[Walter Soyka]

[sam baum] “Is there a way of controlling particle playground so that it starts with a set number of particles and doesn’t emit any more? I’m trying to make a school of fish and so don’t really want more to be produced by the effect.”

Most particle systems use emitters that allow you to specify particles per second. If you want to emit only a fixed number of particles, you have to keyframe the emitter and do a little math.

If you want to emit 100 particles, and your frame rate is 30 frames per second, you can keyframe the emitter to 3,000 (100 * 30) particles on the first frame, then 0 on the second.

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]

[Lou Wirth] “The content consists of Hi res stills and titles created entirely in AE so I am not slave to any video. The playback will be from an AMA video player that plays back from its hard drive. https://www.akman.com/index.php?p=AMA1080p So given this info, what would be the ideal resolution to create my projects? Should I go 1366×768? what PAR?”

According to the page you linked to, the device plays standard DVD files, 720p, or 1080p. It looks like some scaling will be unavoidable: you can either let the device upscale slightly from 720p, or downscale more substantially from 1080p. In either case, you can use square pixels.

Maybe 1366×768 is possible, but it’s not a standard video frame size, and you should plan on testing it with the player.

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]

[Drew Jensen] “I know noise removal is a difficult process and the video still won’t come out too good. So with those expectations when I started, I played around with AE built in removal, then tried Neat Video’s removal and the difference was hard to notice which brings my question here. If a 3rd party plugin doesn’t look any better is it possible it might be something else?”

I like Dave’s suggestion of reshooting — it’s the best way to get good results. I think Neat Video one of the best noise removal effects around, but it’s not magic!

One note on Neat Video — a lot of first-time users don’t read the instructions. If you just drop the effect on your footage and render, you will be disappointed. You must build a noise profile. Some fine-tuning by hand may also improve your results.

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]

[Mark Reese] “Prores is not available there (only lossless) nor is it available to set as a default under Edit > Template Settings > Output Module.”

ProRes is not a default output module — but you should be able to select it by editing an output module and choosing ProRes as the codec under Video Output > Format Options.

See Output modules and output module settings for more.

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]

[Mark Benson] “I wasn’t too sure of what I needed to start practicing and making these. “

After Effects is both broad and deep, and I think you need to get a broad understanding of the package overall before you can really go deep on any one area.

If you’re new to After Effects, I’d recommend the following link, in which former documentation lead Todd Kopriva pulls together some important introductory materials:

https://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2010/01/getting-started-with-after-eff.html

I’d especially recommend Andrew Kramer’s free Basic Training tutorial series.

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]

[Erik Hofmann] “I’ve masked it in, made a pre-comp of two layers of fire to make it look ‘fuller’ and it’s all good on that end. The problem I’m having is that it just looks fake. “

Can you post a still? It’d be easier to give some suggestions if we could see what you were up against.

[Erik Hofmann] “Should I add Glow or Blur to the fire (maybe even liquefy) to simulate the heat coming off of it? would that make it more believable?”

That might help — I bet you could use Turbulent displace.

[Erik Hofmann] “Should I add something to the lights (or a different attack altogether)?”

I bet that re-lighting would help you quite a bit. If the fire had been there in the shot, it would have cast light on objects around it; to sell your shot, you’ll probably want to replicate that effect.

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]

[Todd Kopriva] “We’ve seen lots of problems with Mac OSX v10.6.4 and OpenGL. It’s not just affecting After Effects; it’s affecting Cinema4D, Steam (gaming software from Valve), et cetera. I’m staying away from Mac OSX v10.6.4. My Macs are running Mac OSX v10.6.3 and Mac OSX v10.5.8.”

Todd, is there a place where Adobe publishes recommendations on point releases for Mac OS X and Quicktime?

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]

Got it — David, email me at walter at keenlive.com.

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]

The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from! “4K” can refer to any of a variety of different resolutions, depending on aspect ratio.

[Scott Buford] “From what I understand the only way to playback native 4k material is by syncing 4 playback devices. Doremi recently came out with a standalone 4k playback device: The DSV-J2 with an optional input called MB-4k”

4K playback exists, but it’s entirely limited to the digital cinema market. DoReMi has had a 4K playback device for some time — the DCP-2K4 Digital Cinema Server. Sony has the LMT-100 media server. Both play Digital Cinema Packages (DCP), which require an expensive DCP authoring package to create and encode.

[Thomas Leong] “What source material would be suitable? Red 4K? I have no experience with that. Haven’t even seen one in my life, therefore, is The Red 4K’s output 4096×2160? Would it be the only source material suitable apart from original gfx material from a compositing software like After Effects or Digital Fusion?”

Red’s 4K is 4096×2304. As you may have read, its REDCODE workflow is a bit different than other video cameras.

Film is still around, too — you could shoot film and scan it at 4K.

I’m looking forward to hearing more about your findings!

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]

[clyde villegas] “Thanks, Walter. But do you know of a more affordable substitute that can do the job as well as Camtasia?”

I use and recommend Camtasia on the PC, and ScreenFlow on the Mac. I think TechSmith has a free trial of Camtasia, so you could give it a try and see if you think it’s worth the cost.

I’m sorry, but I don’t know anything about any of the alternatives.

You might be able to rent a scan converter for less than the purchase price of the software — though I doubt it would do as good a job.

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