[Steve Roberts]

You must talk to the person who will be receiving your piece. Usually it’s an editor who will lay off your digital files to tape. Find out exactly what they want from you in terms of codec, frame size, file type, delivery medium, levels.

The levels thing is important. In NTSC-land, normally you’d run the levels effect in an adjustment layer to change your blacks to 16 and whites to 235, though it’s often preferable to choose 16 blacks and 235 whites as your elements if the rest of your material (say, footage) is already safe. This means you don’t dull down your footage by running levels on it. Ideally, you’d have a scope downstream of your graphics to test whether the levels (and saturation) is safe.

Speaking of saturation, one way to keep that safe is to use the “key out unsafe” broadcast safe effect after the levels effect and hue/sat effect in the effect stack. This tells you when colours are safe or not. You can make the hue/sat effect pick certain colours to desaturate. Red is often problematic. As for yellow, it’s best to tweak it a bit towards orange to make it safe, rather than knocking down its saturation towards yucky green.

You also need to make sure your important images are within the action safe area, and your titles are within title safe area. TVs cut off the image around the edges, unlike computer monitors.

For more details, pick up the Creating Motion Graphics books by Chris and Trish Meyer.

That’s my 2 cents. Anybody else?

Steve 🙂

[Steve Roberts]

The motion is tied to the magnification of the comp window. At 100%, the arrow key moves it one pixel. At 200%, 1/2 pixel. At 50%, 2 pixels.

Sorry, but I don’t know of any way to make it move 1/2 pixel at 100%, for example.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

If frame 1 is the same as frame 300, you should render from frame 1 to 299.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Maybe all the elements are 3D layers in one comp.

If not, and the comps all have transparent backgrounds, you’ll avoid seeing a perspective shift from comp to comp if you collapse each comp so its 3D layers are in 3d space … not a big flat plane.

… if I understood your question.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

1-Make a comp the size of the layer to be blurred.
2-Place a black solid over a white solid.
3-Blur the black solid so the white creeps in around the edges.
4-Drag this comp into the main comp.
5-Apply the compound blur effect to the desired layer, using the aforementioned black/white comp layer as the blur map.

There you go. Youmight need to tweak some settings, but that’s the theory.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

I read the Meyer books and did some Total Training. More importantly, I experimented on my own. Also, check out the COW tutorials.

Mess around, combine effects in the effects stack (effects palette), apply effects twice, drag the settings to weird values.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Import the needle into AE and drag it into a comp.
Double-click the layer in the timeline to open the layer window.
Make sure “anchor point path” is visible at the bottom of the layer window. Click the little button at the bottom to make it so.
Move the little circle in the center of the layer to move the anchor point to the root of the needle, away from its center.
Close the layer window.
Animate the rotation property of the needle, and it will rotate around the root of the needle, because that’s where the anchor point is now.

For more stuff, search the help.

Steve 🙂

[Steve Roberts]

Regarding the “vertical” spot:

Since it looks as if everything is a flat plane, I’d say it could probably be done in AE with only Trapcode’s 3D stroke for the ski lift.

Are the camera moves too tough for AE, requiring the use of a 3D app? Maybe not, especialy if each axis of the camera is tied to a null, allowing you to move the camera along each axis independently. That may not have been done, of course.

The growing trees could be done with animated masks.

Aside from that, it’s all about style and motion, not software tools.

my 2 cents,
Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Animation is best.

Next (IMHO) is Photo-JPEG. For file size reduction and neglgible quality loss, set quality to 89 or 94%, at the highest the slider allows.

Microcosm ( at digitalanarchy.com ) is great for file size reduction and 16bpc rendering.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

The waveform display seems to slow things down. Have you tried making it visible after zooming in on the timeline?

Then it has less info to display.

Steve