[Todd Gillespie]

Hold shift when you drag.

Cheers,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

As with most good fx, it’s usually a composite of serveral or dozens of fx layered on top of each other.

From a quick glance at the mov and working with particular it looks like, at least, 3 different Particular types.
First a ‘lighting’ effect shooting from both sets of hands.
Second, a ‘energy ball’ where they meet.
Third the falling particles that bounce off the groud using a floor layer and gravity.

One of the things that make it somewhat more complex is the shots is dolly around, so the fx would need to have done using AE’s 3D space and with a comp camera to move with the video camera.

Cheers,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

Hi Chris,

This may not be exactly what you were looking for…but I don’t think I’d use that kind of a workflow? You’re running into issues with HDV. HDV 60i is upper field first, but DV is lower. So that’s one problem. FCP will resize to fit the HDV into the SD sequence, otherwise you’d only see about half of the image.

Since you didn’t get the animations in HD and your footage will look better compressed in HDV, you might want to see if you can author ‘in’ the animations around your footage. Either by using chapter marks and connections or laying it over on the DVDSP timeline.

Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

[TtotheD] “So it sounds like striping into a RAID is sort of pointless unless it is a redundant raid”

It’s just depends on how it’s used, you will be getting a little performance boost by configuring with the enclosure, but you will always be limited to FW 800 speed. If you had decided to jam in a bunch of drives into your Tower with SATA then you could see a HUGH performance boost, but still not that secure. I use a GRaid that’s similar to what you are using, and it’s been very reliable, but I can still push it too far in trying to keep up with SD.

[TtotheD] “Can I put the project files and media on the same FW drive? “
As I said before, I usually do it with my projects, but it’s a good idea to keep a backup on your local HD.

[TtotheD] ” Was this a bad choice? Should I stripe the drives inside into an array. I mostly bought this so that I could use FW 800″
Not a bad choice, especially if your just using SD. Using the enclosure’s hardware to create a RAID is fine. I would stay away from software RAIDs.

[TtotheD] ” know it isn’t a ton of space, but for the small projects i do, it will suffice”
Drives are so cheap now a days (just bought an extra SATA 500gb for $220), definately the more the better.
It’s always a trade off for speed, security and portability. The more speed and security you get, the less portable it will be.

Hope this helps,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

[TtotheD] “-Can I use one drive to store the entire project and media files for each job/client?”

You can, as I normally do, but it’s a good idea to backup or store your project file on another drive. Local HDs work OK.

[TtotheD] “Of course, the RAID would not be mirrored or anything”
Then why are you doing it?? You don’t gain performance and increase your risk of drive failure by a factor of 3x. Unless you’re stripping with SATA? (but you didn’t mention it)

[TtotheD] “Ideally, it is cleaner to use one HD per project, but I could perhaps just offload the projects to a drive for storage at the end?”
Backing up projects depends a lot on your postproduction and $$, but since it’s not really feasible to backup media (even DV 25 to anything less than a half dozen DVD-Rs) the best backup is good organization (which it sounds like you have), labeling your original footage, and keeping a backup master.

[TtotheD] “…so just keep in mind the ease of travel.”
I’d buy a ‘reliable’ FW drive (or several) and a Pelican case for traveling around.

Cheers,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

Edmond,
AE has a great stabilizer, you just don’t understand how to use it.

Here’s a tutorial by Andrew Kramer, he shows exactly how to use AE stabilizer.

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=1&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/kramer_andrew/sky_replacement/index.html

Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

Just to add-

We incorporate a ‘bug’ with all of our programs and it’s a 10-15min render for an hour. I use a pct file, not a PSD, so it’s not rendering a nested sequence like it would with a PSD. It may not make any difference in render time, but it’s a little cleaner. If you exporting to compressor, FCP doesn’t need to render anyway, it would just add to the render time.
Tom is correct-system, drives, and software will matter. Back in version 3.5, it was an hour render for the same thing that takes 15 now.
Aja’s new card has a live hardware HD/SD keyer for compositing bugs, so you can add it as you digitize-then it’s already part of the video.

Cheers,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

Hi Enzo,

I’m not sure what you’re going for…but if it’s just some basic shapes, you can use Invigorator pretty easy in AE.
Adobe bundles it with any AE Pro purchase since 5.5(?).

FWIW

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

Hi Matt,

Usually when these type of effects are going to be used, the production will shoot the same shot, one with the ‘thing’ and one without the ‘thing (person/car/cantaloupe/etc)’ – then when they need to remove the ‘thing’ from the shot they will use the shot without the object in it. So instead of a big hole, you’ll have the same background.
Andrew’s tutorial works because (if memory serves) because there is part of the video that doens’t have the sign.?

None the less-From the sound of it, you probably were moving when you shot this, so not only is it subject moving, but your background is changing every frame. Not fun. So you can ‘try’ to roto out the car, then try to mask in the matching background. But you may not even have the same background to cover up every shot.

Although the viewing public is going everymore accustom to seeing rotoscoping effects, it’s still a very sophisticated and can take a long time to make it look good.

Hopefully someone might have a good idea on something else you can try, but it would be my recommendation that you find a different way to acheive what you want. Either through editing or different fx.

Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

Hi,
copy and paste your panned audio channel into the next audio layer, so you’ll have 2 audio channels with the same audio. It should boast the sound to what it would have sounded like while recording.

Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production