[Mooviemaker]

Good point regarding persistence of vision, as far as the relationship of the Specs. to what our eyes would perceive.
Thanks for your input.

Cheers
Steve

[Mooviemaker]

Thanks for the reply Michael. I’ll keep these points in mind.

Cheers
Steve

[Mooviemaker]

Thanks for the link Steve. Some wicked awesome work there! I see what you mean about the worth of good solid creative work with a plugin possibly used to supplement a piece of work. Looking at some jaw-dropping work, that as far as I can tell, hasn’t employed a Plugin gives me some serious motivation to think about what I want to accomplish in a piece and how I might enable it with AE.

I guess it’s kind of like looking for a magic pill to keep fit, instead of a little good ol’ fashion work.

Good point Jonathan about “getting ot know AE from the inside out”. I think I’ll have a gander at the offerings for AE training.
Great anecdote BTW!

I see what you mean Pete, about executing solid roto work. I’ve done a fair of that myself. I think if I put my roto work on show I won’t mention that I went through a box of Kleenex (Wah) and a bottle of Jack Daniels :-). I get what you’re saying in that regard. After doing some work with masks whose form was dictated exactly by the movement of one object over another layer that would totally give away sloppy mask-making, I remarked to a friend how in comparison making a freakin’ flying logo would be a joy to create.

Thanks again guys for putting things in the proper perspective.

Steve2

“I’m not afraid of dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Woody Allen

[Mooviemaker]

Good advice. Sorry to pose such an broad question. As you say: What do you mean by “afford”? True. To put it another way, what would be considered as the most bang for the buck if one was to spend no more than around $700-$800 US.

Presently I have no jobs on the go. My thoughts were that I could put together a demo with something like the Trapcode Suite to drum up some work. I agree with the philosophy that the money spent may have been better spent elsewhere (food, rent,…:-)) but thought I’d take the risk. Perhaps a more cautious approach is advisable.

For sure, buying software/hardware can’t assure creative success.

Thanks for the input.

The other Steve

[Mooviemaker]

I checked out their site. Very nice. It seems pricewise that you get a fairly
comprehensive array of plugins (Particular, Shine, etc…) for the money spent, say if you get the Trapcode Suite. Do you agree?

[Mooviemaker]

Dave, I have to admit I was excited at this suggestion. I tried it and the separate layers are still referenced and , therefore, show the line where they butt up against one another. First, as you suggested, I brought the opacity of the 2 layers up to 100%. Then I put them in a PreComp which was brought in to the main Comp. Actually I overlapped the layers to ensure the line wouldn’t show, and expected the behaviour of this preComp to be solely affected as a unit. But when I decreased the opacity I could see the overlapping.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks for the solid advice. I thought for sure this would do the trick.

The other Steve.

“I’m not afraid of dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Woody Allen (I think)

[Mooviemaker]

Thanks Dave. You said it: “it’s a good lesson learned: you don’t want to make precomps too small. I doubt that you ever will again.” As a matter of fact I think I’ll get that tatooed to my forehead backwards so I can read it everytime I look in a mirror:-)

I tried your suggestion, but I still seem to have a problem with precisely lining up the edges ( in this case of the mask). To further explain: What is creating some difficulty is that the solid is only at 60% opacity so any misregistration is obvious. I’ve tried applying blurs, but without any success.

As I mentioned to Andrew, if I hadn’t spent so much time creating the masks to match up with the movement of other objects I’d simply start from scratch. Again as you suggest: “don’t make your precomps too small”. The ironic thing is I could have made the solid layer absolutely huge without any appreciable performance hit in computer processing. Lesson learned. Thanks again for responding.

[Mooviemaker]

Thanks for your response Andrew. I was a little fuzzy on #3 “open the solids folder in the project window” so I tried it two ways. I created a “solid” via Illustrator, imported that and tried to Alt drop, also created a new Comp with the large solid and Alt dropped but still get the masks stretching. As Dave LaRonde pointed out the mask vertices are tied to layer size.
I’ve learned my lesson: When you play with masks you can get burned:-)

Zog learn lesson. Fire hot. Zog not touch fire again.

Thanks again but I think I’ve got an unweildy beast on this one. If I hadn’t spent many, make that MANY, hours on painstakingly creating 22 masks I’d simply start from scratch and chalk it up to experience.

Oh well. “Once burned, twice learned.”

[Mooviemaker]

Thanks for the response, Mark. Resetting the comp to 59.94 is a good idea for smoothing out playback on NTSC, but in this case my problem isn’t with unsmooth playback but with the mask itself moving, in which case your second suggestion nails this puppy. That I will do, and thanks once again.

Steve