[Patrick Brady]

I know this thread hasn’t been touched in awhile, but it was the first one that came up when I searched for this very problem, so I thought I’d share my solution in case more people are looking for the same thing. I think this is along the lines of what Mr. Rabinowitz was looking for; an expression to make a simple wiggle hit 0 velocity between each move:

freq=1; //frequency: fill in or tie to a slider
amp=300; //amplitude: fill in or tie to a slider
octaves=1; //default value
amp_mult=0.5; //default value
period=1/freq; //time taken for each wiggle move
pCount=Math.floor(time/period); //number of wiggles performed so far
sTime=pCount*period; //time when current wiggle begins
eTime=pCount*period+period; //time when current wiggle ends
p1=wiggle(freq, amp, octaves, amp_mult, sTime); //start position of current wiggle
p2=wiggle(freq, amp, octaves, amp_mult, eTime); //end position of current wiggle
ease(time, sTime, eTime, p1, p2); //ease the wiggle


[Patrick Brady]

You mentioned you had a hard drive full of Canon 7D footage: the Canon plug-in for FCP expects a CF Card from the camera. The “invalid directory structure error” often means that the files are arranged differently from the way they would be on a CF Card. To read a folder on a hard drive as a 7D Volume, start with a parent folder to act as your volume, let’s call it “MyFootage”. Inside MyFootage, make a new folder called “DCIM” and then inside of DCIM make a folder called “100EOS7D”. Place all of your Canon files in the 100EOS7D folder, then go into FCP Log and Transfer and mount the “MyFootage” folder using the Ad Volume button or CMD+I. It should read in just like a CF Card.

[Patrick Brady]

Hi Ben,

To me, that looked like Trapcode’s Particular plug-in: the particles seemed to float along a motion path and then distorted around a spherical field (one of the subsettings of Particular). A more experienced poster here might be able to confirm, but I’m not aware of an easy way to get that same sort of motion without something along the lines of Particular.

[Patrick Brady]

Hi Charmaine,

If you like the look of Andrew Kramer’s 8mm sample, I would suggest simply looping that sample. It’s worked out well for me. I just turn on time remapping for the 10-second clip, alt-click the stopwatch next to the “Time Remap” property and add the expression: loopOut(“cycle”)

From there, you can stretch the footage to cover any length you desire, and because the footage is so jumpy and random to begin with, no one will really notice the looping.

I hope that’s helpful. Cheers!