Simon Ubsdell
6
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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Sets are really useful ways to store parameter set-ups so you can switch between them as you choose which version you prefer.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
From now till the end of the month there is 40% off all Ripple Training Motion tutorials – I would strongly recommend that you have a look at the Getting Started video.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
Grab the end of the Motion Path, either in the mini Timeline or the main Timeline, and pull it with the mouse. (See the red arrows in the screengrab – either of those places.) As you drag left, the behavior will become shorter.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
Do not shorten the duration of your bezier layer or your object layer. Shortening your object layer will make it disappear early. (Actually it doesn’t matter if you shorten the bezier path, but it won’t achieve what you want.)
Simply shorten the duration of the Motion Path behavior itself.
You can do this by setting the playhead to the place where you want the animation to end and with the Motion Path selected hitting “O (for Out) on the keyboard. Or you can drag the end of the Motion Path so that it ends at the right place.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
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Actually what’s interesting is how extremely useful and descriptive your joke example is. I can read that filename and know exactly what the content is even though I know nothing about the job, and you could come back to it in ten years time and still know what was meant.
Simplicity is the most powerful tool of all.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
Here you go:
The guidelines for Digital Cinema Naming Convention.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
I get that this is meant to be satirical, but it’s how a lot of the major film companies are now working, along with their distribution suppliers, for the simple reason that it works.
Some things that make a lot of sense can take time getting used to, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you 😉
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
I agree that the potential for metadata analysis is very interesting, but that’s probably getting over-ambitious at this point.
The first challenge is to convince enough people that there’s value in metadata in the first place 😉
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
OK, so this would be the second part of my plan for a simpler, more efficient world, although strictly speaking it’s the first part.
The best, most efficient place to store metadata is the most obvious and easily used.
And that’s the filename.
If instead of putting your file inside a folder called Boat inside whatever application it is you are using, you rather added the characters B-O-A-T to the filename (outside any specific application), you are immediately at a very considerable advantage.
The first advantage is that the metadata travels with the file wherever it goes, so whoever is accessing the file in whatever application immediately knows what you want them to know about it. This is vastly more useful than metadata added inside a specific application which can almost never usefully travel outside.
The second advantage is that you can now access your Boat files instantly within your application, assuming it has a simple search function (which almost everything does).
Typing BOAT into a search field is always going to be faster than clicking around to find a “folder” with your boat files inside it. Typing is always faster than clicking. Always. Operating any application from the keyboard is always faster than using the mouse or pen.
The third advantage to metadata stored in the filename is that it’s human-readable, which obviously confers its own benefits. Even a producer looking at a folder of files in the Finder now knows their contents without having to open them in any application.
There are plenty of ways to edit the filename (and batch edit multiple filenames), but my current favourite is Kyno which has a set of very elegant options for how the original filename is handled and how the new characters are added.
Sometimes the most powerful solutions are also the simplest.
Interestingly quite a few of our clients are now asking for deliverables to have specifically formatted filenames that “embed” a whole range of useful metadata, including date, frame size, codec, aspect ratio, track configuration, language, texted/textless and more. This system has obvious advantages for distribution of deliverables.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki
