[Roland R. kahlenberg]

Particle Playground is able to do this. I have a tutorial, here at the COW, Fun in Particle Playland. Towards the end of the tutorial, there is a part where the balls stick onto a single object. It could easily be multiple objects.

If you can afford it, Particular would be a good buy – going by what folks say about it.

HTH
RoRK
broadcastGEMs
customizable animated backdrops with Adobe After Effects projects files

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

Collect files COPIES all footage used in a project into a designated folder, for easy archival. Fonts and Plugins are not copied.

HTH

RoRK
broadcastGEMs
customizable animated backdrops with Adobe After Effects project files

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

Click the AE logo at the top to get to the COW’s AE tutorial page. Once there, look for the link to Barend’s COW tutorial. He’s got one on Deinterlacing which is very good. For more control, there’s a 3rd party plugin from RevisionFX’s FieldsKit
HTH

RoRK
https://www.broadcastGEMs.com
customizable animated backdrops with Adobe After Effects project files

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

h.264 requires information on rendered frames in order to work well. These frames allow the encoder to group frames into packets for enhanced compression to ensure a smaller filesize and bitrate.

The -8960 error message seems to be an error that occurs due to non-conformity to expected screen ratios that a CODEC works in.

You will do better by rendering to the Animation CODEC and then using QTPro for the h.264 encoding.

HTH
RoRK
broadcastGEMs
customizable animated backdrops with Adobe After Effects project files

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

John’s right, do a search and you will find lots of answers. My only other input is to take into consideration the different pixel aspect ratios that PAL and NTSC. So, the job will require frame-rate conversion and also pixel sapect ratio conversion.

HTH
RoRK
broadcastGEMs
customizable animated backdrops with Adobe After Effects project files

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

You may want to look at Trapcode’s Echospace plugin.

HTH
RoRK
broadcastGEMs
customizable animated backgrounds with Adobe After Effects project files

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

[Don Days] “If nothing else, passing the exam is a great goal to set for yourself…and you learn alot about the software.”

Adobe should license the COW to set the exams. Things will happen faster and the exams will be even more useful. I’m not too certain of the other Adobe softwares but the AE exams are certainly a farce. They take way too long to appear. It’s just ridiculous.

RoRK
broadcastGEMs
customizable animated backdrops with Adobe After Effects project files

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

This should be easy using Invigorator by mapping your video to a sphere. Just ensure that your video is sized to fit intot he sphere without distortion – this may be the only tricky part.

HTH
RoRK
broadcastGEMs
customizable animated backdrops with Adobe After Effects project files

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

The way the ACE exams are managed on Adobe’s side is a farce. They’re always late. As it is 6.5 has been out for a long long time and they still haven’t updated their exam. 6.0, as you say, is the current exam on offer.

Don’t expect anything great to happen to you after you pass the exam. Unless, you plan to teach, it is largely meaningless. My experience has been that other than having your name up at the Adobe site, you shouldn’t expect any other support from Adobe.

The local Adobe office here in Singapore doesn’t make it a practice to publicise courses run by certified instructors. You’re really on your own in terms of marketing your courses. Companies with uncertified instructors but with a bigger marketing budget can easily obtain more students.

My .02.

RoRK
broadcastGEMs
customizable animated backdrops with Adobe After Effects project files

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

As you have just mentioned, AE does encode differently from QTPro in this specific instance. I suggest that you get in touch with the AE development team to see if they can fix this in a future release. For now, at least you have QTPro to do the work for you.

You should try to understand that most CODECs come with a bunch of parameters that can be controlled by the software performing the encoding. If you look at a more advanced encoding option such Squeeze, you will notice that they have 2-pass variable bit rate encoding. This is not avaiable in AE. However, the Sorenson 3 CODEC does offer this feature. It is up to developers to implement the features they want for their users. Off course, equally important is for the parameter settings to work as they should.

In this instance, I believe that AE’s rendering engine is deficient.

Cheers
RoRK

broadcastGEMs
customizable animated backdrops with Adobe After Effects project files