[Steve Morris]

You need to render the title on an alpha channel. There are several different ways to do it.

PPro works best with a STRAIGHT unmatted, rather than premultiplied. The Straight setting will look bad if you view it on its own, but in PP, it will look better than premult. On somethings I can seem to get away with premult. I think it depends on what the feathering looks like on the alpha channel. I can not be for sure on this.

I use these render settings:

Quicktime
animation
Million + colors
Straight

You can use other setting like targa and tiff sequences as well.

[Steve Morris]

This is what I ended up with.
https://s122.photobucket.com/albums/o249/stevem1928/?action=view&current=water4.flv

I just poured a bucket of water in front of a green screen. The key turned good enough for my purposes.

I checked out Particle Illusion. The water generator looks good, but I did not have the time to learn a new system right now.

[Steve Morris]

I just tried it. It works for me. I set everything to 0.

Use a Point, directional. “Velocity random” to 0, “velocity from” to 0

There may have been another one that I did. The particles came out evenly spaced.

[Steve Morris]

Andrew Cramer has some explosion / fire stuff on his web site. Check out Action Movie Essentials.

https://www.videocopilot.net

https://www.videocopilot.net/ame_gallery/ame_gallery.htm

[Steve Morris]

See this thread.
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/902536?pview=t#head

You have to get rid of the adjustment layer.

[Steve Morris]

What are your system specs?

[Steve Morris]

Hopefully you will get a better answer than mine. I had the same problem. The way I got around it was to color the actual particle and do away with the adjustment layer.

I don’t have AE in front of me, so I can’t check what else I did to change the effect. I know that I manually moved the “light” emitting layer around in 3d space. That allowed me to have control over where to cut the layer front to back for the obscuring.

[Steve Morris]

Here is the link.

https://s122.photobucket.com/albums/o249/stevem1928/?action=view&current=slide.flv

I made everything go about twice as fast as it should really be played (trying to reduce file size). If you watch it at half speed, it looks a lot better.

[Steve Morris]

I experimented with this 2 months ago. I stopped with the project because I decided to handle the photos a different way. The project was not fine tuned yet, so don’t base an opinion on my work from this. I had to go through and replace my old family pictures with some generic ones. I hope I did not mess anything up. I am rendering the sample for you right now. I will post it when it finishes rendering.

I was trying to duplicate my dad’s old projector.

I used a 3D comp with lights and camera. I started out by trying to pass light through the picture by using the command that allows the colors to show through as a shadow, but decided against that.

Here is what I did.

I got a photo of a screen, then added some water stains, like ours had.

I added a very bright light between the slides. Something that would blow out the highlights. I then moved a very blurry copy of the slide from the side (our projector brought the pictures in from the side). I masked out the blurry slide as it hit the screen, and replaced it with a sharp copy. As the slide came in, I lowered the intensity of the light. I also added motion blur to everything that moved.

I was going to place a photo of the area where my dad would show the slides behind the screen, but did not get around to it. It was not easy to add the photo behind the screen due to the 3d comp.

I also changed the house lighting as the projector started.

I never got around to adding the sounds. That would add a great finishing touch. I did not want to drag out the projector. We only have one bulb left. I blew a bulb the last time I had it out. I don’t know if we can get more bulbs for that old thing.

Let me know if you come across good sound effects for this.

[Steve Morris]

I just noticed the $ is rotating. You could do that with Zaxwerks ProAnimator or other 3D app. I also noticed the lights flickering on the letters. You could add that in a number of different ways, one of them being a particle effect and a glow, maybe even something like vegas effect could make it look like chasing lights around the text.