[Steve Bentley]

Well, we have Resolve Studio (last Tuesday’s upgrade in fact) and while the posted min support is Win 10 you can download, install and run it on Win 7 with a tweaked BMD codec set up. (you’ll notice RS is still compatible with High Sierra while Adobe is forcing you to head to Mojave)

Are you saying we should upend our AE pipeline for film and video compositing (centered around images remember) for an audio feature only available on Win 10? If audio is taking priority in AE now does that mean the long awaited paint is right around the corner too? I’d upgrade to Win 10 for that!

I’m just being cranky. I’m still grumpy from Adobe’s surprise codec gap in 2018 15.1. I realize why that had to happen but I would have prefered a heads up (or even accurate or non conflicting info on their site) so we could plan for it. Same goes for this change.

[Steve Bentley]

There are some plug ins at aescripts.com that automate the step and repeat process to give you the “edge” and they will also let you easily tie into a camera so the perspective can change too. (all things you could do with expressions as well).
Something that can hang you up when doing this kind of thing (if you’re not used to it). Changing the number of layers above your stacking layers can have an influence on the look since the index number (used in the expressions to offset each successive layer) is the layer number, which changes if you add new a layer above. So one layer referencing another layers’s index number can get its math out of whack if those indexes change, especially if you are using multiples. It’s easy to write code around this but if you are copy and pasting code from somewhere you might not realize this little gotcha. The same goes for randomness – the random seed is the layer index (unless specified in the expression).

[Steve Bentley]

As a fellow 17″ laptop sherpa (with the elongated left arm to prove it), the rule of thumb is go for the fastest, most advanced, biggest, baddest (add your own adjective here) you can – the minute you walk off the lot, it’s obsolete.

That being said, the most important consideration is the card. I don’t have the list in front of me but because there are fewer cards available to portables, make sure the one you are looking at is qualified by Adobe AND make sure the specs you are looking at is for the “M” designation (for “mobile) and not for the same named card that gets wedged into a desktop.

I always worry about these “gaming bundles” as the card tends to be aimed at that crowd. Nothing wrong with the 10series cards but we’ve had better grunt with the MQuadra models, at least for AE. The tide is changing where the Cuda cores are starting to make a real difference in AE production but I think horsepower is still the main focus – that, and read and write speed on the drives. I’m not sure I trust SSD’s for long term yet (C4D might just kill one with its million reads and writes on every frame) but you should see a massive speed increase with heavy AE projects if you swap out the HDD (and if not check the speed of the internal HDD to make sure its fast).

As for 4K, keep in mind the icons gets smaller at that rez (and some of AE’s are way too small already – I’m glad we have the new “Close all other timelines” button because those little close X’s… well I don’t think you can resolve an X in less than 4 pixels, but Adobe sure is trying.
Can you really see a difference in a 4k screen at any size that will be portable? Many of these 4k screens just goose the color so they “feel” sexier but in fact look as sharp as HD or 2k. Some 4Ks will also just scale the HD and add artifacts and artificially sharpen the image, so what you see may not be what your client sees.

There are a zillion ways to look at this – let the pile-on begin!

[Steve Bentley]

Are you saying that 2019 is installable on Win 7? Adobe won’t even let you have the link to the install exe if you show up at their doorstep looking through a Win 7 browser (of any flavor).
And CC updater just says “Sorry mate, you need to head on up to Win10 if you want a taste”.
Even the demo won’t come forth if you plead from a Win 7 box.

I know Win 7 is now years old now and long in the tooth, but I think of it like we all thought of NT. It was (and still is in some cases) the backbone of everything for sooo long that everyone had to keep writing for it. Win 8 was just a disaster and Win 9 was still-born so this blind adoption of Win 10 makes me think, given the track record, the OS probably needs to spend a little more time in the oven until it’s well seasoned. I really don’t need any new emojis.
Whoops, looks like Win 11 came out while I was typing.

[Steve Bentley]

Let me know before you do that Dave, and I’ll buy stock in 3M.

I’m with Kal on this one. You could attempt it in Particular inside AE but you woudn’t get that little curl that always seems to define overlapping Post-its (TM). Particular particles are flat.
Tilting the particles (use a sprite or a layer as your particle) slightly might give you a shadow that would mimic the curl, or you could put a grad on your master particle that acts as a false shadow and gives the illusion that it or the layer above is curving – you would need two sets of particles source layers for this – the ones behind the front most layers would need the shadow grad illusion but the front convering ones would be more solid white.
You also could just let “real” shadows fall from an AE light and see what happens but I think it might ring a little – it’s a fairly high frequency image and that might cause the shadows to be noisy.

You could do this with Element 3D though (inside AE). You could import a bunch of 3D objects in varios levels of curl and use the replicator to plaster the postits all over the scene and various 3D objects that you would import into Element too.
While this is very doable in Element, I don’t find the interface as elegant as a standard 3D software package like Cinema or Maya. And I think you would have a better time with the noise and flexibility for tweaking in a true 3D package.

[Steve Bentley]

There’s also the built in FloMotion inside the distortion effects which is pretty much spot on with the example given.

[Steve Bentley]

Are you using particular? If so you can use the “vary size over time” graph to give a curve to the expansion.

You could also use the mesh warp or even the reshape effect to get the exact kind of shape you need. The mesh warp nodes can be animated to “follow” the car so the shape is always relative to the car or it can lag so the plume passes through this warp. For the reshape effect its a little harder but helped by the fact that you can now control the node of each mask in AE>2017 so you can use expressions to keep those masks relative to the car.

FYI the corner pin effect is quite soft and I prefer the CCpower pin – its more flexible and is perfectly sharp.

Finally you could use the displacement map or Video Copilot’s heat distortion plug in (I think it might be free) to create turbulence in the cloud. You could use another particular layer emitting spheres or cloudlets to generate a hidden layer these two effects reference to create the distortion. This hidden particular layer could be linked to the emission layer of the beauty particles (you may have to precompose the hidden particle layer and make it visible in the nested comp to allow it work with the effects.

[Steve Bentley]

I’d rather compress it on the PC. The issue is getting a codec format that is wide enough in its color space and small enough in size (like Cineform) that the PC can write and the Mac of that age can read and recompress to Prores. But if I can cut out the Mac platform altogether that speeds things up immensely.
I’ve been out of the Fusion world for years and didn’t realize BMD had bought it.

[Steve Bentley]

Hey Thanks Walter, I didn’t realize there was a ProRes for FFMpeg. I’ll give that a whirl. That will allow us to cut out the middle man (er… middleMac?)

[Steve Bentley]

Like this:

12747_bluebeforered.aep.zip