[Rj]

Thanks, Dave, much obliged!

What you recommended was exactly what I was doing when I posted. I’d shifted the field order to lower first on a bunch of stuff, compressed, and burned a DVD. Presto, it worked. (By the way all the 1080i stuff is, as far as I can tell, natively upper field first, hence the problem copying it into a DV timeline. Makes me very curious about this format-independent timeline promise…)

Wasn’t aware that dragging a ref quicktime from FCP to Compressor would save time. About to try that.

And yes, it’s super frustrating figuring things out against a ticking clock– so I REALLY appreciate your help!

rjb

[Rj]

Skacey you rule, my friend. This is pretty much exactly what I’m looking to do. BIG UPS!!!

Thanks again, man. HUGELY appreciated!

RJ

[Rj]

Thanks so much for that advice.

I just gave it a try, and unfortunately it didn’t work too well. Maybe I need a little guidance on how to prepare the logo, and for that, I need to give a little more info on the logo as well. Basically, it’s not a simple logo. It’s two words, one above the other; the first is in an ornate script font, the other is in an outlined, customized blackletter/gothic font. In the second word of the logo, there’s the “inside,” which is the mostly solid letters tht make up the word– I say mostly because there’s some texture in there– and then some space surrounding the “inside” letters, and then the outline. (So it’s not just letters with a stroke outline– there’s actually a bit of space between the outline and the inner, “solid” letters.

When I tried the Roughen/Blur technique, I had to set the logo layer (black logo on white bg) to Multiply, to knock out the white. Then I followed the Roughen/Blur procedure, which I can see might work really well, but unfortunately the “Roughen” outlines weren’t the outlines of the actual black logo elements, but of the white outline (that I knocked out by compositing with Multiply) of the single layer containing the logo. So imagine: logo, surrounded by blank space, surrounded by the “Roughen” line in the rectangular shape of the overall layer.

Would solving this problem be as simple as separating the black logo elements from the background in layers in Photoshop? Then maybe the Roughen would be only affecting the logo parts, as opposed to the underlying layer? Sorry if this is such a newbie question…

THANKS AGAIN!
RJ

[Rj]

I’ll definitely need Particular for the smoke effect, but I’m trying to avoid sparks and flames, which is what Particulary seems– excuse the word– particularly good at.

What does anybody out there think about creating a feathered mask of the logo and basically starting it really contracted and expanding it, so the logo begins as very thin lines and finally expands into the full logo, as if it’s burning into the wood? That makes a bit of sense to me, but then I’d need to know how to make the edges randomly jagged as they expand, to mimic the variations in the wood as it “burns” or “sears.” (Imagine a cow being branded by a hot iron, only the branding/burning occurs without the presence of the iron.)

Again, any ideas would be greatly appreciated. And thanks again for the Particular tip.

THANKS IN ADVANCE!

ps– found MANY spray-paint resources on the Cow; sorry for posting before searching on that topic!