[Walter Soyka]

[Heidi Kumao] “I’m using CS5 on a MAC and I’m trying to figure out how to import someone else’s animation presets. Is there an import “button?” If I manually drag them to the AE applications folder/presets folder, they don’t show up.”

See Animation presets overview and resources. You may need to click on the Effects & Presets panel menu button (down arrow and four horizontal lines) and select Refresh List.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Matthew King] “My problem is that as I’m trying to render out the final product (after everything is re-linked), it starts to render but then stops after a few seconds and just says ‘failed’ and doesn’t give me an error. I’ve tried different export settings and I still get the same problem.”

Are you using the render queue? What render settings and output module are you using?

What about your system? OS, version of AE, processors, and amount of RAM? Have you tried disabling OpenGL and multiprocessing?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Geoff Roughface] “I’m trying to create some simple graphics but I want the text to behave and come in different… I was wondering if there were any free solutions to my problems? Using a mac and CS4”

Check out text animators. Very powerful.

There are also many text animation presets included with AE.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[walter biscardi] “So as of right now, no Davinci is not supported by AJA and we have installed a BMD HD Extreme 3D card in one of our machines to test Resolve.”

From one Dutchess County boy / Newhouse alum / long-time Kona user named Walter to another, do you have an opinion on whether BMD’s up/down/cross-conversion is comparable with AJA’s?

Thanks,

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Bob Zelin] “If you have any specific questions about the Cache-A, just ask !”

I’ve got three:

How does it handle backups larger than included hard drive?

What metadata is available in the searchable user-interface?

If you have happened to have also used a BRU-based solution, how do they compare?

Thank you, Bob.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[simon zehentner] “until now i always worked with chroma keys for live production. but now i have to set up a key for graphics with alpha channel and i don’t really now where to beginn. so if someone could tell me with which key i can mask pictures with alpha channel in general and maybe even on a panasonic switcher in particular i would be very thankfull.”

You can self-key based on luminance (this is called a luma key) just as you do with chroma-keying. This is usually used to knock a graphic off a pure black background, but has a very limited range of transparency.

If you have separate key and fill sources, you can use a linear key. This uses the luminance of the key source to control the transparency of the fill source. Areas of the fill where the key is white are kept; areas of the fill where the key is black are eliminated; shades of gray in between allow partial transparency.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

I helped design an event last year with mixed LED walls and projection screens. Our on-site LED programmer was able to adjust the LED wall to remarkable consistency with projection. We occasionally spread content across both systems, but for the most part, we treated the LED walls differently as an intentional design choice. Both approaches worked well.

One other technical issue to be aware of is resolution — your projection systems and LED walls may have different resolutions and physical pixel sizes, so you’d need to be aware of this upfront.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Tim Wilson] “…the days of Final Cut and After Effects being enough to land a job are way, way over… All kidding aside, it comes back to the same thing we speak about again and again here – if all you have are production skills, forget it. You’ll be stuck with monkey work forever, if you’re even lucky enough to get that. Among many other things, you NEED management skills, if for nothing else, to manage up.”

Tim, I couldn’t agree more. I think this goes to the heart of the issue — just knowing which buttons to press is not a differentiator anymore.

[Tim Wilson] “The only “adjacent” software besides Camtasia et al that isn’t a core part of Final Cut Studio, the Adobe Production Suite, Sony Vegas, Avid Media Composer, etc. is Adobe Captivate, a drag and drop tool for creating Flash-based ePresentations. In other words, PowerPoint made of Flash. Frankly, it’s a great tool for creating animations that explain things in your video. A lot easier than learning Illustrator and After Effects.”

I’ve never used Captivate myself, but I was under the impression that there’s more it to it than that: simulating custom apps, testing the user interactively, integrating the modules back into e-learning system content management systems, etc. E-learning is a whole discipline in itself.

One of the problems in our industry is that we equate knowledge of the tool with knowledge of the craft. Knowing FCP won’t make you a great editor, and knowing Captivate won’t make you a great trainer.

To get back to the original subject line — perception and exactly what is wrong with our industry — I think that perception is what’s wrong with our industry. There’s a huge subset of industry professionals who are actively creating the misperception that our tools do the work.

We need to frame our work in terms of the skills we have and the value we add, not the tools we use to do it. See Mark Suszko’s What do they call you? thread above for some examples of how people are working to fix the misperception, explaining in their titles how they add value.

If you wanted to move from cook to chef, you would never pitch your proficiency with ovens to a restauranteur!

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

You mentioned you shot SD — if you happened to shoot this on DV, you can use FCP’s DV Start/Stop Detect feature.

If not, software like Scene Detector can analyze your video clip and notch it at the cuts.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Charles Wannop] “So my question is – “What about Tape?” Is it still an option? Is it affordable?”

Yes, tape is still an option. Now that everyone is acquiring tapelessly, we no longer have camera masters to rely on for re-digitizing old projects, so there’s a lot of renewed interest in data tape backup. As for affordability — I suppose that depends on your budget!

A lot of production companies are using LTO4 (or the newer LTO5 format, released a couple months ago). Cache-A Archive Appliances are boxes that all of the work for you; if you’d prefer to roll out your own hardware, BRU is a popular software solution.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events