After Effects - can you help please?

[Steve Grisetti]

Oh, you're going to make it hard for me, eh? Okay.

Tell me more about where these sparks originate and how large. (As large as the moon?) And do you want them to appear independent of the background or as if integrated in the action?

Also, how would you like it to time with the movement of the plane?

(Sorry. I tend to ask a lot of questions. Just trying to get a handle on your vision.)

[Chuck Engels]

I was thinking it was supposed to look like a tinkerbell trail behind the plane, something like the Gliding Star Video background
http://muvipix.com/products.php?searchp ... =0&btn.y=0

Which by the way has a transparent background so you could make it coming from the back of the plane
That would be the one step easy method, you can also use Premiere Elements to change the colors of the gliding star.

[Chuck Engels]

Ahhh, now a little better understanding.
Making the letters will be tricky

[Steve Grisetti]

Yeow! What was the codec you used on that file, Shrimpy!

I can't use it in After Effects and I can't even find software that will convert it!

[Shrimpfarmer]

Not guilty my Lord. Midnight will no doubt answer that

[momoffduty]

The codec is CUVC and couldn't open it either. Made a test in AE. The moon should be round and not oval. It took 15 min to make the title and I spent the last 90 min trying to get the moon to translate when compressed to stay round. Gave up. Would like some help getting projects out of AE.




Used the scatterize effect and keyframed position and scale.

[Chuck Engels]

Would like some help getting projects out of AE.

What do you need help with Cheryl?

[Chuck Engels]

The codec is CUVC and couldn't open it either.

Yes, that is a CanopusHQ codec in an AVI wrapper. 1280 x 720 16:9 according to GSpot.
I don't have the codec either.

[momoffduty]

I made the moon round in AE, or it appears to be round in a NTSC widescreen comp. But on export it looks oval. Rereading my book and think I should have the comp button on "toggle pixel aspect ration correction". When that is on the moon looks oval. So should I have that on when drawing a round shape and then it will stay round when exported?

[Chuck Engels]

I'm wondering about the aspect ratio when you Render and Export.
What setting are you using?

[Bob]

Canopus HQ is a proprietary codec. I haven't checked to see if there is a free decoding only codec for that. The one that can encode and decode is not free.

Since I couldn't read the file, I faked one just to try it out. I used the Particle World effect to get the twinkle trail and used scatterize on the text with a linear wipe. It still needs to be tweaked a little.

[Bob]

Cheryl,

The toggle pixel aspect ratio button is for previewing in the monitor window. It has no effect on the export. Toggling it on in a rectangular pixel comp will help you to more accurately guage whether you are drawing a circle or ellipse and what the appearance will be. Because of the difficulties of judging things, if the comp is busy or complex and what I'm doing, I'll create a comp using square pixels and do my drawing in that and then place that comp in the non-square pixel comp and let After Effects take care of the conversion. It's pretty flexible. The comp you place on the render queue needs to have the proper pixel aspect ratio for the type of export.

[Paul LS]

I have the Canopus HQ codec I could convert if required. Alternatively you can sign up at on the Support page at http://desktop.grassvalley.com/home.php and download the Canopus Playback Codec Pack.

[Midnight Blue]

Sorry to have caused problems with the codec. I'm trying out Edius 5 at the moment so the codec I used which has been rightly been said is the CanapusHQ codec, It's the only one I could use to keep the file size small enough but not lose to much quality.

I was playing around with something last night and came up with this. It's the plane hitting the moon that causes the sparks, they twinkle down to make up the letters just like filling a glass with milk it starts to fill up from the bottom and works it's way up the glass but it's letters filling up with sparkley dust. If that makes any sense. Here is my YouTube demo of what I was able to do without After Effects. I don't want to put anyone to any bother if what I'm looking for is a lot of work.

[Steve Grisetti]

Very nice, Midnight! That's kind of the effect I was going for.

If we can get that codec issue straightened out, I'd still love to take a pass at it at some point.