[Matthew Woods]

Hi Kevin,

I had tried that initially, and it seemed like it would work pretty well if I just had the sphere in the scene. The problem is, I also have 3d text layers. The auto oriented 3d sphere didn’t seem like it was moving in the same world as the text layers.

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

One trick I use for things like this is to animate a texture tile rather than the camera move on the road itself. I might try making a repeatable “road tile” then apply Offset followed by CC Repetile to it. Rotate it along the x axis it in 3d space, maybe do some extra distortion to make a true vanishing point, then animate the Offset Effect’s value to make the road texture zip by. You could even apply effects like CC Bender on top of that to make your road appear to reach a curve.

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

Its not a hard calculation to do. I was just wanting to see if there was a new trick to improve workflow. One trick I have used in the past is to figure out the approximate size of things is to change my grid size based on it. I can then easily turn on the grid to get an idea of how big things are if for example I wanted a person to be life size in a projection. (I wish I could do that on a per project basis rather than in the prefs). In this case I needed an exact size for a number of areas in the template, so I needed to do the calculation a lot. I never knew that AE did anything in inches, so I was surprised to discover this. I’d hoped there was a way to adjust this.

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

Hmm. I don’t seem to have any options for that in my display prefs.
I’m on a mac, so I don’t get as many display card options.

Thanks for the thought though.

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

Another nifty way to animate a pie chart if you want to have multiple slices of pie:
Apply a horizontal grayscale ramp to a solid, followed by a rectangular to polar coordinates conversion, followed by colorama. If you uncheck “Interpolate Palette” in the output cycle of colorama, you can create any number of colored pie wedges. By key framing the output cycle, you can easily animate between different versions of the pie chart.

Cheers,
-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

Thats what I thought I remembered. I did finally figured out my bug without it, but for some reason the error description box isn’t popping up anymore in CS5.5. Is anyone else having this problem on a mac? Its making scripts even harder to debug than usual. I’d wondered if they moved it. I really wish AE had some sort of console/message window that you could print script variables to for debugging purposes.

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

Careful John-Michael,

I’m trying to keep ideology out of this. I’m a mac guy, that I’m even considering switching our editing suite to PC says a lot. I’m trying to be open minded.

Anyway, Viruses/Malware whatever you want to call it, our company has been burned by it in the past. I’ve also been burned by antivirus software. Symantec/Norton Antivirus caused more problems than it solved. As far as I know, the only mac malware out there requires you to consciously install it, and enter your admin password. You can’t just visit the wrong website, or open an email attachment. I know windows 7 has supposedly improved a lot of this, but I still have bad memories.

I’m curious though do you never use email or the web on your editing machine?
Running the constant updates required by Windows to “stay safe” scares me as well, as updates sometimes break things. I’m usually wait a few weeks update, and check these forums to make sure nothing important breaks before I run one.

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the list of integrators, and suggestions. In answer to your question about the home laptop, I’m running chrome as the browser. Don’t touch IE. I really didn’t like Vista either, and haven’t had much experience with 7.

I’m still a little reluctant to go with a PC, but your information has been really helpful, and gives me some places go to find out more. I’ll check out those integrator sites, and talk with our editor and my boss about how we want to proceed. Thanks also to John-Michael for recommending the GTX580 video card. Thats good info to know.

One last thing on Premiere bugs. Overall, we have been happy with the speed and interface of Premiere on the mac. Some of the bugs have been really painful though. I thought I’d list some buggy issues we’ve had on the mac platform and see if you PC folks have ever encountered them. If switching to a PC would fix these, it would make our editor very happy.

On the mac we have had these bugs that have driven our editor crazy. We tried upgrading to 5.5 to fix them, and encountered a new bug that caused us to go back to 5.

Issues with dissolves when rendered, They sometimes pop on at about 20% then dissolve the rest of the way in. This issue is in PP5

Issues with the first keyframe of a key framed clip sometimes changing value after saving.
This issue is in PP5.5 and we couldn’t solve. It was really frustrating and made us go back to PP5 till they fix it.

Audio occasionally drops out for a few seconds randomly on playback.
This happens in both 5 and 5.5.

Bloating project files that grow to gigs in size and take forever to load.
This happened in PP5 a year or so ago, but seems to have been fixed.

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

Thanks for your advice, Tim. Some good info there. You mentioned BOXX, can you name a few more of these professional integrators? I had tried doing a google search for places like that, but maybe I didn’t have the right keywords. The only people, I knew to make pre-built windows machines are places like Dell, HP, etc who don’t have a clue about what hardware you need for editing. Maybe I’m not reading enough ads on the cow.

As to the virus thing, I’ve found that the virus protection programs often slow down the computer and are are a real hassle. I’m not sure how the virus got on the office PCs. I think it was spread by email. I don’t think anyone in the office visits a lot of pirate sites. If it was for my own machine, I’d feel a little more comfortable diving into it, as I can usually identify suspicious emails. Is it unreasonable for our editor to expect to be able to check her email on her edit machine?

Even aside from viruses, I don’t know what maintenance you need to regularly do with a PC. We have a PC laptop running Vista at home, (hand me down from my mother in law), we mounted it in the kitchen and use it exclusively to stream netflix, and hulu. We don’t do anything else on it. When I first got it, I reinstalled windows, and removed all the bloatware from it, and it was running very snappy. I have noticed over time it is gradually getting slower and slower to respond in the finder. I don’t know if it needs de-fragged, or needs some other maintenance. PCs always seem to slow over time, and I don’t know how to fix that.

Thanks for all the help,

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

Hi folks,

Both our editor and I are primarily mac people. I’m the motion graphics / interactive programmer in the company, but I’m also the more techie person in the office so I usually end up purchasing and setting up the machines as well. I’m comfortable installing hard drives, memory, and PCI cards in machines. I never buy them directly from Apple. I’ve never built a PC from scratch though. I am somewhat comfortable with windows. I have to install museum installations on Windows all the time. Our editor used to own a windows computer at home, but is a mac convert.

My biggest concern with windows is maintenance. We don’t have a full time IT guy. Back when we had PCs as the office machines we had a freelance guy that came in to maintain them. When they got a virus it wasted a lot of both my time, and our producers whose machines were down. I dread a virus on an edit suite. I curse at all the drivers I have to track down when I am trying to reinstall windows on a pc. It still seems like you really have to know what you are doing, and baby the system a lot to keep Windows running at peek efficiency. My personal theory, is that the reason IT guys don’t like macs is that if they caught on, it would put many of them out of business.

My biggest concern with mac, is their trend towards prosumerism. We do very high res res programs, with lots of layers. We need a lot of power. We have been waiting for a mac pro refresh, but its been a year and a half since the last update, and the latest rumors on the apple rumor sites are saying that Apple may be ditching the mac pro line as unprofitable. I would normally discount this rumor but what they did to Final Cut Pro X has me worried.

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com