[Keyser_Soze]

Polax wrote:

Do u have a solution?

This is how I guess it was done. At least this is the method I use when doing similar stuff. Go into the warper. The tracker marks are there for easier tracking of the warp mesh (wonder if it isn’t better to have no tracker marks at all, now you have to get rid of the marks on the face and that is probably harder then to track a face with no marks). So start with adding a warp-mesh, the fewer points the better, you will understand why later. When you are satisfied track your mesh. It is a xy track only, so you won’t get rotation and size (you can handtrack size and rotation in the animation menu). Or do it manually by adding keyframes to your mesh. You will probably have to add keyframes to get it “tight”. The fewer keys the better. When you are satisfied copy your front source data to the front destination. And use that copy to start warping the head. You will have to adjust the mesh at every keyframe. It can be hard to get an even result and the head will look as if it was made of jelly if you are sloppy. That is why you will add as few keyframes as possible. Don’t give up. It may take a while to get it right.
That is how it was done in the god ol warper. But you can forget all of that because of the shiny new distort node. The technique is the same but you will have better tools at your hand. You will have a complete tracker with position, rotation and size. And you have a flexible spline based tool to make the source and destination for the warp instead of the mesh in the old warper. This will all make life a bit easier for you. With better tracking and a nice spline-tool you will be able to get your keyframes to a minimum and now you understand why that is a good thing. Happy warping and good luck!

[Keyser_Soze]

rego wrote:

Keyser_Soze suggested this but I cannot change the motion from linear, but as it is an end credit and has to be linear.

No, I think you misunderstood me. The motion should be linear. If not you will definetely end up with unwanted artifacts.
If things work fine with discreet edit, why not go for that?

[Keyser_Soze]

GHSU3D wrote:

those are some very vaild points, thanks alot.
could you expline why using photoshop is a must when dealing with vector graphics?

Well, simply because FFI can’t import vector graphics so you have to rasterize them first to a format that discreet soft understands, tiff or whatever. And I prefer photoshop for that. Of course you can export directly from illustrator but you have more control in photoshop.

[Keyser_Soze]

GHSU3D wrote:

Hello all, I have a question regarding the use of Photoshop with smoke.
There is a new feature in 6.5 allowing import of psd Photoshop files.
What is the advantage of using Photoshop over smoke when working with images because smoke seems to offer superior tools then Photoshop either way does it not?

I know the question might seem a bit foolish, the reason I am asking is because
The other day I was told to mask out a bunch of buildings out of still images to be used in a composite in DVE. They required some masking duplicating of cretin elements within the image and so etc.
I told my boss I thought it would be easier to do in Photoshop.
For example when, a cretin visual element looked out of balance n required me to duplicate half of it n paste it to create a more visually pleasing element I had to go through DVE create another composite processes the image bring it back to the other scene.
While in Photoshop I would think I could do this much easier.
Also as far as masking goes wouldnÂ’t Photoshop masking tools be better then using smokes through the keyer?

Thanks in advance

P.S.
Maybe I am mistaken about all this. I just feel that my boss expect smoke to be some kind of magic realtime solution that its not. I donÂ’t think itÂ’s proper to go into it further. But if someone with some experience wouldnÂ’t mind sending me a privet massage or email. I could use some advice from someone with some experience.

Like Jeff says, it all depends on what you want to do. Photoshop has nice tools that discreet systems lack (for example I really like the healing brush tool). So photoshop might be the way to go if you’re working on a still image with a lot of layers and a bit of retouching. And as we know photoshop is a must when going from vector graphics to a discreet system.
But as soon as you are working with sequences or you predict that you will have to do a lot of changes later on, think twice before you choose photoshop. Switching between systems is not always that fast and it might get complicated with a lot of layers that you have to import and update. Especially when sitting with a client that wants to make changes. Now!

[Keyser_Soze]

rego wrote:

Well I just checked my workspaces, the options you told me are the default ones and i have not changed them. i.e the field dominance of my comp is “upper first” and in my render “no Fields”. Actually also played the .mov on my computer and i can see the same jittery motion i was talking about on my progressive monitor. so i dont think its much of a viewing problem, i think combustion cannot handle something rolling across at a little fast speed. In fact just playing the animation directly in c* without rendering also gives a jitter. I think you should try to do a quick text roll and you will know exactly what my problem is, Thanks

I wouldn’t trust your pc (mac?) and definetely not Combustion to play back your animation at proper speed and without jittering. Take it to a genlocked system and play it.
Is the motion linear or not? If so that could cause problems…
I have done scrolling texts in combustion both with and without fields and have had no problems. So it can be done.
I know that certain speeds and textsizes can be problematic but have been able to fix it by either adjusting speed and size or give the text a slight y-blur.

Cheers.

[Keyser_Soze]

ursfranzen wrote:

hi,

flint 9 on linux sometimes crahes when saving a reel. it seems it only occures when the reel already exists and is overwritten. then the complete library is not available anymore, when you try to get access, flint crashes again. this is very, very ugly! 👿 any bugfix?

urs franzen

We have recently bought two flint/smoke on linux and have had a tremendous amount of problems. And it is buggy to say the least.
The worst problem of them all are clips that becomes corrupt and impossible to process in any way. We have lost MANY ours of work because of that. Thank you Discreet!!! The latest news from them are that the problem is due to one of their bigger features “clip history”. So until they have fixed that the advice is to disable clip history in system prefs. More problems that i have found:

– batch – seems very unstable
– projects defaulting to interlaced although project is started as progressive
– project in 24 fps mode although it is started as a pal 25 fps project
– problems with the wacom board
– and more but I dont remember them all, will get back when I think of something

But I have to say that it is a very nice machine to work on… when it is working. But think twice before you buy this machine it needs to mature a bit I think. Any others that have had similar or other problems? Please share…

ps.
some tips on trying to recover corrupt clips:
Try to archive them. It could work but I know sometimes it did not.

One edit with a lot of effects in it was not possible to open or process in any way. It was made in flint. I tried everything but it did not work but…
we found that if it was opened in smoke and brought to the timeline and hard commited (could only be commited in the timeline) it could finally be output to tape. All the effects were lost but at least the material was saved, phew.

[Keyser_Soze]

foetz wrote:

tech specs compared to space. it is compact.
however, would have to kick my onyx due to space 😆

Well, it wouldnt be a big loss. We are kicking our onyx the next few days and I think the only one interrested in it was a guy that wanted to rebuild it to a fridge. But it has served us well for a very long time so it feels a bit sad to let it go, sniff.

[Keyser_Soze]

foetz wrote:

it’s the world’s best computer today.
http://www.hpce.nec.com/572.0.html

Well, I guess you would like to run inferno on that one, hehe. Wouldnt be much space left in your livingroom though, although they call it “amazingly compact”. 🙂

[Keyser_Soze]

foetz wrote:

Keyser_Soze wrote:

ah sorry, didn’t want to sound cynical.
of course flinux is far better than some wintel solution but i thought it was more like a general discussion. regardless of what somebody has or not.

No problem.
Maybe a bit off topic… but above you were referring to the Nec Sx line. What is it?

[Keyser_Soze]

foetz wrote:

oh yes, it is!
just a matter of money 😉

That is somehting that you obviously have a lot of and I don’t. So I’m happy with flinux but of course I wouldn’t mind working on a tezro or whatever you have. Not everybody are as priviledged as you. Congratulations.

[Keyser_Soze]

nanuk wrote:

i know, but you can´t scale to infinity, it becomes unsharp. and illustrator in afx, scale till u drop!

Yeah, strange isn’t it? Seems like Discreets integration of ai files could be better. It’s almost like vector graphics are rasterized in the actual pixel format it has in illustrator and not continously rastered as you scale the graphic. I’ve found that if you scale the image in illustrator to a very “large” format you can get past that problem. You can then scale the image in combustion without going psd and still have the possibility to edit vectors in the paint module. Or is there some button that I have overlooked? I know in AfterEffects there is a switch where you can force rastering of vectors to update. Haven’t seen that in Combustion. Anybody else have the same prob? Cheers.

[Keyser_Soze]

I checked the the 2d3 site and found that it was boujou that had “Shake node export & shake lens distortion plugin”. I haven’t used the feature myself so I can’t tell you how it is working exactly. But I guess it goes something like this… you will need something in the actual footage that you for a fact know is a straight line. A table fo example (or a grid) and point that out so the software then can calculate how much the straight line is distorted. That info can then be exported to shake. Here is a link for boujou:
http://www.2d3.com/jsp/products/product-overview.jsp?product=10

Cheers.

[Keyser_Soze]

foetz wrote:

indeed it’s a strange evolution.
seems like nearly all companies try to push x86/linux by force.

funny thing that some home-user machines have reached high-end levels we had a few years ago in some
areas and many people cheer and call it high-end or similar 😆

sadly a big number of those companies neglect developing the REAL stuff at the same time.
seems like innovation and real new things are not popular these days.

I wouldnt exactly say that an ibm intellistation was homeuser but I understand what you mean. It is not high end either although it is slowly getting there. But for it’s price and performance it’s totally OK to work on most projects unless you are into a lot of HD and film.
Do you really think developing flinux isn’t “innovation and real new things”? I think that if Discreet doesn’t give us high-end on home-user machines they will find themselves overrun by other systems going that way. I believe it’s dangerous to just stick to tremendously expensive specialized hardware when you can get enough performance from a “desktop”. Highend will of course still have it’s niche with 2k 4k and so on. Bigger isn’t always better 😀

[Keyser_Soze]

pink_panther wrote:

how do i remove perspective distortion with the stabilizer or tracker? there are only 2 points to eliminate rotation (z axis) scale and positioning errors. but how do i remove rotation around the x axis caused thru a wide angle lens? i also tried some distortion filters but without satisfactory results. can u help me?

You cant do that in the tracker or stabilizer. Ideally you should have been at the actual shooting and place a grid in front of the camera so you could measure the lens distortion. Then you need a warper, like the one in shake or flame. Maybe you could use the warper plug in combustion as well. If you don’t have a grid to analyze the distortion it’s getting trickier. I don’t do this every day so I might be wrong on this. I tested the 2d tracker Monet once and it had some kind of “automatic lens distortion aware” features. Maybe you could use that, but it was an expensive piece of software. I’m not sure here but I have a faint memory of having seen some program (was it bojou or monet? dont remember) that could export shake distortion nodes to fix lens distortion. Maybe someone else knows more? Good luck anyways.

[Keyser_Soze]

patdawg wrote:

Also, we just got smokeHD on a 4-proc 800MHz Tezro, and it is a hell of a lot faster than the Octanes or Linux machines.

No kidding! How can you even compare Tezro to Flinux? They are two different philosophies. Not everybody are working on highbudget Hollywood productions, you know. I think it’s great that Discreet finally has realized that there are cheaper hardware out there and that it’s getting more and more powerfull. I don’t expect it to compete with sgi (yet) but I believe it is the future.

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