[Sam Moulton]

I love 7. started out on 6 then 6.5 and always was trying to find things because i work on a single monitor. no more lost windows. no more clicking on window, look for the info checkmark, yup it’s checked must be somewhere on the desktop, can’t find it, 5 minutes later, oh there it is hiding under the effects palette.

i use the graph editor a lot, but I also use the u key to find keyframes a lot. Never even missed the way 6.5 handles graphs and keyframes like Filip does.

7 is also much faster on my machine and more stable now that i’ve updated my modest collection of plug-ins. they were the only source of any crashes I had with 7. never had a single problem from day 1

[Sam Moulton]

don’t try and do it all with one layer. add the comma and the rest of the digits when you need it. I just add a slider to a numbers layer and then use that like this;

Math.floor(effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”))

you can animate whole numbers up to a million by just setting keyframes. Add Mylenium’s idea and more than one layer and you’re set.

[Sam Moulton]

don’t try and do it all with one layer. add the comma and the rest of the digits when you need it. I just add a slider to a numbers layer and then use that like this;

Math.floor(effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”))

you can animate whole numbers up to a million by just setting keyframes. Add Mylenium’s idea and more than one layer and you’re set.

[Sam Moulton]

one more thing, i didn’t try and eliminate the shadow, I tried to turn it into something I could use. the way they are lit they have to be casting shadows so they look funny without them.

[Sam Moulton]

i’m no expert at keying but my first thought was to break up the shot into various areas, maybe 4, and then work on each section. I messed with the photoshop file for a few minutes and fond that I could pull a good key of the dancers almost all the way to the middle of their legs. That would be one layer. Then I pulled a key from there to the ground, then I worked on the shadows and tried to create a shadow pass layer only. combining the 4 separate layers with quick garbage mattes to block the areas that wouldn’t key properly, then using the shadow layer as a track matte over a grey solid set to multiply over a background, i got a good result with a believable shadow. I think it would be impossible to do with only a single layer and a single application of Keylight. BTW… didn’t learn this on my own, learned it from a class i took at NAB. the instructor, cant remember his name, said that he hardly ever pulls a key with only one copy of the footage. he always isolates the problem areas and works on them separately.

[Sam Moulton]

i had an art teacher in high school that sang a little tune when asked how to get good at art. the tune went dum do do dum do do dum do do do WOW! first you draw something dumb then you do mor work and work some more and it’s still dumb, then you do more and work more and it’s still dumb, but if you work long enough and hard enough eventually somebody else will look at it and say WOW! he also said: how great you are depends more on how hard to work than the tallent you are born with.

[Sam Moulton]

mb has been updated for 7. saw it at nab. wish i could afford it.

[Sam Moulton]

I can get the first to work, the second for me gives me a blur that changes over time as you say but it has a max value of 30 not 5. Maybe i copied something wrong or am misunderstanding what you did. your expression is much more complex than anything i can cume up with at this time. if it isn’t in the list of expression goodies in the popup or made with a pickwhip i’m pretty lost.

I added a slider to my moving layer and tied to the expression with a pickwhip. the new expression is

L = position;
b = effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”)*.01;
L.speed*b

this means if the layer is moving 400 pixel per second, the blur is 4 pixels with the slider set to 4. i multiplied by .01 instead if deviding by 100 to aviod a divide by 0 error. the slider makes it easy to adjust. wow, i’m impressed with myself for comming up with an expression for this. it actually came from another project where we were measuring the speed of a point that was tracked going through the frame and converting that to mph.

[Sam Moulton]

I can get the first to work, the second for me gives me a blur that changes over time as you say but it has a max value of 30 not 5. Maybe i copied something wrong or am misunderstanding what you did. your expression is much more complex than anything i can cume up with at this time. if it isn’t in the list of expression goodies in the popup or made with a pickwhip i’m pretty lost.

I added a slider to my moving layer and tied to the expression with a pickwhip. the new expression is

L = position;
b = effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”)*.01;
L.speed*b

this means if the layer is moving 400 pixel per second, the blur is 4 pixels with the slider set to 4. i multiplied by .01 instead if deviding by 100 to aviod a divide by 0 error. the slider makes it easy to adjust. wow, i’m impressed with myself for comming up with an expression for this. it actually came from another project where we were measuring the speed of a point that was tracked going through the frame and converting that to mph.

[Sam Moulton]

tried your expression, seemed to not work. The first one did, but the second one was fouled up because i got 30 as the max blur and changing the max blur didn’t change anything.

I tried this expression which adjusts blur based on speed.

L = position;
bf = .01 // blur factor;
L.speed * bf

a more elegant solution, which I may work on would also correct by the ammount that the object was off from a whole pixel value. want I mean is if the position was 23.2 pixels it would blur less than when it was at 23.0 pixels because aliasing would add to the apparent blur when the layer isn’t at a whole pixel value.

interesting idea…