[Yossarian]

Sorry about interjecting here, but this is at least loosely related to something I’ve been wondering about lately. I searched the forum for the first part of this thread to see if it would help, but I couldn’t find it.

I run After Effects in English, but occasionally I work on projects in other languages – mostly Spanish and French, with all the accented fun – and I was surprised and disappointed to find that AE7 apparently doesn’t support the tried-and-true Windows method of inserting special characters by using Alt+Numpad combinations. Does anyone know if this feature was simply forgotten, or if there’s something I need to enable? I really don’t feel like having Windows’ character map pulled up all the time so I can copy/paste.

Thanks for any help you can give me; sorry again if this has been off-topic.

[Yossarian]

What do you plan to do with the file once you have it in movie form – import into a video editor or leave it the way it is? Typically you don’t need an alpha, just RGB, unless you have areas where you want something underneath your movie to show through.

Keep in mind that with a 10-minute movie, anything of decent quality’s going to take up a large amount of space. You can pump your quality way down by upping compression/switching to the .wmv format for your final movie (pulldown menu at the top when you click on your output type in the render queue) if you’re only using this for the Internet; that’ll take up far less space.

[Yossarian]

I should probably add a bit of detail: the effect I’m going for is that of a pie chart with a bit of 3D depth – a piece of the pie then flies out and makes its own chart. Not difficult – but adding 3D extrusion is proving to be a bit of a headache.

[Yossarian]

The only way I know of is to use the shatter effect. The process involved to make static 3D text is a little convoluted, but shatter is one of the few After Effects effects that has a true 3D engine. You can find a video tutorial (and demo of final product) at XtReMe. It’s the third from the bottom.

[Yossarian]

Thanks for your time and advice, Sean and Chris. I do have one question, though: Most of the work we do in After Effects is exported into Avid to be inserted into a project, so is the the D1 resolution or SDI quality provided by a Decklink card truly necessary for the preview I’d be doing (mostly for color temperature anyway)?

We do have After Effects 6.5; I just wasn’t aware of its monitor output capabilities since this is the first time I’ve even heard the suggestion that they might let me get my hands on an NTSC monitor to hook up to my computer.

As far as the 3D program goes, the current excuse is that “our projects don’t call for that sort of thing,” but I’m going to keep trying, most likely for 3DS Max if the opportunity arises (unless Cinema 4D has a better animation interface; I haven’t had any experience with it).

Thanks again.