Rob Webster
Forum Replies Created
-
It sounds like Windows has forgotten the file association. Right click on the file, then in the fly-out menu, go down to Open With…. If After Effects isn’t an option there, there should be an option to Choose Program… at the bottom. Find your After Effects executable file, check the box that says some like “Always use this program to open this type of file”, and you should be good to go.
-
I’ll jump in and add to what others are making clear to you: The tools are very very different. And it’s hard to believe you’ve really read all those After Effects books and not realized this. But you do say that Vegas does all you need it to, so I think that’s your answer. Get a program that’ll do what you need to do, and when your needs are greater than what your program can do, then get another program under your belt.
But here’s one more idea: Get After Effects. You can download the trial version for free. Open up those books you’ve bought, and try some 3D layers with complex camera moves, some of the CC effects plug-ins that come included, and try some motion tracking. Then figure out what all the 3rd party plugins would cost to try to do these things in Vegas. First, you won’t find plugins to do all these things (and if they do, then not as well), and second, the costs would potentially total more than the cost of AE. Trust me: You cannot use plugins to make Vegas do what AE does natively. They’re different tools with different purposes. So get the trial version and just see for yourself. That’s why the smart marketing people at Adobe put the trial versions out there: So skeptics like you can see for yourself what a tool does. And if you realize it does lots of things you’d never need, then by all means, stick to Vegas.
But please don’t post here saying you know everything AE does and ask us to defend it to you. It’s hard to believe you’ve made the full inquiry you claim. Just download the trial and figure it out for yourself.
-
Hurray! Someone mentioned the brainstorming tool! I asked a question some time ago about the brainstorming tool, wondering how people anticipated using it. The only response I got was someone saying such tools can cheapen the creative process, leading people to use randomness instead of a clearer concept to begin with. While I understood the person’s point to a degree, I think this instance is exactly the kind I was thinking of – where you can use a tool like that to create randomness when needed, wanted, and planned. Congratulations on being the first one (in a post I’ve seen, at least) to mention the brainstorming function as a legit creative tool!
-Rob
-
You’ve gotten some good advice. I did a video series a few years back with such cards (see an example here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=uF_M5ty4auA ) and got the look by renting some old Chaplin movies and some other historic footage. The Perlanger Archives online have tons of old movies, too. (https://www.archive.org/details/prelinger)Getting the right font is key. Go to http://www.dafont.com, look under “fancy”, then “retro” and you’ll find some good options. In my video, the opening title card had a border; the other cards did not. I can’t remember where I found the border, though.
I’d recommend using a combination of filters and effects. A number of plugin collections come with “bad film” effects. Even the free Windows Movie Maker program has a way to do it. But I found that tweaking my own tinting and vignetting gave me more control and a more authentic look.
One other note, related not so much to the title cards as to the rest of your film, is to study the old ones and think about how the camera is placed. I violated this in my own, and wish I hadn’t, but in those days, 2 things were true: Cameras were bulky and hard to move, so don’t use hand-held shots, and also, many early film makers were two-dimensional in their thinking. In other words, they were thinking about actors on a stage facing an audience. Lots of old Three Stooges scenes have the Stooges all in a row, facing out towards an “audience”, the camera. “Citizen Kane” re-thought what cinema could be, but not everyone immediately caught on. If you really want to capture the look of early film making, go beyond just making the film look old. Think about shot composition and the limitations, both physical and creative, that those early film makers were working with.
-Rob
-
Two times when one may want to underline: 1) Making a citation of a book’s title, according to MLA standards guides, and 2) If needing to make a graphical representation of a web page with hyperlinks underlined. While some web pages don’t do this and many people disable this in their browsers, to much of the general populace, underlined text means “hyperlink”.
There may be other examples, too, but those come immediately to mind. I’m not saying it should or shouldn’t be offered in AE; I’m just noting two situations where a bigger font or italics might not be a better option.
-Rob
-
I used to get a warning on booting up AE that said: Warning – Tracker Control Pallette Missing. And sure enough, it was. It just wasn’t there. There was no option to bring it up to view it either. It wasn’t that it was greyed out in menus, or that I was in the wrong area of a project. It was just gone, and AE seemed to know this on boot-up. A re-install fixed it. I searched all over, including here, and had never heard of someone having a similar problem – until now. Try re-installing.
-Rob
-
I’d think it would be easier to do the adjustment in your video editor rather than photoshop, because you can apply it once as a final step, verses applying it dozens of times in photoshop, once for each image.
Another thing to try is run the dust and scratches filter on your scanned images as part of your photoshop treatment. Maybe set up an action with a keyboard shortcut to really simplify doing it. That way, even if your calibration settings aren’t where they need to be, at least if those blacks look bright on the TV they won’t have nearly as much noise in them. Ideally, reign in what you’re outputting. But a quick fix might be the dust and scratches filter. One way to check the filter as you apply it is to make an adjustment later that cranks up the levels, simulating on your monitor what the TV tends to do. Fix the dust and scratches on your original layer, delete the levels adjustment layer, then carry on as usual. It’s not the best solution, but in the short run it may be an adequate solution.
-
Make sure you’re only using AE for footage where you need an effect. The difference between AE and, say, Premiere, is that Premiere can be used such that it never creates new frames of footage. In other words, you’re just telling the computer in what order and for how long to play each clip your existing footage that you have loaded in. But in After Effects, the program assumes that you’re wanting to manipulate the look of the footage, and therefore, you’ll actually be creating new frames, making new footage. This is called rendering. (Sorry if I’m telling what you already know, but you said you’re a beginner.) Rendering takes time. Sometimes lots and lots of time.
So, if you’re asking, can you work on an entire movie in AE?, the answer is, yes. But would you want to? Probably not. Just use AE for the frames you need to use it on. Some movies (like 300, or SkyCaptain and the World of Tomorrow, or a gazillion others) have such a stylized look that it’s pretty clear that the entire movie, every frame, has been adjusted digitally. And Gladiator and O Brother, Where Art Thou? have been colorized all the way through, though not with After Effects, I don’t think. So if you need to do that, edit it all in something else, and then bring that into After Effects, and then take a short vacation, then come home a few days later and it’ll be done rendering.
As far as workflow goes, yes, as noted by someone else, Adobe has made it much easier to import Premiere projects into After Effects. Just make sure you do your editing in Premiere, then your effects and only your effects in After Effects, and your life will be much easier.
-
Agreed. To an extent. Your response is what mine initially was. Most of us have specific needs (or the client does), and a direction to go in. As I posted my question, it occured to me that most AE pros would rarely use this. However, most of us at some point in learning a tool as deep as AE certainly do play. And that to me is a benefit. It’s fun to play with, but I’m not sure about how it is to work with, if that makes sense. But it’s in the play that one discovers what a tool can do, that one can discover things perhaps not yet thought of.
I do see it being very useful, though, as a random values generator, which I know can be done in other ways in AE, but the Brainstorm effect lets you preview a number of random values and then select which one best suits your needs. It seems to me that brainstorming the random seed value of an effect and previewing a few options is simpler than going one seed value at a time, for instance. And my example of spreading layers in 3D space can of course be done easily manually or with an expression, but if the number of layers jumped to 100 and doing it manually becomes cumbersome, then the Brainstorm tool, though intended for brainstorming (duh), seems as though it could become a powerful tool simply for generating random values. I understand and agree with your soapbox. But if our vision we’re headed for is one that does involve random values, then the Brainstorm function for me goes beyond simply brainstorming or play (both of which it does well) and it becomes quite a useful tool.
It may be, since not too many have responded yet, that people on this forum won’t use it much, or don’t anticipate how they will. I’m still curious, though. I think it will prove more useful than either of us realizes.
One more thing – I’d like to know about Storyboarding tools as well – consider starting a new thread and I think you’ll generate a better response – one that I’m anxious to see, too.
Thanks for your excellent thoughts on this and many other posts.
-Rob
-
Check out freeplaymusic.com. In limited circumstances, their music is completely free. But in most cases, there will be a liscence fee you have to pay. One option is that you can always download the music for a client, and then purchase the music based on the client’s approval.