[Zax Dow]

Great explanation of a little-known fact.
An excellent example of creatively using an effect.

-Zax

[Zax Dow]

Great explanation of a little-known fact.
An excellent example of creatively using an effect.

-Zax

[Zax Dow]

Excellent tutorial Serge. I love how your mind works!

-Zax

[Zax Dow]

>>>anytime you want to find a forum specific tutorial, just click on the forum name on the forum’s main page. It’s a link to that library. <<< This is a great tip. Thanks Kathlyn! I highly recommend Eran's Autumn Movies tutorial. It's really well done. He covers lots of good stuff without swamping you with details. Eran is a fun and knowledgeable presenter. Compared with the time and money of taking a college course, the decision to purchase these DVDs is a no-brainer. Go BUY them! Best, Zax

[Zax Dow]

It sounds like you are looking at the RGB without applying the alpha channel.

For instance if you are looking at the final movie in QuickTime Player it’ll show bad aliasing because QuickTime Player doesn’t apply the alpha to the RGB. It just shows the raw RGB. Zaxwerks software always leaves a raw RGB so you don’t get ghosting around the edges (double-pre-multiplying) once the image is composited.

Once you bring the movie into your compositor and apply the alpha it’ll look perfect. Each compositor does it a little differently so which one are you using?

Best,
Zax

[Zax Dow]

HI Chris,

There are only 360 degrees is a single revolution. If you are just trying to do a simple spin loop, then you will be adding 360 for each spin, not 370.

By the way, in a complete 360 loop both the first and last frames will be identical, so you’ll have to render one frame less than the complete loop to make it seamless. If you include both the first and last frames you’ll see a tiny hitch in the animation because it’s playing the same frame twice. For example if you set your keyframes at 1 and 120 then only render 1 through 119. Frames 1 and 120 will be duplicates.

Hope that helps,
Zax

[Zax Dow]

Hi Ken,

Serpentine is having some extra features added before release. We were gearing up for an NAB release date but during the show I got some excellent feedback on how to make the workflow easier. Always being a hardcore workflow kind of guy, I decided that these suggestions needed to be handled sooner rather than later. So this is being done and we should be able to release by the end of next week.

If that doesn’t work with your schedule write to me at zaxwerks.com and we’ll see about getting you a beta version.

Best,
Zax

[Zax Dow]

Hi Randall,

You can lock ProAnimator’s camera to the After Effects 3D camera by turning on the Use Comp Camera checkbox. So the workflow would be to get the Boujou tracking data into AE and have the AE camera use that tracking data to define its motion. Then tell ProAnimator to use the AE camera and viola, you have the two linked together.

Unfortunately I don’t know enough about Boujou to know how to get it’s motion data into AE. Perhaps you know the anwer to that already. If not then a ? on the AE forum will take care of it.

Best,
Zax

[Zax Dow]

Hi Stephen,

Good question. After you apply an Object Animation (whether by picking it yourself or by using the TRY button) you can see the name of the last anmation selected at the top of the Object Animation menu. In the menu you’ll see a few commands, then a line, then a single animation listed by itself followed by another line. This single animation is the one that was applied.

The above technique is fine when you want to find out the name of an animation you just applied, but in your case the problem is that you quit the program. Once you quit that name disappears. So you won’t be able to just read the name off the list. However I can think of a way to do it that should only take 5 minutes or so.

Create a new object such as a primitive. This will make a new object track. Now you can hit the TRY button and see if the animation applied to this new track matches the animation you added yesterday. You won’t have to look at the movement of the 3D objects, just look at the timeline and see if there is the same number of segments and their lengths match. If the animation doesn’t match hit the TRY button again.

Repeat hitting TRY over and over until you find the matching animation. The TRY button isn’t completely random. It will go through your entire object animation list once before it chooses the same animation for a second time.

Hope that helps,
Zax

[Zax Dow]

Hi Gary,

Please check your version number. The latest version is 4.5.1 and it doesn’t have the problem you report. This problem cropped up when QuickTime 7 was released. We worked around the issue and released the change in 4.5.1.

Best,
Zax