[Michael Szalapski]

Depending on the complexity and quality of what the client wants – as well as the nearness of the deadline – are all factors you should consider.
Are they asking for something a newbie could do? You should probably not charge as much as if you’re doing something very complicated.

Also, it’s worth considering how much exposure the work is going to get. If you’re working on a national ad for Coca-Cola, you should probably expect to receive more money than doing a local ad for Big Bob’s Big Cars.

At this precise moment in time I in the midwest as well (thanks to the COW’s jobs forum I’m moving next week to my new job). I’ve charged anywhere from $30-50 an hour.

Occasionally a client may just want a graphic and pay a set fee. I did some graphics for a client – it matched their branding, it looked great, they were extremely happy with it and loved me forever and I made $160 for an hour’s work (an hour and a half, if you count rendering time [which you should]).

DO NOT FORGET to put into your contract with the client a stipulation about changes. I just did a job for a client that was supposed to be about 10 hours of work, but with the agreement that any changes beyond the original request would be more hours. They got a product that was better than their request, but they wanted a little change here and there that was different from what they originally requested. They ended up having 16 hours of changes because they couldn’t make up their mind. If I hadn’t put that into the contract, they might have gotten that work for free. I’ve seen it happen to our colleagues here on the forum before, and it’s not pretty.

– 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]

Is your camera moving in the shot? If not, a simple corner pin effect will enable you to place your tv’s content (which I assume you have in a precomp) on the screen. If you have things moving in front of the tv screen, such as an actor walking through, you’ll have to duplicate your footage layer and rotoscope the person out so they’re in front of the TV.

If your camera is moving then everything’s pretty much the same, except instead of applying the corner pin effect manually, it might be easier to use corner pin tracking. I haven’t had any experience with Mocha yet, but there are help files on Adobe’s site and tutorials aplenty (including some here on the COW). If you want to use AE’s built in tracker, there are tutorials out there, but Adobe’s own help files will work nicely too. Basically, switch to the motion tracking workspace, select your footage layer, and choose Track Motion. Then under the motion type choose Perspective Corner Pin. Place your tracking markers on the four corners and go!

There are other tricks you’ll need to do that are the same with every compositing job. Match the color, blur level, and lighting on the TV precomp to the footage. Add some sort of light reflection on the screen (how this looks depends on what your TV looks like). And all those other normal things.

If the TV is a CRT one, don’t forget about reflections on the screen of things in the room, perhaps duplicating your footage layer, masking out the tv screen and laying it over your tv precomp with some layer blending mode and lowered opacity would work.
Also, don’t forget about the bending of the screen, you may need to try bezier warp, or some other distort tool to match the curvature of the screen.

– 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 is a tutorial here at the COW for making glossy text that would also work on a button.

I seem to recall back in the day a really goofy/fun way of making really shiny stuff happen. At the moment my AE machine is in the middle of a render for a client’s commercial that has to go out today otherwise I’d try it myself.

I seem to recall it being something like this.

Make your button shape.
On the button go to Effect>Generate>Ramp
Move the top and bottom parts of the gradient/ramp so the button goes from black to white (top to bottom)
Then Effect>Perspective>Bevel Alpha (you can play with these settings later)
Then Effect>Color Correction>Colorama and for the output color, choose one of the metallic options. If you then animate the output cycle, you get a really cool glossy look.
You can either change the colors with Effect>Color Correction>Hue/Saturation or you can actually change the colors in Colorama.

I’m not sure if that’s quite how it was, but it’s close.

– 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 do you mean when you say animated glossy buttons?
There are soooooo many different things you could want.

What do you mean when you say glossy? Do you mean a dark cool sheen, do you mean the Web 2.0 look, do you mean the Mac OSX look, or do you mean something else?

What do you mean when you say animated? Do you want the buttons moving around? If so, how? Do you want the “glossy” moving around? If so, how?

– 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 are you trying to do? There dozens upon dozens of different possibilities of how you might be wanting to “make it play nicely with other 3d layers.”
I don’t see anything out of the ordinary in the picture you posted, but then, I don’t know what you want it to look like.

Keep in mind that there are several tutorials here on the COW for working with Particular and 3d layers.

(And BTW, don’t turn the Particular layer 3d.)

– 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]

Sometimes it’s those little switches we forget to push that can frustrate us for days!

I’m glad you’ve got it working. If you get a chance, why not post a video example for us to see?

– 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]

I’m not quite sure I understand what you’re saying, but there are several 3d camera tracking programs out there, such as SynthEyes and Boujou, that can export camera tracking data into AE that do a better job for 3d movements over AE’s tracker.

– 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]

The video you linked to said that it wasn’t available for my country. So I went to YouTube and searched for something with a similar title and I think I found it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKz-RXSeIYA

If you’re talking about where he has all those silhouettes of himself growing behind him prepare to spend quite a bit of time. Remember, record companies pay thousands (sometimes millions) of dollars for a music video and they use teams of people to get it done; this stuff takes a while.

Here’s one idea on how to do it:

I’m going to be using After Effects for this explanation, but I’m sure you can get similar results with other programs. (I would probably step outside AE and use Wondertouch’s ParticleIllusion for the particles part, but I’m getting ahead of myself…)

Isolate your performer. Whether it be via chroma key or rotoscoping, get the performer on their own layer.
Duplicate the layer and precompose it. Name the new composition “Particle”
In “Particle” fill the layer with a medium grey color. Effect>Generate>Fill
Then put a black (or dark grey, you can come back and experiment with this later) stroke on the layer. You can do that several ways, two of which are Effect>Stylize>Glow or Effect>Generate>Vegas

If you do it with Glow:
Make sure you set the glow based on Alpha and raise the intensity, but lower the radius and change the A and B colors both to black (or dark grey).
If you do it with Vegas:
Change the input layer to be your new layer. Change the segments to 1. Under rendering change hardness to 1 and the end opacity to 1.

Create an adjustment layer apply Effect/Color Correction>Hue/Saturation.
Click the colorize button. Play with the colors until you get what you want. And keyframe the color to change over time. You can come back in here and create more keyframes later.

If your performer isn’t walking around, you should be done. If they are, you’ll need to use the motion tracking and click Stabilize motion on your performer; use their belt or some other part on the middle of their body as the tracking point and stabilize them. (Check Adobe’s help documentation on how to stabilize motion).

You should now have a composition called “Particle” with a silhouette of your actor in grey outlined in black inside a main composition that has your performer on a separate layer.

Back in your main composition turn the eyeball off on the “Particle” composition.
Create a new solid and put it under your performer layer.
Use your favorite particle plugin (or export the particle layer and use a separate program like ParticleIllusion) and make the emitter follow your performer (In AE Create a Null then on your performer layer do a motion track, but this time instead of using Stabilize Motion click Track Motion and change the motion target to the null. Use an expression on the particle effect to tie the emitter’s location to the null’s location)
Use a custom particle and make it the “Particle” layer in your composition.
Then, depending on which particle option you’re using, play with the settings so that there is no velocity or gravity and make it so that particles grow smoothly over time.
If you’re using ParticleIllusion, make sure it’s set for new particles to be on top.

I’m sure there are other ways to do this, but there’s one. Perhaps after playing with it, you’ll come up with something that’s totally unique and you’re own effect.

– 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]

Using that set command requires the layer to be in the default placement for new objects or weird things happen.

I’m assuming you’ve already got keyframes set, etc. since you say you’ve got a good move down; so my suggestion is this:
Pick a keyframe on your tracked 3d layer. Write down the information for position, rotation, etc.
Then twirl down the properties for the layer. (If it’s already twirled down with a property or two twirl it up then back down again) You should have a reset button. That’ll put it back where it originally was when the layer was created. Then set your Zaxwerks thing to follow it; then redo the keyframes with the values you wrote down. You should then see the object come back into your field of view.

I’m no expert at the 3d Invigorator, so if that doesn’t work, perhaps a post over on that forum would 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]

That’s not what I meant. I meant that in 3d Invigerator you can set your object to follow a 3d layer. In this thread in the Zaxwerks forum Edward Wu talks about how to match Zaxwerks to follow a 3d layer in AE.

“Use the Set command to “Track 3D Layer”. By applying a Set to track a 3D Layer, you can keyframe either the 3D layer or Null object and you can try working like that.”

He goes into a lot more detail in the thread (pictures too); check it out.

– 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.