[Ron Coy]

I found that repairing disk permissions seems to fix it, but not permanently. You may find that it works until Final Cut Pro crashes again, but I did a repair and they started working for a while, then just stopped.

Somehow FCP is losing the permission to access the texture files or something like that, as far as I can tell.

[Ron Coy]

Yeah, actually… it’s kinda funny now, but we finally figured out that it was done in….

wait for it…..

KEYNOTE!!!

So we ended up using Keynote to do the presentation parts of the video (so as to replicate what they already had with new info) and editing in the commercials we did for them. WHAT A PAIN. Keynote doesn’t like to output video that Final Cut Pro is happy with.

I wonder if Apple will ever fix that?

[Ron Coy]

i second the widget… easy as hell to get to in a pinch… just hit F12 to bring up dashboard and it’s there.

[Ron Coy]

I’ll check that out.

Does particle illusion affect text or images like this is doing though? I mean, it’s using the color values of the images/text to color the sparkles in the transition. I was under the impression that it was only a particle generator.

[Ron Coy]

Lux needs lights, but Particular doesn’t. You can parent the emitter to a null.

[Ron Coy]

Or greenscreen a golfer and make the footage into a silhouette. Probably easier than the 3D route.

[Ron Coy]

any chance of this being listed as an After Effects sub forum? Cinema 4D is up there, and it really isn’t as After Effects related as this “How Do I” forum is.

Just my two cents. It would make it easier to find for AE people who need help with techniques.

[Ron Coy]

sounds like a job for expressions.

Though, I don’t know how you would get the z info to color a 2D layer in varying z space… I’m trying to wrap my head around just the concept, I know nothing about writing expressions myself, but I can usually figure out what needs to relate to what in these situations. I just can’t figure out how you could make something further from the camera a different gradiated color from something in the foreground, without some kind of 3D aware plugin or camera effect.

[Ron Coy]

instead of using time remappping, just take your sequence up to the point of the freeze and put that on one layer. Then take the frozen frame, make it as long as you need it, and put it on another layer that begins where the other stops, then make a third layer of the remainder of the footage and put it where you need it to start up again.

I’ve done this many times to freeze animations where I need them to freeze for adding bullet points of info about the subject I’m illustrating in my animations. An example of this is at https://www.roncoy.com/Demo.html in the top right video where the animation swings around and stops to allow the text to point to the relevant parts of the model.

You can also time remap the moving footage parts to gradually slow down and speed back up, without having to jack around with the timing as much as when the time remap has to deal with the entire piece of footage as a whole. What I mean is, it’s easier to work with time remap when you’re only dealing with a speed up or slow down, as opposed to both on the same piece of footage on the same layer… at least in my experience.

[Ron Coy]

is your pre-rendered footage in a format like mpeg, MP4, h.264 or another format that throws away keyframe animation? If so, you’ll need to convert it in another program to a video file format that After Effects can use.

You will always get weirdness with those file formats.