[Paul Conigliaro]

Personally, I like to render out full raster (1280×720). Final Cut Pro will know what to do with it.

CS3, FCS2
[Note: Using Particular, 3-D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your designs “teh awesome.”]

[Paul Conigliaro]

I believe there is an effect called “Leave Color” which does exactly what you want.

CS3, FCS2
[Note: Using Particular, 3-D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your designs “teh awesome.”]

[Paul Conigliaro]

This can be done with expressions enabled and using the pickwhip tool.

• Make sure the hue controls are visible in the timeline.
• Pick which layer you want to be your master layer. On all your other layers, option/alt click on the add keyframe button. This will turn on expressions.
• Using the pickwhip tool that appears (the little button with a swirl on it), click and drag to the “master” hue control.

Now, whenever you change that one, anything linked to it will also change.

CS3, FCS2
[Note: Using Particular, 3-D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your designs “teh awesome.”]

[Paul Conigliaro]

Have you tried using CC Cylinder? Set up a large comp (much wider than your finished resolution), space out your video layers however you see fit. Precompose those layers and apply CC Cylinder (you might also be able to get away with an adjustment layer with CC Cylinder as well).

Nest your larger comp inside your main comp and collapse transformations. Now you should be able to place a camera inside your cylinder to get the arced wall effect. You can either rotate the cylinder effect or the camera to get the feel of the videos sliding along the curved suface.

CS3, FCS2
[Note: Using Particular, 3-D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your designs “teh awesome.”]

[Paul Conigliaro]

It sounds like your looking for volumetric light. The closest you can get in AE (that I know of) is the Lux plugin from Trapcode. But that only takes into consideration lights, not shadow, unless someone knows some settings I just haven’t played with yet.

CS3, FCS2
[Note: Using Particular, 3-D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your designs “teh awesome.”]

[Paul Conigliaro]

The first one could be done by (round about) applying tracking data to a light and using particular.

I know the second video was done using practical effects. They used long exposures and lots of people with light pens. They really wanted the organic feel it gave. Some of the later spots in the campaign used post effects and it just didn’t look the same.

CS3, FCS2
[Note: Using Particular, 3-D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your designs “teh awesome.”]

[Paul Conigliaro]

The first thing I would do is check your audio outputs in the preferences. It may be set to the headphone jack for some odd reason.

CS3, FCS2
[Note: Using Particular, 3-D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your designs “teh awesome.”]

[Paul Conigliaro]

Question 1: I think you’re okay working direct with MXF files in AE. Just make sure segmented clips are coming in in their entirety. Also, P2 is not full raster, meaning even though the resolution is 960×720 (4:3), it is meant to be displayed as 16:9. If you toggle the pixel aspect ratio in your comp window, you should notice it stretch back out to 16:9.

Question 2: What you render out to will depend entirely on your edit. If you’re cutting at 24p (23.976), then render out at 23.976 progressive. The only time you should introduce pulldown is if you’re going to a 29.97 timeline.

CS3, FCS2
[Note: Using Particular, 3-D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your designs “teh awesome.”]

[Paul Conigliaro]

I’m not sure if this is possible, since AE needs to know where to place the shadow, and if you turn off that temp background, there’s nothing to cast the shadow on. I can look into it tonight or over the weekend, but the only thing I could think of trying to do is creating a shape layer then turning the fill down to 0% opacity. But I’d doubt that would work.

Did you consider faking it with a duplicate text layer in black & blurred a bit, then animated either by hand or with expressions to match the movement of your original text layer.

CS3, FCS2
[Note: Using Particular, 3-D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your designs “teh awesome.”]

[Paul Conigliaro]

Look into some tutorials for any of the particle systems (CC Particle World, Particular, etc). Those might help you out.

CS3, FCS2
[Note: Using Particular, 3-D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your designs “teh awesome.”]