Michael Ebert
Forum Replies Created
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Figured out my own question! You draw the final distorted quadrilateral shape in Illustrator, move it to the front, give it no stroke, then select your group of objects and the new shape. Then, from the Object menu, you Choose Envelope Distort -> Envelope Options. Uncheck Distort Appearance. Finally, again from the Object menu, Choose Envelope Distort -> Make with Top Object from the Object. Bam! Expand as desired. What a dolt I was for not seeing this. Sorry to waste everyone’s time.
–Michael.
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// love what you do or do something else. //
Michael Ebert — graphic designer, jazz saxophonist, horror movie devotee
https://homepage.mac.com/mwebert
mwebert@mac.com
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We defrag our Medea RAID religiously. Otherwise, our MPEG-2 encodings from Premiere include dropped frames. Defragging cures this.
Never had any problems… but we double-backup everything on external drives anyway.
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You could also use a mask in your video editing program… You would create the complete dashed line in Photoshop, and then “reveal” it cumulatively by moving the mask over time in Premiere, for example…
–Michael.
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// love what you do or do something else. //
Michael Ebert — graphic designer, jazz saxophonist, horror movie devotee
https://homepage.mac.com/mwebert
mwebert@mac.com
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No, I don’t – and I’ve often wished I did!
One of the simplest ways to accomplish the same result is to duplicate your text layer – 1X for each character – and then mask out only that letter.
But you probably knew that already. 🙂
–Michael.
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// love what you do or do something else. //
Michael Ebert — graphic designer, jazz saxophonist, horror movie devotee
https://homepage.mac.com/mwebert
mwebert@mac.com
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Alright, just a first stab here…
I think Illustrator + circle geometry + step-and-repeat can be your friend here.
Basically, you divide the 360 degrees of a circle into positive and negative shapes, like slices of pie. Say you want 36 pieces, each measuring 10 degrees, alternating positive and negative. First, you draw a long vertical line. Now rotate a copy of it 10 degrees – align the two centric endpoints and join them. Now connect the opposite (radial) endpoints to create a long, thin triangle. Now, you can either use step-and-repeat or just rotate additional copies of this at 20 degree intervals, yielding 18 positive triangles (and thus 18 negative triangular spaces).
I think this is what you’re looking for – you can then import this into AE and rotate/mask with it to your heart’s content.
Hope this helps!
–Michael.
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// love what you do or do something else. //
Michael Ebert — graphic designer, jazz saxophonist, horror movie devotee
https://homepage.mac.com/mwebert
mwebert@mac.com
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You can easily draw a yellow Shape Layer rectangle over the text in question, setting the layer’s color mode to multiply if it’s over black text on whitish paper…
Hope this helps!
–Michael.
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I often prefer to do it myself – i.e., Ctrl-click (or Command-click on a Mac) on an alpha channel to select its contents – then go into another channel and either fill that selection with white or black as needed. Hope that makes sense…
–Michael.
——————————————————
// love what you do or do something else. //
Michael Ebert — graphic designer, jazz saxophonist, horror movie devotee
https://homepage.mac.com/mwebert
mwebert@mac.com
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It’s not going to be fast without a real-time video card (like a Matrox, for example), but you might save some time by doing your MPEG-2 encoding in Premiere instead of in Encore. You basically export your timeline using an MPEG-2 encoder (I think Premiere comes with one by default), and then go out for the evening. A finished 2-hour MPEG-2 .avi file at around 4.5 Mbps speed should come in under 4.5 GB including audio.
Hope this helps!
–Michael.
——————————————————
// love what you do or do something else. //
Michael Ebert — graphic designer, jazz saxophonist, horror movie devotee
https://homepage.mac.com/mwebert
mwebert@mac.com
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Another thought – If you can, set the End Action, Menu Remote, and Title Button Links to play your Timeline from the beginning?
–Michael.
——————————————————
// love what you do or do something else. //
Michael Ebert — graphic designer, jazz saxophonist, horror movie devotee
https://homepage.mac.com/mwebert
mwebert@mac.com
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