[Reynolds Strother]

Dude hang in there, I was looking for the same thing 3 weeks ago. After finding lots of different methods and articles on the subject I’ve now gotten my head around the subject, Almost!

My goal is to get control 2 different things about a camera so you can get realistic control. How smooth and organic can I it move and target objects. I tried to achieve these things with the fewest controls and the most automation possible. Doing things this way would make controlling the camera easy, fast and modular.

The bad news is you would need to know a little about expressions, JUST A LITTLE! If you hang in there I’ll have my test comp done soon and you can check it then.

Camera control seems to be a defining factor between good motion gfx and great motion gfx. I want to find the simplest ways to get realistic camera control so people who are new to using cameras can get better results at a basic level.

Stay tuned, still in the works. But for now just use the graph editor to control your easing as Matthew suggested.

[Reynolds Strother]

Regardless of any resolution concerns you can do this pretty easily, at least I think this way is easy. There may be a better process but it worked for me.

I had to do the same on a project a few months ago and decided to use parenting and a single null to scale everything.

Create a null in the main comp. Call it something like “Comp Scale” if you like being organized. Then proceed to parent all the layers to this null. The scaling of this null will distribute all proportions of the child layers evenly. As far as I can remember it should scale motion paths in proportion too.

Important!

–Make sure you only parent layers that do NOT already have parents. (example: if layers 5, 9, 15, 77 and 72 are parented to layer 2, you should only parent layer 2 to the scaling null. If you don’t look out for this you can screw up your comps original parenting structures).

–You may need to create two nulls, a 2D and a 3D if your comp has both kinds of layers.

Hope that helps.

[Reynolds Strother]

A few months ago I made the upgrade from notebook to tower. Granted I didn’t have the latest MBP, I can only assure you that a Pro tower is the best option if you plan on doing these two things:
1. Use AE as a means to make a living.
2. Keep your sanity.
Making money with the aid of computers and software has always proven that speed and reliability correlates to profit margin. I can’t begin to tell you how much green a “spinning, rainbow-colored, beach ball” has stolen from me.

Before I expanded my skills of PS, AI, and Flash into using AE, I knew I needed to protect my hours more than ever. AE doesn’t have a beach ball, it has a render progress bar. It pigs out on time worse than the beach ball.

I can’t tell you how happy I’ve been with my upgrade. I would’ve never be able to do great things with a notebook because AE gets good in the deep end. Besides, one jobs earnings should cover the difference between the notebook and the tower. You’ll have it longer, and do more with it. The notebooks benefit is only portability. Price is negligible when you look at the value over the first few jobs you use it on.

I suggest you configure it with the minimum RAM when you order it because 3rd party ram is dirt cheap. I added 4 gigs for just $130. IMPORTANT! AE can only use 3gigs per processor so don’t put more in than necessary.

Remember the more time you save the more money you make, or the more free nights and weekends you have.

[Reynolds Strother]

not sure if you watched this tutorial or not. I saw this right after that last post.

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/Echo_Time/video-tutorial.php

[Reynolds Strother]

I just finished testing out different pref settings with ram, cache and multiprocessing. No luck.

I haven’t seen these little red and blue things on my quicktime icons in the project panel before now. Some icons have them and some do not. What are these thing, can’t find anything about what they mean. link

[Reynolds Strother]

You probably don’t want to scab footage form dvds.

Check out the video at iStock.com or look around for CC Licensed video. Don’t forget all the public domain stuff out there.

If you grow hundred dollar bills instead of hair on your head, any stock video site should have some goodies to use.

[Reynolds Strother]

I think this thread can help you out.

https://aenhancers.com/viewtopic.php?p=1733#1733

If you employee this method I think you’ll only need to apply the expression to one layer parented to a null creating the Y rotation. Then parent all your other layers to the layer with the expression, they should follow the vibration.

[Reynolds Strother]

Motion trails are best done with echo when it comes to the AE built in effects. You can try the CC Particle Generator that comes with AE. Check out Andrew Kramers tutorial which uses something that may work for you.

3D Stroke

There is some expressions you could use but they would only achieve something similar to echo. Sounds like you need a plug-in. Trapcode Particular is top notch for stuff like this.
I’ve used echo to get effects similar this. Mess around with the setting for echo to see if you can refine what you after.

Try finding a link to an example. Maybe I could help you more if I saw something.

[Reynolds Strother]

Here are some specs on the setup.

-It was happening with QT 7.3
-This started when I upgraded to CS3 and my new MacPro
-I’ve tried reinstalling
-Started with 2 gigs of ram, so I upgraded to 6gigs thinking this would fix it.
-My RAM usage is set to default 120% (3 gigs)
-My RAM cache is set to default 60% (1.8 gigs)
-OpenGL is OFF
-Multiprocessing is ON
-All the original videos (12) have been rendered into PhotoJPG less than 50mb in size.(This was just to ensure RAM was not being maxed out from the videos)
-The comp design is just alternating through each video with 8 sec on screen and a 1 sec black fade in between each video. There is an audio track for the length of the comp and simple text animation for each video transition.

Simple setup, few effects applied only to text and sound, the videos have no effects applied. My best guess is that AE is screwy on how the video is caching. My runner up suspicion is that the video itself is screwing with how AE can interpret it. But my assumptions still leave me stuck in the mud. I hope somebody can snuff this problem for me.

[Reynolds Strother]

I just don’t understand what is going on with this comp. My computer should be able to handle it so I can’t blame it on the processor or the ram. The files are small videos, all Photo JPG.

I’m going to lose it on this one. Usually I feel like this for the two hours it takes to get an animation looking right or to adjust something in 3D so it stops overlapping an object it should be behind. This situation is lingering on forever and no matter how long I look for someone who has experienced this, I that I’m the only one on earth. This must be a top secret version of AE from Adobe designed to render it’s user into a twitching ball of frustration.

Maybe I should kick the computer with the side of my foot. Seems to work on old lawnmowers.

HELP!