[Mike]

This is what I’ve done to achieve this effect before:

1. Create a layer with your type.
2. Create a grey solid and make a thin rectangular mask in the shape you want for the cursor.
3. Create a white solid and make a rectangular mask that starts just to the left of your cursor and has enough width and height to cover up all of your text (you are going to use this as a track matte to reveal your text)
4. Parent the white solid to the cursor.
5. Move the cursor layer (which now has the white solid parented to it) to the beginning of your text line.
6. Create position keyframes for the cursor just after each letter of text and space the keyframes to whatever length of time feels good to you to have the line typed.
7. Turn each keyframe into a hold keyframe so that After Effects won’t interpolate any of the inbetween movement, but will just snap the cursor layer to each keyframe position.
8. Lastly – place your white solid layer above your text layer and turn on alpha matte for the text layer.

Since the text will be revealed by the white track matte layer and each of your keyframes are set to hold keyframes for your cursor layer, this gives the illusion that each layer is popping up just to the left of the cursor – as would happen in the “real world”. You can also keyframe the opacity of your cursor layer if you’d like to create any blinking effects. I have used this numberous times for type and it works out great. Good luck!

[Mike]

It depends on the plug-in package – some install CDs have both Mac and Win installers. When I tossed my old PC for a new Mac I was able to get several of my plug-in packages running again on the new machine because the install discs were dual platform (Boris FX, Digieffects, and Tinderbox off the top of my head). And for the ones that I needed to re-buy, most plug-in manufactureres offer a cross-platform upgrade. That’s what we did with our digital anarachy plug-ins for a much lower cost than it would have been to rebuy them. I think Red Giant offers that too, but I’m not sure. Good luck!

[Mike]

We are strongly considering a purchase of a Quantum SDLT 600A. SATA backup burned us too, so we are looking into this solution. I saw this drive at NAB and even though it is a tape drive, the catalog file structure and the fact that’s drag and drop seem to make it feel a lot more like a random access drive, but with the reliability of tape. I used to use DLT drives for all my backing up and they never failed on me, but the backup and restore process was a nightmare. Especially in a situation where a client wanted a single photoshop file off a 20GB tape. When we switched to DVD-RAM we gained the file flexibility but lost a lot of the space benefits (and now with an HD job DVD RAM is obviously useless). So I don’t have the Quantum up and running yet, but will definitely report back when we do purchase it and let you know our findings. On paper it appears to be the perfect compromise we’re looking for in terms of ease of file management and also large data storage, but I guess that remains to be seen. Has anyone out there had a chance to use one of these drives yet?

[Mike]

Thanks for the info. I was never planning on the speed effects being done during the telecine, but I was hoping that when the 60 FPS was telecined it would playback at half speed at 29.97. I want to have enough infomtation there to do a smooth speed ramp from 60 FPS to 30 FPS and the footage I revieved looked like a stright transfer to 24 with pulldown. So any slomo I do would be interpolating and I was trying to avoid that.

[Mike]

What plug-in are you using? Also – has your image shifted at all in either x or y? If you import your footage and apply a different plug-in do you experience the same problem??

I notice that certain plug-ins when applied definitely have an effect on the image regardless of the frame-rate. I have this problem all the time with trapcode shine – even when ray length and boost light and all other attributes are completely off the image becomes noticeably blurred. Other Boris Plug-ins and Eye Candy plug-ins have given me the same problem. My workaround in the case of shine has been to apply it to an adjustment layer and then trim the adjustment layer to only the time when the rays are ramping up or down only.

[Mike]

Thanks for the reply Ben. They had no preference on audio codec. Only to receive a single embedded mpeg 2 file. I tried taking a separate .m2v and .ac3 file made by compressor into MPEG Streamclip, but didn’t have any luck with the muxing. Any idea on how to do this properly?

[Mike]

Talk to 21st century 3D in NY. They are the best at producing exactly the type of work you’re talking about (and no, I don’t work there :). They’ve designed their own proprietary stereoscopic camera system – check them out http://www.21stcentury3d.com

[Mike]

The only way I was able to ever maintian vector information from a flash file in AE was via the Useful Things plug-in. It was a for a project that I was working on a few years ago so I may not be remembering everything, but you could import an .swf into Useful Things and then use the Position, Scale, Rotation, etc. parameters within the plug-in (not AEs native controls) to make adjustments to the .swf file. This was the only way I found to preserve the vector file and not have it rasterize. Someone may be able to answer definitively, but I recall hearing that Useful Things is no longer being sold. Not sure though…..

[Mike]

I have found this too…..my photoshop files usually look a lot more saturated than when I bring the same files into After Effects……Is there a profile setting in PS that will match AE??

[Mike]

You’ll need targa 32-bit to keep your alpha intact. 24-bit will only be your RGB channels and 32-bit will be RGB+Alpha.