[Steve Roberts]

Nope, Dave spoke righteously. DOF only looks at layer positions, and shatter just makes a “3D movie” on a flat layer, basically. So DOF only sees the position of the “movie screen”.

Shatter is a bit of an old filter, and though it would be nice to give its camera the power of DOF, I don’t see it happening any time soon.

The particles-to-logo thing can be done with Trapcode’s Particular, but the particles don’t fit together like puzzle pieces, they just sort of fill the space and overlap each other. If I recall, you set up a layer so the particles all stick to it. Be warned: it can take a lot of particles to fill a layer if the particles are small.

Hope that helps,
Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Nope, Dave spoke righteously. DOF only looks at layer positions, and shatter just makes a “3D movie” on a flat layer, basically. So DOF only sees the position of the “movie screen”.

Shatter is a bit of an old filter, and though it would be nice to give its camera the power of DOF, I don’t see it happening any time soon.

The particles-to-logo thing can be done with Trapcode’s Particular, but the particles don’t fit together like puzzle pieces, they just sort of fill the space and overlap each other. If I recall, you set up a layer so the particles all stick to it. Be warned: it can take a lot of particles to fill a layer if the particles are small.

Hope that helps,
Steve

[Steve Roberts]

How about …

1. get a bucket.
2. make a tube that your arm and fist will fit into. Cover the ends. Cover it in wax paper or parchment paper.
3. place the tube securely in the center of the bucket, in as deep as your fist will go.
4. fill the bucket with something that will harden. Cement? It should fill around the tube.
5. When the stuff is hard, remove the tube. You should have a fist-sized hole in the hard-stuff-filled bucket. Maybe the hard stuff should be painted black?
6. fill the hole with water, so it overfills the hole and covers the hard stuff with about and inch of water …?
7. when shooting, plunge your fist in the hole (not too fast), letting the water gush up around it, hopefully not draining back into the hole. 🙂

I’ve never tried this, and I see the possibility of damaging your fist if you miss the hole. Maybe if the hard stuff isn’t that hard, you could save your fist. Attempt at your own risk. Your mileage may vary.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Search the COW (“QT7”)on this one — the solution seems to be going back to QT 6.5.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Does the error happen at the same frame in the comp each time? It could be a point where your comp is accessing a certain file or effect.

Is the disk defragged? Can you place your source footage on its own defragged disk?

Keep Task Manager open and look at RAM usage. Does it quit at the same level of RAM usage each time? If so, it could be bad RAM, only accessed at that point.

If all else fails, try rendering to a sequence of TGAs. When it crashes, you can just start up the same render again, starting the sequence render where the last render crashed. When done, bring in the entire sequence and render to QT or AVI — it’ll be really quick.

Also, access the secret prefs by holding down shift when accessing the prefs — keep shift down until the dialog box appears. Try the setting that purges RAM every 5 frames when rendering.

Steve
P.S. 2Gb is 2 gigabits. 2GB is 2 gigabytes, which is correct. Not a big deal here, but if you ever talk data rate, you should be clear on your B’s & b’s since both are used with different meanings. 🙂

[Steve Roberts]

… and if the I/O card is the onboard Firewire, then the codec is DV.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

I actually used liquify to remove a boom shadow. The shadow only covered the talent’s jacket for a second, so I grabbed a clean frame of the jacket, placed it over the shadowed frame, then mushed it into the new shape with the liquify filter, since the talent had turned slightly.

It helped that the jacket had a grid-like pattern on it. 🙂

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Avoiding the temptation to wade into sarcasm, before I dive into this topic, I’d have to ask you to be more specific.

Please describe the exact effect you want to create: does something become liquid, where does the liquid go, what does the liquid look like, is it realstic or graphic, is text involved, is it an ocean or a puddle ….?

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

None of these are included in a preset: you need to “mix your own” effect.

For burning, you can make the text shrink away by animating a mask downwards or using a comp containing a ramp layer as a gradient wipe, but as for the flame, you’d probably have to find stock footage of a flame and composite it over each letter. Ideally, you’d cut real letters out of cardboard and shoot them as they burn, I suppose.

For crumbling, you need to work with the Shatter effect. There should be a tutorial on the COW.

Dissolving …yeesh. Use the gradient wipe or mask method above and add a puddle of water by creating a puddle shaped mask, then applying bevel alpha over it, and compositing a sky image over it to act as a reflection.

Dripping: Try searching the COW for “blood”. Search the archives.

Anybody else?

[Steve Roberts]

Try changing the background color of the comp. If it is black, and your logo is black, you won’t see anything.

Steve