Motion Blur Musings

A fellow user recently asked about problems he was having with motion stutter when slowing down 24p (24 frame per second, progressive scan) footage. This led to a series of musings about using motion blur - including some new options in After Effects CS3 - that we thought would be good to share.

Adobe/MAXON Power Integration Tour

We have long been fans of Cinema 4D as a 3D package for motion graphics artists, both for its feature set (including the powerful MoGraph module) and its very tight integration with After Effects. We focused on this integration in Chapter 38 of Creating Motion Graphics 4th Edition (an excerpt from that chapter can be downloaded here ).

Last year Adobe and Maxon did a joint tour touting this integration. They had so much fun, they’‘re doing it again this year. The first event was at the January 2008 DMA/LA meeting; the tour proper kicks off February 26 in San Francisco - see the full list of cities and dates below.

Pardon the Interruption: UPS Musings

We’re having the hardwood floors in the office refinished. They brought in a huge electric sander that didn’t even have a plug; they wired it straight into the circuit breaker panel. Needless to say, every time they turned it on, the lights dimmed.

This brings up the subject of battery backup power for your computer workstations, commonly known as a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). In short, you should have one on each computer, keeping it and your drives alive when the power blips. You can’t work all day off of them (unless you have a truly huge one), but they’ll keep you up long enough to hit “save” - rather than suffer through a data loss.

We used to have UPSs in the 450 to 650 VA (volt-amp) range. They were fine for our Mac G3s and G4s. Things weren’t so rosy when we started getting multi-processor G5s a few years back: One power blip, and everyone was dead. We’ve had to move up to supplies with at least a 950 VA rating. Higher ratings mean longer running times, plus more future-proofing for when you buy an even more powerful (and power-hungry) computer in the future.

These beasts are a lot less expensive than they used to be, especially if you buy refurbished models. We get ours from UPS For Less, where used units are dirt cheap - roughly $100 for a 1000 VA unit (normally $500+) is a common price. Replacement batteries (which you will need every few years) can be had from a number of places; just Google them.

Here’s a dark secret about most UPS devices: The power they output is not as “clean” as the outlet on the wall; they fake the sine wave of the alternating current. This isn’t a problem with computers, but can cause noise in sensitive audio devices. If this is an issue for you, look for supplies that say they have a “true” rather than “simulated” sine wave output.

The content contained in our books, videos, blogs, and articles for other sites are all copyright Crish Design, except where otherwise attributed.

Welcome to Creating Motion Graphics

Welcome to the Creating Motion Graphics blog on ProVideo Coalition! We’re very happy to be here, and look forward to using this new forum to share with our fellow motion graphics artists tips and trends that we think might be useful or intriguing. We will also be posting an archive of many of our past articles and columns which contain a wealth of advice and techniques. And on occasion, we will be posting our musings on the state of the industry (such as in the rest of this entry, past the “more” jump).

After Effects 8.0.2 and gamma issues

Adobe has released an 8.0.2 update for After Effects CS3. Its headline new features are support for Mac OS 10.5, as well as for P2 media. There are also the expected array of bug fixes. What’s been getting less press than it deserves is a change in the way it handles color management with respect to QuickTime files.

External Drive Cables

While on the subject of external disk drives (see the previous post on LaCie power supply issues), problems with data corruption are also often caused by drive cables. There’s a few ways to cure them.

The most obvious problem is a bad cable. The free cables that come bundled with drives are often chosen because they’re the cheapest, not because they’re the best. For mission-critical applications, we like cables from Granite Digital. They were pioneers of higher-quality cable in the SCSI days, and we feel comfortable continuing to use them with FireWire.

Before you rush out and buy new cables though, there’s a chance they’re not bad - they just live in a bad neighborhood. Make sure you route all of your cables away from any power supplies. Those “wall warts” and “power lumps” create electromagnetic interference which can corrupt the data signal.

Also make sure your cables are passing along all the signal they possibly can. Applying a common audiophile technique to computers, we always apply contact cleaner to the connectors on drives or computer cards when we install them. Something as simple as “TV Tuner cleaner” from your local Radio Shack may help. We personally prefer the CAIG DeoxIT products, available from places such as Amazon and Markertek. These cured many a drive problem for us back in the bad old days of SCSI drives.

The content contained in our books, videos, blogs, and articles for other sites are all copyright Crish Design, except where otherwise attributed.

LaCie Power Supply Tips

We own several of the LaCie Big Disk Extreme external hard drives (view on Amazon), which is part of their “d2” line. They provide RAID 0 speed in a very quiet enclosure, which is important to us. We use the FireWire 800 interface, which we find to be faster than internal SATA in many cases.

However, others have reported problems with these drives failing. One problem is no doubt heat. These drives are tightly packed with a small fan, so they’re going to need a little help to keep them cool. This means try to place them with good airflow all around, and not buried inside a hot enclosed space. We tend to place them on the back sides of our desk (again, to further buffer the noise, but also to get them away from the hot computer), and run their FireWire and power supply cables out under the desk to them.

Another problem has been pinpointed by fellow user Danny Grizzle. He has found that LaCie’s d2 and Big Disk drives can have an issue with their power supplies. They supply 12 volt and 5 volt lines to the drive. However, the 5 volt line may drop in voltage with age. If it drops too far, the drive will become increasingly unreliable until the drive eventually dies.

Free 7-day Passes for lynda.com

Sorry for the blatant plug, but there’s a payoff: A free week of as much online video training as you can watch!

We’ve been getting into creating online video training, focusing on specific topics and techniques rather than creating long-form courses (that’s what our books are for). Our current titles are available either pay-as-you-go through Toolfarm or to subscribers of the lynda.com Online Training Library.

If you’re not currently a lynda.com subscriber, and are curious to check them out before signing up, you can try them out for free for seven days by clicking here. Feel free to pass this link around. In addition to After Effects, they offer training on a variety of 3D, DVD authoring, NLE, and business applications - even tutorials on operating systems.

For those who are considering creating their own tutorials that they’d like to make money off of, we’ve been testing the waters for the past year trying out a couple pay-as-you-go services in addition to lynda.com’s subscription model, and - with all due respect to the excellent folks at Toolfarm and other places - lynda.com has been the hands-down winner from the content creator side. We’ve found them to be a great company to work with, and we plan to be doing a lot more with them in the future. We’ll keep you apprised as we release more titles, or if our opinion changes.

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