[Michael Szalapski]

Oooh, yes. I forgot to ask how accurate to the original painting you actually need to be. The Video Gogh plug-ins are quite fun and, if you just need to look vaguely painterly, they might find this acceptable. You won’t have Starry Night or anything, but if you create an underlying precomp that’s similar to it with shape and color and apply this effect to the painting precomp, you can get close enough for government work.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

There’s no plug-in that recreates a famous painting, but in animatable mode.

Your client’s going to need a bigger budget.

It’s going to require a lot of Photoshop work. Split the painting into different layers that you’re going to be animating. Using your favorite cloning methods add to the layers so that you have room for animating. You may end up creating a few whole new layers too. I hope you brushed up on your painting skills. (har!)
It’s the same basic principle as the The Kid Stays In The Picture effect. Where you take a photo and split it into elements and animate it in 3d. You need to recreate the background behind the objects that are going to be moving and to the parts that are moving “out from behind” other things.
Then import your Photoshop file into AE as a composition. Animate the layers and, if needed, use some distort tools to add an organic quality to them.

It’s going to take a lot of time and effort to make it look good.

As with many things in AE, I’m sure there are other ways to do it, but I will leave it to others to suggest alternate methods.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

There was a film I worked on where I kept getting called upon to fix stupid things in post.

The crew eventually made me a t-shirt. The front said, “We’ll fix it in post.” And the back had a picture of me wielding a gun saying, “I’ll fix YOU in post!”

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

What? No, just add an ambient light to your scene and your text will regain its color. It won’t be black…I promise it doesn’t have to be black.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

This is very, very easy to do. It will just take a very, very long time.

First, you’ll want to rotoscope each person. Then use those masks in combination with other masks to isolate the brightness/color correction to just the part of their bodies that are facing towards the hologram. This could be a series of masks on an adjustment layer, or you could put each person on their own layer…really, there are endless solutions to this.

This tutorial covers adding in light from muzzle flashes, etc to a scene. You’ll want to do this, but instead of just for a split second, you’ll want it for the entire length of your scene.

Have fun!

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Short story is DV and HDV toss out tons of color info, so you will often end up with jaggy/noisy keys. Read this for more info.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

This thread should help.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Not the motherboard’s problem.
It sounds like an issue with the graphics card. Turn off the Open GL preview in AE, see if that helps. I don’t know of anyone who uses Open GL in AE; it has too many problems.

Also, see if there’s an updated driver for your video card.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Dangit, that’s what I get for stopping in the middle of a post to do work. Nice post Walter.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

There are several threads about this on this forum.
They all say the same thing:
At least two gigs of RAM for every core of your processor. Four would be better.
Get the most processing power you can afford. (I have 8 cores)
Graphics cards don’t matter a whole lot. Open GL in AE is a joke.

That is the basic gist of the threads.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.