[Steve Roberts]

Fake the 3D by curving the lines so they arc up and back down again. Sure, it’s not physically correct since you’re viewing from above, but it may be what the client is imagining. Or make the ones at top of screen arc up, and ones at bottom of screen arc down. The start and end points would be the same as before.

Or … you could use 3D stroke to draw a line that curves up toward camera and down away from camera as if it were a really high arc on the earth. The line would appear thin at both ends and fat in the middle. It should curve up (seen from camera) a bit as well. To sell this (and the other) you need a shadow that is a straight line.

To picture this, imagine the arc as the bow, and the shadow as the bowstring.

[Steve Roberts]

Is it fair to say that Apple has a more user-friendly OS (compared to Windows), but that a good PC systems integrator can get you more powerful hardware inside the box?

Which might reinforce the “hard-core 3D, go PC” idea?

(trying to stay flame-free here …)

[Steve Roberts]

Sometimes, if the gradient is too shallow, it’s even beyond the ability of 16 or 32 bpc to smooth out, especially when the final format is 8-bit (e.g. Avid) or 10-bit (e.g. DigiBeta). Sometimes.

In those situations, you would need to add a bit of noise to the gradient. Search the COW for “banding” for more.

[Steve Roberts]

If the original editor rendered progressive text over interlaced video (bad editor! bad editor!), it would be best to request the original video with no text, then re-do the text. If that’s not feasible (aw, crap!) you need to preserve the original video by doing this:

1. interpret “no fields”
2. make your new graphics over the video in a comp
3. render with no fields.

This will reproduce the original error (prog graphics over int video), but hey, if it passed approval before, it should pass again.

CAVEAT: I’ve never tried this, because I’ve worked with good editors. 🙂

If original text and video are both interlaced, I recommend interpreting no fields. Why? Because you’re not doing anything to the video itself. Then add the new graphics, and render with fields (upper or lower, according to Dave’s post). Test on an interlaced monitor.

[Steve Roberts]

Walter’s post leads me to the conclusion that if you buy one, eventually you’ll need to buy the other as well.

[Steve Roberts]

NOOOOO!

Okay.
Look at the software you want to run, then pick the platform.

A friend of mine, a director, runs Premiere and wishes he had a mac because virtually everyone he knows runs FCP. My service bureau runs FCP, but my old one ran Avid, I think.

AE runs transparently on either platform. But you have to pick one, of course, since an AE disk only contains one version.

Some 3D apps only run on Windows, but many run on both platforms. I like Cinema 4D, as do many. But if you’re hard core 3D (Max/Soft), you’d probably pick windows due to the greater availability of render boxes, graphics cards and so on. I’m assuming you’re not hard core, since you haven’t picked a platform yet.

I have much fewer problems on my Mac than I did on Windows 3.1/95/98/NT/2000/XP. So I’ve been there. But I did a lot of great work on Windows, so it doesn’t have some anti-creative vibe about it.

But for motion graphics, I’d lean Mac. Besides, you can run Windows on it.

Here we go.

[Steve Roberts]

One option: use Particular where you shoot out copies of an object toward camera (long lens), then they freeze. Varied lifespans, so they each disappear randomly. Then render and reverse. (Or precomp and reverse.)

It should work.

If you don’t have Particular, you could try Particle Playground, I suppose.

[Steve Roberts]

… and be economical with your keyframes — use as few as possible and massage the bezier handles to get the curves you want.

[Steve Roberts]

I think that After Effects automatically imported your 50fps footage as 25 fps because most PAL footage is 25fps, not 50. That’s why you see slow motion.

If you want your composition to play normally in a 25fps composition, you can leave it as AE has interpreted it (25 fps), then drag it into the 25 fps comp, and speed it up (“time-stretch”) it inside the composition. You want your layer to be twice as fast, or run half as long.

(You don’t want to solve this in the interpretation dialog, because that dialog retains all frames of the clip. You don’t want to do that — you want to drop every other frame to speed up the footage. Right?)

[Steve Roberts]

Animation: try just below 100%.
DV: I thought there were no choices …?
Photo-JPEG: move the slider off 100% — it usually stops aroun 89-91%.
TGA: leave it alone.

As for anything else like H.264, the other gents are right: don’t use AE. AE is good for rendering to high-quality, then you use something like Sorenson or Compressor to do the 2-pass encoding.

Speaking of which, compression is considered an art, and if you want to learn more, look on the Compression techniques COW.