[Paul Hennell]

I have a feeling they’re fine on commercial use, their Earth Observatory page has some terms and conditions here, which approve, but obviously if you didn’t get it from that particular sub-site, those terms don’t really count for much….

—
Only in after effects do children get to pick and whip their parents.
https://hennell-online.co.uk

[Paul Hennell]

As a student still learning AE, the rotating part seemed like quite an interesting challenge so I’ve had a bit of a fiddle. I’ve found two successful ways to achieve the effect – I can’t guarantee either of these is the most sensible or the most effective way to achieve this – but they work which is enough for me.

Both methods require your items as 3d layers plus a Null object (also 3d).

First (simpler(?)) method is – arrange your items in a circle around the Null. Parent the items to the null then either Auto-orient your items towards the camera (Add a camera too) or use an expression to subtract the nulls rotation from the items rotation. (items Y Rotation = – thisComp.layer(“Null 2”).transform.yRotation).

This works fine but you have to manually arrange your items into the circle, which is annoying, uneven and hard to edit if you want to make it bigger or add more items. In an effort to solve such problems I’ve worked out an expression led solution as follows –

Name your Null object ‘Controls’ and add two expression sliders called “Radius” & “Number of Items” and an angle control called “Rotation”.

In the position property of your items add the following expression:
—
radius = thisComp.layer(“Controls”).effect(“Radius”)(“Slider”);
angle = degreesToRadians(thisComp.layer(“Controls”).effect(“Rotation”)(“Angle”));
offset = degreesToRadians(index * (360/thisComp.layer(“Controls”).effect(“Number of Items”)(“Slider”)))

x = thisComp.layer(“Controls”).transform.position[0] – (radius* Math.sin(angle – offset));
z = thisComp.layer(“Controls”).transform.position[2] + (radius* Math.cos(angle – offset));
y = thisComp.layer(“Controls”).transform.position[1];

[x,y,z]
—

This will orbit your items around the position of the controls null, in a circle sized by the radius slider. Set the Number of items control to whatever number of items you have (Don’t set it to 0, it’ll break) and it will position them all equally about the circle. Key frame the rotation control to make it spin.

Hopefully that all made sense – if you’re interested in the expression it mostly a re-working from reading this. If anyone has a better method I’d love to see it.

—
Only in after effects do children get to pick and whip their parents.
https://hennell-online.co.uk

[Paul Hennell]

The only major special effect for documentaries I can think of would be interviewing participants in front of a green screen, so as to add a impressive background picture or something. Wouldn’t recommend you do that as it’s lots more work for no real benefit at all.

As for name captions and occupation I’d suggest just use the title features available in Premiere (Or whatever video editor you use). They’re fairly simple to use and work perfectly for your requirements. As for the intro I’d sugest keeping it simple, and again using the title features of your editor over filmed footage with no big exciting effects as that’s far more stranded for the documentary genre.

[Paul Hennell]

After Effects is not an ideal character animation tool, but if you already know the program you can make some pretty good animations with only a small amount of hair pulling and sanity questioning involved.

I’ve been creating animation style things in AE for a couple of years and it has its ups and downs. For simple transforms of limbs or characters(rotation, movement etc) its great, but you need loads of layers, and it’s quite easy to get confused with whats what. Also any complex scene requiring different drawings for poses or many mouth shapes or hand movements are annoying to set up, and not intuitive to animate. (Best method BTW is the time remapping system as shown in one of the awesome Cow Podcasts.) The puppet tool has made things much easier, but you’ll need to fiddle a bit to understand how it works, and it occasionally won’t work in any sensible manner just to annoy you. AEs obvious abilities with cameras, lights and 3d layers however can make some impressive effects very easy to achieve, and with use of parenting, pre-composing and (optionally) basic scripting can animate things incredibly fast when you get going.

I must admit when I bought the production package of CS3 I was intending to start doing this type of thing in Flash, as it’s more suited to animation projects, and seems a more sensible tool for the work. As it was I found flash utterly confusing and lacking (Or I couldn’t find) features I use a lot, so I’ve stuck with AE. If you know and can use flash I’d guess the combination of the both of them would be a perfect match (especially as you can use illustrator art for both) so you can do different scenes in which ever program you feel would be easiest for the animation/motion in that scene. (I’ll be trying my hand again with flash at some point so I can do this, as it does have many advantages for this kinda work).

Essentially, you should go with what you know best/which program you think will work best for what you want to do. If you have a lynda.com account (or money to spare) it might be worth watching their animating characters series; I watched a few of them when I had a 30 day thing going, and picked up a couple of good tips and tricks which have proved fairly handy. (Also disagreed with the overly complex way they did some stuff, but if you’re just starting out in this style of work I’d imagine it to be very helpful.)

[Paul Hennell]

I’m assuming you mean while previewing content, rather then when exporting it, its a common issue, becuause you can’t just hit space to play sound and video in AE.

To hear sound you have to do a ram preview, so it can play it at the full speed with pre-rendered video. (If a ram preview doesn’t play the sound check it’s not muted in the layer, and that Comp> Preview>Audio is ticked.)

You can also just play the audio from the current position by pressing the number pad . key, which if you display the waveform in the audio track layer, means you can have a fairly good idea what you’re doing. (If you have specific points to edit to, drop down the audio waveform, play the audio with the [numpad] . key, and mark the key audio sections with the [numpad] * key to aid synchronising bits.

Check out the help guide for more on ram preview settings and working with audio.

[Paul Hennell]

Have you seen this tutorial – https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials.html?id=16 if not, it might help you out.

[Paul Hennell]

Can’t really help specifically, but the biggest resources I’d recommend are the podcasts/tutorials on this site and the tutorials over at https://www.videocopilot.net.

In fact if you’re only just starting out/learning the basics I’d really recommend you watch the basic training tutorials at https://www.videocopilot.net/basic/index.html. Not all of it will be needed for what you’re trying to do, but its the best way of seeing the basic principles of the program and seeing how it can be used.

[Paul Hennell]

Is there any option to e-mail it? I emailed scans of my student status just the other week which they accepted fine. (Although that was to the UK Student Section of Adobe, so no idea if it’s an option open to you)

Still might be worth looking into (If you haven’t already).

[Paul Hennell]

Cheers Dave, hadn’t even thought about that! I was half wondering about replacing vista with XP (because the performance hit to the hardware which doesn’t really seem worth it), but I’d assumed that the software would at least be able to play nice.

Haven’t managed to find the big thread you mentioned, but it does seem quite a few people have had problems with vista (Adobe has a whole page on ‘solutions to the many problems there have been’ :/ ) so it looks like that’s another thought to consider.

Hmm. Winning computers is surprisingly complicated…