[Matthew Woods]

Yep, the replicator seems to work differently between Motion 3 from Motion 2. Not only does Motion 3 look softer, the spinning wheel of lines in the center of the logo (that I got by animating a replicator offset) moves differently between Motion3 and Motion2 as well. I opened a copy of the project on an older machine in Motion 2, and it plays and renders fine. So for now, I am using an old dual processor G5 instead of my fancy 8 core intel to render these components….

[Matthew Woods]

Have you tried changing the “emission angle” on the emitter?

Do your smoke particles have negative gravity or some other behavior on them that makes them want to travel up?

[Matthew Woods]

Actually the problem seems to be with the replicator particles, not the particle emitter. Emitter particles are still crisp. Here are two stills, one from a Lossless Animation export out of Motion 3, the other from a Lossless export out of Motion 2 that I did before the upgrade.

https://homepage.mac.com/mattness/Motion2Export.jpg

https://homepage.mac.com/mattness/Motion3Export.jpg

[Matthew Woods]

If you have too many images to animate by hand you could try, depending on how different your images are, and how smooth an effect you want, you could try importing the images as a sequence, and applying the timewarp plug in (or time remap and apply high quality frame blending) to them… that probably won’t give you the results you want though…

[Matthew Woods]

If you are on a mac, I’ve had good results using the free program MorphX. You have to create morphs for each pair of images and string them all together in After Effects.

https://www.norrkross.com/software/morphx/morphx.php

If you have CS3, I’ve also used the puppet tool… take two images. Put pins in the first, move the playhead and dissolve halfway over the second image, then move the pins to the corresponding points in the second image. This creates the top layer of your dissolve. Next copy the pin locations of the end puppet points, to your second image. (This creates a new mesh for the second image with the end pin locations). Go back and enter the values of the original pins in the first image to the mesh for your second image. Then adjust the opacity keys of the top image to dissolve between the two. Rinse and repeat.

[Matthew Woods]

You might try playing with the Echo time effect and some motion blur although this can get render intensive.

Joe Chao does some cool stuff with this in his “ribbonsandconfetti” tutorial.

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/chao_joe/ribbonsandconfetti.php

[Matthew Woods]

Thanks for your suggestions kevin, I tried “set Matte” in the past and it didn’t work the way I wanted it to. I could go the pre-comp route, but I often prefer to tweak in the same comp without having to flip back and forth. The solution I usually use if I anticipate a lot of tweaking is make a master matte layer and a slave matte layer with expressions linking any property I want to tweak to the master matte layer, then dupe the slave layer for all of the layers I want matted and make them shy. The problem with this is, its a bit of a pain to set up. An effect like I described would be a real time saver.

[Matthew Woods]

It didn’t seem to be conforming to the PS formatting correctly for me when copying out of mail and into CS3 on mac OSX. It must have had something to do with the way that particular text was formatted in mail. I did find this handy little piece of freeware called “PlainTextPaste”:

https://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/24821

It adds two options “plain text copy” and “plain text paste” into most applications that have a standard “Edit” menu (not photoshop).

By doing a “plain text copy” out of mail, it pasted the text appropriately into photoshop.

-matt

[Matthew Woods]

Hmmm… that is a different case… in my case I was editing using the full res stills (2134×3200) which edited fine in real time in an sd timeline… You might try reconnecting the files to the full res images before sending it to Motion. You might also try playing with the Media manager to designate your existing stills as an offline resolution… I am more of an AE person that a Final Cut person though so I can’t give you a precise solution. I stumbled my way into mine.

Good luck,

-matt

[Matthew Woods]

Eureka!

I figured it out!

The trick that worked is to use Apple Motion. Select the sequence in final cut and choose “send to > Motion Project” This creates a motion timeline with all of the linked images from final cut.

In motion, the images all appear as subclips of one layer. I then rotated and scaled that layer to the size I needed. Unfortunately, this didn’t seem to preserve the resolution of the source images. They still looked as if they had been scaled up.

As a last resort, I dragged the images out of my rotated and scaled layer into the motion timeline to create their own layers, and suddenly Voila! The images popped into full quality, and retained all the rotation and movement data from the original final cut sequence!

Magic! A bit of a convoluted workflow, but it works and saves me a lot of headache.

Hope that works for you alw0311

-Matt