[Walter Soyka]

If you want an actual light leak, Artbeats has some good ones.

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 might check out Playback Pro — it’s a full-featured, Quicktime-based software DDR, which was written by a video engineer.

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 am really happy that Adobe is making After Effects 64-bit. It will make a huge difference in my studio’s workflow and productivity on HD and higher-res projects.

I’m also glad that Adobe is making CS5 64-bit-only, because it will force developers to update their plugins to stay current. If there were a 32-bit mode, I think you’d see fewer plugins go 64-bit, and the entire transition would be much longer and much more painful.

I really can’t understand all the griping on this thread — if you don’t think the new features are valuable for your work, then don’t upgrade! My studio is still on CS3, and we are still producing great work and keeping our clients happy. I’d rather see Adobe pushing AE and its entire ecosystem forward so I can work better; I’d hate to see them hold back development for any reason. I didn’t see enough value in CS4 to justify the upgrade costs, but upgrading to CS5 is a no-brainer for me, for 64-bit AE alone.

My thanks to the Adobe reps for their thoughtful responses in this thread, as well as to the other posters who are keeping the discussion civil.

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]

That’s a good-looking spot, and there’s a little more to this one than splitting out the photos into multiple planes. If you watch carefully, you’ll see that the people in these photos actually move — you can do this with subtle and artful application of the puppet tool.

If this is the effect you’re looking for, there was a thread on the same topic from a couple days ago where I suggested projection mapping as an alternative.

But it sounds like you are trying to make a static image look like a static, locked-down tripod shot, correct? You could add a little grain, but you’re going to need to animate something in the frame to sell the shot, and Michael is, as always, right on point when he asks what the clip looks like.

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]

[Nic Cross] “Hi I need help on figuring out the best setting for Syncing audio with visual cues in after effects. We need to be able to play in real time the footage in order to determine when best the animation should start/happen. Right now we are playing the footage in Avid and getting the timing of the clip to match it to the animation but its frustrating as its too much back and forth and surely after effects can do things in real time with a proxy?”

AE isn’t a realtime system, so you’re already doing this the best way by timing it out in an external program. When I’m working on a project with lots of audio cues like this, I time it out in FCP and note the frame counter where each effect must begin and end.

Your best option inside of AE is to press the period key on the numeric keypad (to begin an audio preview), and then tap the asterisk on the numeric keypad to add a markers as the audio plays.

You can also twirl down the audio waveform (or select an audio track and hit L twice) to use as a guide.

Finally, you might check out Trapcode Sound Keys, which may or may not help, depending on what effects you need to achieve.

[Nic Cross] “And why when I make proxies the audio always disappears? “

When you add the proxies to your render queue, did you add audio to your output module? It’s not there by default.

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]

[Ori Burg] “If I will make my footage a JPEG-Sequence it should fix it?”

It’s the first thing to try. Native HDV footage seems to cause all kinds of bizarre behavior in AE.

The second troubleshooting step is making sure OpenGL is disabled.

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]

Andrea, I would create the shape layer and add a glow. Next, on the first frame, add a Hold keyframe with Opacity at 100%. On the seventh frame, add another Hold keyframe with Opacity at 0%. On the tenth frame, add a final Hold keyframe with Opacity back at 100%.

Now, still on the tenth frame, option-click the Opacity stopwatch to add an expression, and use the following:

loopOut("cycle",0)

This will allow the layer to blink on and off throughout the main comp. You can control the speed of the blink by keyframing those first 10 frames however you like.

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 should search this forum for any post by Dave LaRonde with “Dave’s Stock Answer #1”.

This first thing to try is transcoding your HDV footage to some other high quality format that doesn’t use interframe, temporal compression.

Uncompressed, Animation, Photo-JPEG, and Avid DNxHD, or an image sequence are all good candidates.

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 Lantz] “The goal is to produce video (industrials for clients and our own ‘creations’ for the web and DVD) shot, for now, with a Sony PD-150.”

The iMac isn’t a bad choice at all for DV-based standard def video production.

[Tim Lantz] “I also plan to edit with Final Cut Pro and possibly add professioal 3D animation and audio mixing software.”

Here’s where it gets dicey — once you start doing 3D renders, I think you will find that 2 cores is not enough. At a minimum, you might think about the new 4-core iMac (with 8-16 GB of RAM), but of course you’ll prefer a Mac Pro here.

For audio mixing, keep in mind that the iMac doesn’t have any expansion slots, so you can’t add a dedicated audio interface. There’s only one Firewire bus, so adding external drives, plus video, plus audio on Firewire might be taxing.

[Tim Lantz] “I just want to make sure I’m investing in plug-n-play hardware that’s capable of running the software right out of the box without giving me headaches– don’t need memory or speed issues.”

The iMac is basically a laptop with a really big screen and no battery. If you’re comfortable on a similarly-configured PC, you should be right at home with the iMac. If you have a desktop PC now, you might think about going for the Mac Pro after all.

Since portability is a concern, check out iLugger for the iMac, and Benson Box for the Mac Pro.

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 Lantz] “Looking to invest in the iMac (27″, 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB memory, 1TB hard drive) to run CS4.”

Tim, what kind of work do you plan on doing?

My general opinion is that the iMac is not a great primary computer for video pros, because it’s very easy to outgrow. You can’t add expansion cards, and the only upgrade you can make within warranty is adding RAM. I’ve got a dual-core iMac in my office, too, but my Mac Pro runs circles around it in After Effects.

That said, the iMac is an outstanding secondary machine, great for web-browsing, photo editing, and offline video editing.

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