Posts by Repetition

I don’t know if it’s possible to do or not (legal or whatever reasons), but I’d really love it if projects would come with their preview videos. Without having to do a RAM preview (etc), they come in real handy sometimes as a reference when editing a project.

I know Flashato’s personal site (http://www.flashato.net/) allows you to download a copy of the preview. For each of his that I’ve bought I’ve done that and saved it into the project folder. (thanks, that’s much appreciated)

The other side is having a large number of projects (21 I’ve bought now), and forgetting what some of them look like. I always come back here to use the previews but it would be easier to just have the flash preview sitting with the projects).

Just a thought…

The only real problem is the slowness of AE. I just rendered a 1920×1080p project that lasted only one minute but took 4 hours to render (6 lights in use, etc). I’m currently on an i7 @ 3.8Ghz with 12GB of 1600Mhz DDR -3. You can’t really do much better than that without jumping up to an expensive work station. The difference between 720p and 1080p can often mean hours of render time. But, the real problem is how much a complicated project slows down your edit time. 12GB does help a lot even though AE CS4 is only a 32 bit application. Each core render thread of AE can use 2GB of RAM , and 12GB will peak at max usage within seconds of starting a render.

No way around it though – 1920×1080p. Here’s hoping CS5 has a nice speed boost.

I can’t stand 1920×1080. HD broadcast quality is all 720p/1080i. With a 50” LCD , most people from 10 feet away can’t really even see much difference. If I had a choice, I’d take everything in 1280×720.

Render Speed, 3D Fonts, a Font Pallett like Premiere has, a better camera system.

Thanks Uniquefx, that was really kind of you.

What I ended up doing for a nice title:

I bought this loop: http://videohive.net/item/hd-blisfull-field/19469

I masked out a nice picture of my Grandfather with a little feather to make it look like it was right behind the grass next to the tree, then added “In Loving Memory” with his name and the years right under. Then I used Optical Flares on his picture with the center about where the sun was to cast rotating light rays across the photo. That was actually the first time I used Optical Flares and it made me very happy I had it paid for and installed already.

Yeah, thanks. I was thinking about that and also the pages project (which I already bought): http://videohive.net/item/pages-ae-cs3-project/45150

Most of it should be a motion slideshow, but a couple of projects in the middle could really break things up and make it look a lot better.

For intro I was thinking about maybe buying the Scriptool project (http://videohive.net/item/pages-ae-cs3-project/45150), I’ve never had to animate text like that before and it might look nice. Something like that for the text and maybe some flourish animations (got the Videocopilot.net Flourish pack), with some other elements to site on the title for a good while without it being boering.

I never thought about it before, but you’d think there’d be a big “In loving Memory” opener project demand. I’m really having a hard time working on this today. It would be a lot eaiser if it was someone I didn’t know.

Thanks!

My grandfather passed away on Friday, the Funeral is tomorrow. I was looking around for a nice memorial video title to save time but I really haven’t seen anything. I would picture it as something that lasts a minute or more with a single picture frame and some nice surrounding animation (flourishes, etc) “In loving memory … John Smith 19xx – 20xx”.

There’s so many projects to look through here now, if I’m missing anything, I’d love to hear about it. I could do something nice in a couple of hours but I am really not in the mood. It’s hard just going through the pictures.

Tip

One of my dirty secrets is I always turn to PowerDirector for making motion slideshows(http://www.cyberlink.com/products/powerdirector/overview_en_US.html). Even though the program is a bad (horrible) low end video editor, I’ve never found a faster or easier way to generate motion slideshows. I look at the $100 price of the app as a plugin fee just for being able to make custom motion slideshows very quickly. I tried looking around for a Premiere/AE plugin that would do the same thing for a long time, but only found one worthy plugin and it was around $400. Andrew Kramer actually has a tutorial for making them in AE but it’s all manual and probably takes more than three times the amount of time.

Anyway, it saves me a lot of time. You can see how it works here (starting at 2:30): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn7ryNahhFs&feature=PlayList&p=8A13EC311BFD6173&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=2

If anyone has a better way of doing motion slide shows from inside Premiere or AE, I’d love to hear about it. I always thought it was sad a $100 low end video editor had something to make it easy when $1500 worth of AE/Premiere has nothing at all that isn’t doing it all by hand manually.

The one video using it against particles was very interesting. Trapcode starglow on steroids it looked like. I haven’t got a chance to play with it yet, but that’s what I’m most curious to exeriment with right now. If it really does act as a working stack effect on Particular and Form, my mind will go numb with possiblities.

You have to love his price structure and the qaulity UI. If my memory is right, he hired a new programmer just for help with the UI. He chould have gotten away with charging three times as much. You have to respect that.

The shatter and multiple copy methods both have really nasty flaws. I can’t stand using either.

One of my dirty little secrets is a $29 program called Xara3D. You can make really hot looking 3D transparent titles in a couple of minutes. The animations aren’t so great but they can add a little 3D life to the titles. I think I’ve had it in my tool belt for around 10 years now. http://site.xara.com/products/xara3d/features/

Otherwise, if you can stomach the price, Zaxwerks is the best way to go. You get 3D titles directly in AE with AE key frame animation control. So overpriced and such a horrible UI though.

($700) http://zaxwerks.com/proanimator/index.shtml

At least in the past, the only way to do it was to call them (so they have the “opportunity” to talk you out of it). I’m sure they have internal propaganda that states this is for the benefit of the customer too. Corporations…

I haven’t sold my 360 yet, but I haven’t turned it on in a year either. I totally switched to the PS3 . Mostly because it’s an all-in-one multimedia system that I use all the time anyway, but also because I got to where I couldn’t stand the monthly/yearly Xbox Live fee. I’m very glad Sony decided to go with no monthly fee. Either company should be making enough for content packs and arcade games to not need a monthly fee.

I think I may actually sale or gift the 360 soon. Dead Rising 2 isn’t going to be exclusive (PS3 now) and I can play Mass Effect 2 on the PC.