Steve Roberts
Forum Replies Created
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Ah. Is it a horizontal pan? Are the vertical lines stuttering or juddering? You may be stuck with it. I’ve come across this effect when attempting to slide a series of stills (boxes, basically) across the frame.
Consider that in a movie, you are playing back a series of still images no matter what you do. If the motion is regular, in one direction, and there’s no other motion, there is nothing to distract your eye from the regular linear motion, so it gets used to it and starts to see the individual still images. That’s the juddering you see, in my opinion. It’s not seen at 60 fps because the images change too fast for our eyes to keep up.
To solve this problem, I’ve used a few tricks:
– render to fields
– add some distracting motion elsewhere (ribbons, particles, text)
– make the images follow a non-straight path (it has to be pretty irregular)
– do something different altogether
– try to mask out the images’ borders, so there are no straight lines in each image (right)
– tell the client it’s unavoidable … if they notice it.
Motion blur or directional blur hasn’t worked for me in this case, as I end up seeing juddering blurry images instead.my 2 cents,
Steve -
You might want to post this in the Broadcast design COW forum. 🙂 Many of these questions have been answered there or in the Business forum.
But anyway, I’ll try to give my opinion:
1. Jobs: all three. TV stations pay less, according to my sources. Freelance can pay more, but you have to pay for your own gear. You can make more if you approach direct clients, but you need to be a designer, not an operator doing what a designer tells you to do. It depends on how much autonomy/freedom/lack of security you want.
2. What do they look for? I’d say a killer reel that shows you can do what they want you to do (well), and a pleasant personality. Polish your presentation materials and style. They don’t want someone who seems careless, because it will show in the work. Education is only looked at if you’re looking for a teaching or in-house corporate position.
3. Specialization: I’d say that you should choose between motion graphics and visual effects. It’s hard to be excellent at both, in my opinion. Find out what your prospect (target) does, and make a reel that appeals to them and makes you appear useful to them. Have more material than you need so you can tweak reels to prospects. (ideally)
4. Not sure what you mean by “options”.
5. Minnesota: Yes, I have some clients out of the country. It can be done with an FTP server (try bulletproof and no-ip for the URL), but don’t underestimate the power of a face-to-face. To answer your question, I’d say “yes”, but work with direct clients usually require more face-to-face meetings.
6. Gear: You’ll need portable hard drives at some point for footage from clients. Lots of extra space for shuffling stuff around. Also, if you choose to work direct for clients, get a Windows box with AE as well. Business clients like WMV files for preview, and if you speak Windows, things will go a little bit more smoothly.
my 2 cents,
Steve -
There is no autosave in AE yet. You might be thinking about increment and save, which saves the current project under a new name, with a number after. Each time you invoke the command, it increments the number.
I save the first project as proj_01, then each time I invoke the command via shortcut, it saves the project as proj_02, then proj_03 next time, and so on. This way, when I send a low-res vid to the client, I name it “low-res_32.mov”, or whatever corresponds to the number of the project that created it. Good for back-checking or reproducing old videos because someone liked them better.
Every so often I delete the obsolete projects or zip them.
It’s not automatic, but I’ve gotten into the habit of doing it after a major change.
As Dave said, save early,save often … and I’d add that your “save as” interval should be the amount of time you’re willing to spend doing work over again. If you’re willing to re-do a week’s worth of work, save once a week. 🙂 For me, it’s about a half-hour.
Steve
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Select file>interpret footage>main. Change the pixel aspect ratio of the imported footage accordingly to match that of the project.
For more details on pixel aspect ratio, search the COW tutorials for “strangepixel”.
Steve
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You probably don’t need to reverse the path — at any rate, you can only redraw the path or change the first vertex.
You should probably look into the 3D stroke effect’s controls to see what you want to do. For example, animate the start parameter instead of the end parameter to reverse the “writing-on” of the stroke.
If that doesn’t help, let us know exactly what you want to do with the 3D stroke effect.
Steve
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Graphic beds?
Try going to the Adobe site, and look for the Adobe Studio under the “solutions” menu. There should be a project there.
Steve
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Draw the mask on a solid, then apply effect>render stroke, using “on transparent” as the paint style. Precompose this layer, selecting “move all attributes”.
Next, apply Particular to a solid. With the emitter type as “layer”, use the above precomp (the stroke)as the emitter.Steve
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I believe you’re out of luck. I just went through this with a producer who had DVCPro50 footage, and we looked high and low for a codec so the producer could do a “paper cut” on her Windows machine. No luck. We had to encode it to DV25 for the producer, while we hung onto the DVCPRO50 footage on Mac. Not the best way of working.
Ask the person with FCP to give you a DV25 rough cut. When he/she finishes the cut, he/she can send you an Animation or Photo-JPEG Quicktime movie.
Of course, if anyone finds an appropriate DVCPRO50 codec for Windows, great.
Steve
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How about RAM usage just before the crash?
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Try effect>time>echo, and mess with the settings. AFAIK, you can’t get a really continuous streak without loooong render times.
Try searching the COW posts & archive on “streak” or “echo”.
Steve