[Nicholas Toth]

As in a still camera taking a picture is being video taped?

Or as in there is a random light leak inside of a film motion picture camera?

Smells like you may want to use an adjustment layer with a mask and EXPOSURE/LEVELS/CURVES to blow out the lights….and animate the mask out to dip to white…

[Nicholas Toth]

I hit that same wall this morning — but luckily we have the duck in house.

If you’re coming from FCP check this out:
https://www.creative-workflow-hacks.com/

[Nicholas Toth]

*credit card exits wallet

[Nicholas Toth]

Take into consideration how much ram you can throw in one.

The new Macbook Slows can take 4 gigs. That is A LOT for a laptop. The core 2’s that are in them are snappy too, and you can upgrade to a 2.6 now, which is pretty snappy. I have a first gen with bootcamp on it, and I couldn’t be happier. However, when it comes to rendering, you def. want either:

a. Nucleo
b. A tower
c. Nucleo on a tower

Also, to play the true devil’s advocate, check this out:
https://dailyapps.net/2007/10/hack-attack-install-leopard-on-your-pc-in-3-easy-steps/

[Nicholas Toth]

Not crazy about the lightning. Looks like you’re coming along well though!

Also, you may want to try to create an anamorphic flare instead of the hokey ae flare, using a solid and a directional blur. Or use Knoll light factory/sapphire. I’d also recommend creating a particle vaccuum into the characters hands. But now we’re talking about aesthetics I’d do, not what you’re trying to achieve 🙂

also:
https://www.digitaljuice.com/djtv/default.asp

Check out reactive lighting.

[Nicholas Toth]

Firstoff I’d love to comment, FRIGGIN AWESOME, i’m a big street fighter fan.

Secondly, I’d build the fireball in components. Perhaps have the tail(s) as individual spikes with bend/bendit applied to it so they flow. Or use turbulent displace on each individual flame.

Particles will come into play also, emitting from the back of the fireball, and also if he’s shooting a super fireball to emulate energy being sucked into the characters hand before he fires the projectile. Particular is very nice, i’d recommend that.

As for the actual fireball itself, i’d make it in photoshop, and then experiment with different blending modes to give it a ‘translucent’ feel. Don’t forget it’ll be emitting light, so you’ll need a ‘pseudo glare’ composite below the fireball.

A custom knoll or sapphire flare would bring it together also, if you own the plugs.

[Nicholas Toth]

You need to either be running

1.) AFX7 with nucleo/nucleo pro
2.) AECS3 with multiprocessing enabled in your prefs
3.) AECS3 with nucleo/nucleo pro

If you’re doing it in aecs3 you’re going to need around 8 gigs of ram. Nucleo doesn’t care that much though, you could throw 4 gigs at it and it’ll work just fine. I’d recommend raid striping some drives together too, I just did that on my work station and it helps with the multiprocessing write speeds.

Its not just about the processors, you must have a balanced machine — your processors can write so much more so much faster, you’ll need a snappier drive and more RAM to feed the cores.

[Nicholas Toth]

buy nucleo, it’ll use as much RAM as you can throw at it

[Nicholas Toth]

You probably won’t want to import straight 3d objects, but instead a .fbx file and set the render output to ‘camera mapping’ on the object within Fusion or whatever software you want too. Either way you have to render it.

Its really asking for a lot — what exactly are you trying to do? The simple export of a camera into AE with appropriate alpha channels tends to work very well. Just make sure you export some reference nulls/lights for 3d space reference.

[Nicholas Toth]

It will help a lot with CS3 too, b/c it’ll actually use the ram….

Steve is very right too, the machine should be less finicky if you’re, say, checking your email and outputting some animation.