[Terry Mitchell]

Never mind. Operator error. I forgot to hit the “Make Active” button. My bad. Sorry. Thank you for the patience, though.

(I’ve only had the program since it first came out. Sheesh!)

[Terry Mitchell]

I think I’m having trouble articulating the situation. When I apply the Increase Brightness emitter to the layer with the snow, it appears as a square area that brightness everything within the square leaving everything outside of the square as is (just the way I want it to do), but I want the square area of increased brightness itself to be conical shaped, and changing the emitter particle shape does not appear to affect the affected area in the square. When I animate it, the square area of brightness moves along staying a square area regardless of the change to the emitter shape.

[Terry Mitchell]

Thanks for the prompt reply Alan. I kinda thought that’s what was meant, and I tried that. But what I’m missing is how to get the area affected by the emitter to be something other than a square, which changing the emitter’s particle shape didn’t do. Of course, I may be misunderstanding. Wouldn’t be the first time.

[Terry Mitchell]

Was there something else supposed to follow …”and then” in your post?

I hope so because I’m stuck. I do have the Increase Brightness emitter, but I can’t get it to do anything more than appear as a square area. I’d like to make the area affected by the emitter more of an ellipse, or even a cone (like a flashlight beam), but all I get is a square area (albeit one that does exactly what I want it too as far as the lighting effect – I just need to to be something other than a square area affected).

[Terry Mitchell]

Hiyas, Aharon! Your right, been a long time.

Things… well my day job is still a struggle for survival, but I’m having a blast in my spare time still trying (operative word: “trying”) to do animations. Got one clunky one (A Tribute to Godzilla) on YouTube (Search words “Poser” and “Godzilla”), another one (a children’s story called “Little Frogs”) that’s making the animation festival circuit (actually won a couple of awards), and too many WIPs to keep my sanity.

The purpose of my posted question is that I’ve been asked to animate a short (about five minutes or so) children’s Christmas story for “release” next year by a charity foundation. They’ve lined up some “name” (but definitely non-Hollywood) talent for the voices, so I’m trying to live up to their expectations regarding animation.

[Terry Mitchell]

Well, I updated the Nvidia 6800 drivers, and Premiere 6.5 and The DV500 settings all seem to be working now. Still get some sporadic blinking of some Premiere windows when I move the mouse around, but the clips are showing up properly in the Monitor window.

But event this has given me cause to think about your suggestion to dump the Pinnacle DV500 and Premiere 6.5 in favor of Premiere Pro 2.0.

My system is several years old, but has new (and expensive) hard drives (all my internal and external drives are SCSI based, and I can’t afford to just dump them), video card, power supply, etc., and eveything is working OK. So I don’t want to replace it all (and I like operating under W2K instead of XP like all the new system come with). Plus, I do not want to have to replace a gazillion GBs of other programs from scratch. So I’ll keep what I have for now.

But, having said that, I would consider pulling the DV500 card and replacing Premiere 6.5 with Pro 2.0. But a couple of questions first:

1. The DV500 did add functionality to Premiere 6.5. Is Premiere Pro robust enough that I would not benefit from having something like its Avid Liquid replacement, or would Liquid add features that I would find useful with Premiere Pro?

2. The project I am in the middle of; could I continue it in Pro, or would I have to finish it with my current DV500 and Premiere 6.5 programs intact first?

3. I have older versions of After Effects (5.5), Photoshop (7) and a bunch of addon programs (Continuum Complete 2.0, Deelerium, Boris FX 6, etc., etc.). Would these kinds of programs get along with Premiere Pro, or would I lose some functionality if I didn’t update all of them (which I cannot afford to even consider at the moment)?