[Mylenium]

Woohoo *shudder* AE 6 and Quicktime are an evil combination. The only QT version that works halfway decently with that version of AE is either 6.3 or 6.5.2. There are several bugs/ problems in that AE version relating to QT. Eitehr downgrade your QT or update your AE.

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[Shaun] ”
I need to center a 3d logo (made with invigorator) at the center of these circles.
I imagine that the radius for this logo could be 400. What expression could I use
for the logo such that no matter how I move the camera around the circles, the logo
stays in the center of the whole thing?”

Do it the other way around: Tie your circles to the logo.

center=thisComp.layer(“Logo”).position; //position of the logo
radius=200; //one circle
angle=degreesToRadians(360/24); //circle segments

X=center[0]+Math.sin(angle*index)*radius;
Y=0;
Z=center[2]+Math.cos(angle*index)*radius;

[X,Y,Z]

I don’t use Invigorator, but I know that it can be made to use a reference object, so your “Logo” in the above code should be this treference object. To permanently orient it towards camera, use eitehr auto-orinet or this code on the orientation property:

lookAt(position,thisComp.layer(“Camera”).position)

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The previews are animated GIFs or JPG stills. You can manually insert them using a Hex-Editor and some copy&paste. There is also an undocumented JSX command that is supposed to do this, if I recall correctly, but it’s not official, so it may damage your presets. Also you of course have to create the GIFs and JPGs first to be able to use them.

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[Eric Steinberg] “1. Can someone explain the “Image Quality” slider under bitrate settings when you render a Windows Media Video? The slider has a range of 0 – 100, and the pop-up help text states: “Allows encoder to favor motion over frame quality and vice versa.” Which value favors what? I’m guessing a value of 0 favors motion, and 100 favors frame quality, but I’m not sure. I ran some tests with different settings, but I honestly couldn’t see any difference between a setting of 0 and a setting of 100. I’m trying to tweak my settings, since I’m not 100% happy with the quality in certain areas, so I was hoping tweaking “Image quality” would help. Which brings me to my second question:”

You’re pretty much spot-on. The slider is supposed to indirectly affect the quality of the motion vectors calculated for the compression blocks. On normal footage with reasonably high bitrates it has barely any effect, it’s more for streaming files.

[Eric Steinberg] “2. The areas I’m having trouble with are reveals/transitions of still images (photos), where I’m doing the following: I’ve duplicated the still image, and set an “add” transfer mode on the top layer. Both layers just appear instantly (“pop in”), and then I do a 1-second fade-out of the top layer so just the bottom layer is left. These transitions are the only areas of my 2-minute presentation that look bad. They look highly compressed/blocky. Maybe I would get better quality if I rendered uncompressed and used a tool like Sorenson Squeeze to encode to wmv?”

You are introducing a “disturbance” into your compression stream. Since there is no previous frames to build on for analysis, the encoder needs to start from scratch and may at that point not have enough bandwidth left to accomodate the many extra small blocks required for maintaining detail. Hence it will use larger, more compressed blocks. You would have similar problems with MPEG-II or MPEG-4. The only way to fully eliminate this is to use a smoother transition. For the time being you should use 2 pass VBR. This will to some degree even out allocation of blocks across the entire stream. Of course other tools may do better also, but beyond ProCoder I do not have much experience which works best.

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Get rid of the cameras in the pre-comps and use the collapse transformation switch in combination with the 3D switch on them in your main comp. Without that, your pre-comps will simply be treated as 2D layers as viewed from the cameras.

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Previews can be manually added to presets using some tricks, but oh-ficially this is still Adobe’s domain. AE does not create them itself. Maybe in the next version.

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[MAmsterdam-Student] “Now, is it possible to make it more “rollover”. That only when I change my cursor over it it will play?
And if so…how?”

No, not really. DVD (Video) is not Flash. To have separate motion, you need to create 3 separate menus, each with its own combo of button states. You can then use auto-action to jump between them to maintain the illusion.

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You can change the font face anytime by creating source text keyframes on text layers. If you want to morph them, you have to import them as a graphic and use effects such as Reshape. For a cross dissolve you need two separate text layers.

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Check Jayse Hansen’s tutorial on growing vines here at the COW. similar tecchniques apply to the photo popup style you were refering to.

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Well, since non of your equipment is calibrated, it’s inevitable to get variations. Some of it can be remedied, some not. One big issue for you seems to be the usage of non-broadcast safe colors. They will shift colors and cause poor MPEG-II compression on the DVD. So I strongly advise you watch Aharon’s tutorial on how to manage that part. It’s also not really clear if you already compress your AVI, which is not advisable. Make it uncompressed. For the MPEG-II conversion there’s a plethora of options, but most likely you can get massive improvements by changing the transcode settings in Encore or directly exporting M2V from AE.

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