[Paul Roper]

Dealers’ stocks of FCP7 are quickly running out (apparently) so if you want to keep your existing workflow but update to FCP7, you’d better be quick about it. Having said that, you could use FCP5 or 7 all day long and maybe only notice one or two differences. FCP 7 (to me) feels like it should be called FCP5.5.

I am a long time FCP user, experimenting with Premiere, not Avid, solely because I already own Premiere.

There’s been a lot of panic about Apple dropping FCP in favour of iMovie Pro (FCP X) but look at it this way – if you’re happy editing with your current setup and it does everything you need it to, and you’re unlikely to be exchanging projects with anyone running FCP X, just stay with what you’ve got.

I saw that you said you use AE a lot – you’ll LOVE Premiere’s ability to link to an AE comp in the timeline and instantly show (no ‘reload footage’, no ‘reconnect media’ – it’s just THERE instantly!) anything you’ve changed in the AE comp – without even rendering it in AE! I, too, hop from AE to FCP all day long, and Premiere’s ability to do this is a MAJOR plus. I cannot possibly count the number of times I have to reconnect media in FCP or FCP refuses to accept that the media’s changed.

Well, those are my thoughts on the subject anyway!

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Dan – some of the sampleimage results were wrong because I had the text layer parented to a null and shifted out of position, so the pixel it was actually over was not the pixel it “thought” it was over. That was an easy fix…

but…

Now I need to do the same thing, but with a grid of 40 x 45 numbers. That’s 1800 numbers = 1800 layers. I tried making a comp of a row of 40 numbers, with each number sampling the picture in the parent comp. This worked perfectly for the first row, so I duplicated it, but obviously it’s only one comp, so the expressions only get calculated once, producing a nice row of numbers, which is then duplicated.

So…any further thoughts, anyone?

[Paul Roper]

Could you export the text as a PDF from InDesign, then either import it directly into After Effects or open it in Photoshop to manipulate it (maybe put each block of text on a different layer) then import this into AE? That way, you’d hopefully eliminate the risk of characters/accents being substituted during the process, which might happen if you copy and paste.

This is assuming you don’t need to animate the text per-character.

It reminds me of a job I worked on many years ago where the Arabic artwork was supplied as A3 prints, with no indication which way was “up”! We just went with what looked about right, and got lucky!

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Thank you very much for that simple fix, Dan – it works perfectly!

I eventually used a workaround – the good old Numbers effect, with its decimal places and leading zeroes options. But I will certainly be using that .value in future.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Yes, if the client adds new layers, it’s a bit of a nightmare.

If when you bring in your Photoshop document, if you choose ‘document size’ for the layers (not ‘layer size’) then if the clients add/remove elements from a layer, or change the size of something on that layer, it shouldn’t screw up your positioning (quite as much!).

[Paul Roper]

Dave, do you ever tire of giving that same reply on a weekly basis whenever this same question is asked?!

…Not that I disagree – it’s excellent advice! I’m still awaiting my 32GB RAM upgrade; then all my processors can zoom along at their full potential. Let’s just hope that in CS6 Adobe make sure that ALL the effects (including the most processor-intensive: PARTICLES) are 64 bit multi-threaded!

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Assuming the layer order or number of layers hasn’t changed, just select all the layers in the project panel, right-click and choose ‘reload footage’. Failing that, closing and re-opening the project will do it.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Thanks Walter and Kevin – I will give those a try. I have previously tried tweaking the render control file without any luck (but that was a long time ago) in an attempt to fix that pesky ‘render control file not found’ error (not sure if that’s exactly it…it’s something like that!).

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

I heard of this today:

https://appzapper.com/

…I don’t know if you’re running Mac OSX or not, but it might help if you are. I’ve never used it, but my IT guy recommends it.

Paul

[Paul Roper]

You can achieve this using the sampleimage expression. I’m no expressions expert but there are a few on this site. Just do a search for sampleimage and you’ll hopefully find something useful.

It basically returns the RGB values of any point you specify. You can then link whatever value you like (position, rotation, amount of blur, brightness of lens flare – whatever) to this value.

Hope that helps (a bit!)

– Paul