality of the result.
On the other hand, if the client hasn’t mentioned a deadline, I have a plan B, which involves a willing victim, a lot of junk food and about six months delay! Then just reverse the process in AE (not as easy in real life though…)
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Hi,
Depending on how realistic you need things to be, you might be able to do this with the Liquify filter, which allows you to selectively bulge, or squeeze in your case, parts of the image, and then animate the deformation. I think there are a couple of tutorials on the Video Copilot site that demonstrate this technique, with both stills and video footage.
Matthew
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Hi,
I had a similar experience recently when, in an emergency, I had to boot up a colleague’s MacBook Pro from an external drive with a clone of my system. When I first opened Media Encoder, there were only the 3 options you saw in AE – no MPEG2, no h264. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure in what order I did things, but after opening AE, Quicktime (to check the export options) and rebooting the machine, the other export options finally showed up. Sorry that’s all a bit vague, but it was as though the system needed a first-run and then a reboot for the extra export options to be activated.
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Apple recently added this codec-pack download for ProApps to their site:
https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1396It doesn’t actually say that it includes all the different flavours of ProRes, but it would be a bit odd if it didn’t. And while it’s recommended for ProApp users, it doesn’t seem to be limited to them, so nothing to stop you installing the ProRes coded for AE without using FCP by the look of it.
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The main difference between Particular and Form is that, in Particular, particles are born, fly around according to your settings, and then die, but generally they’re moving the whole time. With Form, the particles are there all the time, just hanging around, and that can make life easier in some situations.
For your shot, you might be able to get the effect you want by using Particular to fling the water drops around and then using the Physics time factor parameter to slow things down when you get to the time-remapping part of your footage.
The alternative would be to use Form to spread out the particles, add some fractal noise to the size and position to randomize things, and then move the AE camera through the water drops to get the effect you want. The change in speed could be achieved by playing with the graph editor for your camera key-frames.
Hope that helps…
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Hi,
Looks like the Wind settings under the Air parameters are pushing the particles around in Z quite a lot. If you set all the Wind direction forces to 0, everything stops moving. Although, if you want a bunch of particles hanging around and not moving much, Form might be a better bet than Particular.
Matthew
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Oops, spoke too soon! I’d only ever used OF with lights but, as you’ve found, you can also use manual positioning. I’ve just set up a test project as per your screen shots and it’s working for me. Have you tried using a different OF preset, to see if that works? The only difference that I can see is that I don’t have a compressed .mts file for the background layer, but I’d be surprised if that was the answer.
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Hi,
It doesn’t look like you have any lights in the scene. Since Optical Flares reacts to AE light layers, that might be why you’re not seeing anything.
Matthew
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One way to do this, if you have the plug-in, is with Trapcode Particular. Animate a Null between the points on your map, and then use that as the emitter point for Particular. By setting the particle velocity to zero, this will leave a trail of particle along the path, and you can use the various particle options (size over life, opacity over life) to get the style of trail you want. You can even animate the starting opacity of the particles to make a dotted line if you want.
Matthew