[Shawn Miller]

“Yeah in general I’d say Motion is great for titling, visual effects…”

I didn’t know that people were using Motion for visual effects. I always assumed folks were using it strictly for motion graphics…

Do you know where I can see examples of VFX made with Motion?

Thanks,

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

Hey Buck,

Have you tried outputting to an 8 bit TIFF sequence? Unless I’m going to After Effects for compositing and VFX, I never send 16 bit image sequences to Premiere Pro… not even CS5, since 95% of the live action footage I cut with animation is 8 bit 4:2:2… and destined for Blu-Ray or DVD (YMMV).

Thanks,

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

“We are seriously looking at multi-user, distributed workflows…”

That is FANTASTIC news.

[Shawn Miller]

You might also consider Z-Born Toy… it seems like it would be pretty handy for the effect you’re describing.

Thanks,

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

“I know that DVCPRO50 doesn’t work well unless the codec comes with the app you are using”

DVCPro50 works fine… it just depends on whoes CODEC you use. Apple’s (QT) Pro50 CODEC on Windows is terrible… Matrox had a much better implementation, but it’s not available anymore. If you have a P2 camera somewhere, you can dub from your Beta deck to your P2 camera in DVCPro50 4:2:2 and then copy the contents of that card to a hard drive. Your client should be able to take it from there.

I haven’t captured from an analog deck in about 3 years… but when I need to capture from live sources I use Blackmagic 8/10 bit Uncomresssed and Mjpeg in PP CS4 and CS5. BM CODECS always work well for me.

Thanks,

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

As others have said, this ‘can’ be done with virtual 3D sets… but it doesn’t mean that you can’t do this with 2D graphics in 3D space… you just have to be really careful in your shot selection and camera movement. The bottom line is that you have to be somewhat knowlegeble about the subject. You have to know when, why and how you can get away with 2D (or 3D) tracking and 2D graphics vs a 3D tracking and integration workflow. I also (repectively) disagree with some folks regarding camera choice. You can pull good and believable keys with a 4:2:2 camera @ 720p or 1080p… you just have to be good at keying AND compositing.

In order to do this work you’ll have to be comfortable with the following subjects:

2D tracking
3D tracking/matchmoving
3D modeling
3D Painting/Texturing
3D Lighting
HDR Photography (including shooting mulit-exposure panoramas and creating sperical maps from those panoramas)
Compositing
Keying
Rotoscoping

Here are links to some resources that can lead you down the road of understand what you’re trying to do.

https://www.cmivfx.com/productpages/product.aspx?name=C4D_Matte_Paint_Extraction

https://www.cmivfx.com/productpages/product.aspx?name=Syntheyes_Complete_Training

https://videocopilot.net/tutorial/3d_crater_p1/

https://ssontech.com/content/pertute.htm

https://www.amazon.com/Effects-Visual-Compositing-Studio-Techniques/dp/0321592018/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1283985854&sr=8-1

[Shawn Miller]

If I were building an edit system today, here is what I would look at putting together:

CPUs: Dual Six Core Xeons @ 2.4 GHz (minimum)

Motherboard: Intel® 5520 (Tylersburg) Chipset with QPI up to 6.4 GT/s – My prefrerred brands are; Intel, Supermicro, Gigabyte, Tyan (all supporting up to 96 GB of RAM and two 1000Mbit lan ports)

Video Card: Nvidia Quadro FX 3800 (minimum)

RAM: 24GB or a MINIMUM of 2 GB per physical CPU core (unless you do 3D rendering, HT doesn’t make that big of a difference)

Hard Drive: A single RAID array (0,1,5 or 10) for your OS (DO NOT BUILD THIS WITH SOLID STATE DRIVES). Note, I prefere to build smaller arrays for the OS and bigger RAID 0 arrays for project work (I do weekly backups of this drive and daily cloning of active projects to a NAS device).

Anyway, that’s my two cents.

Thanks,

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

This is a really interesting discussion. Apparantly, it is also very timely. 🙂

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=general&src=me

[Shawn Miller]

Did you try MoI on your friend’s PC? 🙂 MoI’s exporter is actually a lot better than Rhino’s… alternately, if you have a way of getting it to me, I would be more than happy to take a shot at converting your file for you. Let me know.

Thanks,

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

Hey Adam,

MoI is VERY good. It was developed by Michael Gibson… he’s the original developer of Rhino. 🙂 I love C4D, but MoI is just faster and better at some modeling tasks. I often use it to build certain kinds of geometry (curved surfaces with holes) and export to LWO or OBJ. I then import into C4D using Riptide. Anyway, I hope you get a chance to try it.

Oh yeah, MoI does import .STP files.

Thanks,

Shawn