Mike Zimbard
Forum Replies Created
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Dosch has one of the most extensive libraries I’ve ever seen. Not cheap, but excellent quality and a lot of variety.
https://doschdesign.com/products/hdri
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Yes – I’ve actually set this up before and it works very well and like you said is nice and cheap! The problem is that so may of our clients are at ad agencies whose IT departments take so long to update computers that many of them are still on Leopard?!? I know it will take some up front investment, but I’d like to get a system in place that’s more universally accessible. I’ve found a few vendors that can handle this in a pretty wide price range. It doesn’t seem to be an area of too much interest yet, but I can see huge benefits from putting a system like this in place.
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Lux will give you a 3D volumetric light, but if you place that behind your logo, it’s not going to calculate the rays in the empty areas the way a 3D program might. You may want to use a combination of LUX with either shine or CC rays. Or if its just the rays you’re after, you may not even need LUX at all. Just place a feathered solid behind your logo to represent the volumetric light and then use on your logo.
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I would try either of these two tutorials:
https://maltaannon.com/tutorials/AfterEffects/GrowingVines/
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/growing_3d_vines/
One takes an all AE approach the other is a 3D approach mixed with AE. Good luck!
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Does SyncVue allow for realtime output of your editing timeline? I had checked it out a while back, but thought it only allowed you to send encoded movies to clients and that they could give realtime feedback. Walter (or anyone else) – does it actually allow you to encode your computer screen so that someone else can view what you’re doing as you work?
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I’m sure what Walter reccomends will work fine for you, but in the past whenever I’ve needed to capture SD footage from an HD source I’ve just taken patched the down-converted SDI output of my deck to the Kona SDI input and let the deck take care of the conversion.
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I’m pretty sure that you can install the 8 and 10 bit uncompressed codecs on a PC, but if you’re working HD you’ll need an array that can sustain 150 MB/sec for uncompressed. ProRes will definitely save you on throughput. We have a similar situation here where our 3D team works all on PCs in Maya/Fusion/After Effects and feeds our Final Cut/Kona 3 edit rooms. I have a suggestion to forget about having the PCs trying to render to a specific codec at all. What I would recommend is having your artists on PCs output an image sequence for you at 1080psf 23.976 or 29.97 depending on the frame rate of your finish. We usually work with .iffs. Then just bring that image sequence into AE on your MAC and render it out to whatever codec you need. So if you want to work in ProRes, you’ll render to that codec and then just drop it right into your pro res final cut timeline.
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I think both programs are very different animals. For the solo motion graphics artist who’s looking to add a little more to their arsenal, I think C4D is an excellent choice. It’s quick to learn, has a lot of powerful features, and you can get half decent looking stuff without having to invest too much time. Also, it has very nice integration with AE for bringing in 3D cameras from C4D.
A program like Maya is more designed for a collaborative team environment and higher end 3D work that requires a deeper toolset and features that require real fine tuning. I have just a working knowledge of Maya, but our 3D department blows me away with how they utilize the program right down to its nuts and bolts. From pipeline setup, to shaders, to dynamics, to scripting there is almost nothing you can’t accomplish. Because of this complexity I would say it should probably not be the program of choice for someone just looking to beef up their AE work a bit. However, for someone who really has a passion for 3D modelling, animation, rendering, etc its tough to beat. And multi-pass rendering has been in there for a while 🙂
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I think both programs are very different animals. For the solo motion graphics artist who’s looking to add a little more to their arsenal, I think C4D is an excellent choice. It’s quick to learn, has a lot of powerful features, and you can get half decent looking stuff without having to invest too much time. Also, it has very nice integration with AE for bringing in 3D cameras from C4D.
A program like Maya is more designed for a collaborative team environment and higher end 3D work that requires a deeper toolset and features that require real fine tuning. I have just a working knowledge of Maya, but our 3D department blows me away with how they utilize the program right down to its nuts and bolts. From pipeline setup, to shaders, to dynamics, to scripting there is almost nothing you can’t accomplish. Because of this complexity I would say it should probably not be the program of choice for someone just looking to beef up their AE work a bit. However, for someone who really has a passion for 3D modelling, animation, rendering, etc its tough to beat. And multi-pass rendering has been in there for a while 🙂
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In general, when you are dealing with footage in After Effects that originated on film and was telecined at 23.976, that is the frame rate you’ll want to use and you should definitely be removing pulldown. It will make your life so much easier and all of those juddering issues you’ve been having will go away because you’ll be working on whole frames and will add a pulldown cadence back in afterwards. An ideal work flow for you would be to edit in final cut and then export each shot individually that requires FX or graphics (or buy automatic duck and save yourself some time:). In AE you should then remove the pulldown from each shot and do your graphics and compositing in a 23.976 comp. Then when you render out to 8-bit uncompressed change your settings for AE to put pulldown back into the clip so that it will render out a 29.97 shot that can be dropped right back into your final cut timeline. I think you will find this a much easier way to work, and all of your shots will playback correctly.