Tag Archives: good

01/03/2012

Gained a year!

By Seamus

So I’ve gained another year, which I guess if I were a tree means I’d have another ring inside me, which should I be spliced in half would show my years. But I don’t really want to test similarity, instead I’ll stick to the bags under my eyes or wrinkles in my brow.

But this got me thinking that I started this site about a year ago. Technically, I’d been using “SilentWisp” as a business name for projects for years, but this site itself came to be sometime in February. But, its officially didn’t come until I changed the name to something that made more sense and registered my first web domain!

So if WordPress’s records are right, “StudioWisp” reaches 1 year old on the 17th this month! So I guess I should do something special for it, because if not for this site pestering me in the background scene to keep doing work, moderating the spam que, and leaving its pages as a reminder for why I started work as a graphic designer, I’d probably be sitting in a cubical taking calls from people who’ve forgotten which AV leads plugs into what (which admittedly, I sometimes confuse myself on too).

Now, I’m not sure how to thank the site for these things, but I have an idea. In some cases, mostly on Facebook and Google+, I’ve posted under “StudioEntity” or something similar along those lines. Soooo, what I’m thinking of doing is giving that ‘entitiy’ I keep posting as a face! Which means tracking down some old folders I had when working out concepts for the site and seeing if that can give me any ideas, but you can expect it’ll probably have something to do with Wisp’s, or maybe I’ll go for the classic one-eyed floating fluffy green critter like thing?

I’m also planning to vamp up the theme on the site.

On an unrelated note: Tales of Thyilos is once again on the lookie for people who’d like to get a first hand chance to play the game before the next Beta is release. The current version is still up, and this time I’m almost %100 sure it can be played through without crashing at some point… Never-the-less the next release may crash, but only because I’ve deleted most everything in the default database in order to build it from scratch. That’s kinda why I’m hoping to find people who’d like to help and make sure it’s playable.

People who want to be an official tester get crediting for their help in the game and may get a sprites version of themselves made and put into a secret room I’m making in the game, OH SPOILER!! 😉 I’ll be leaving a trail of breadcrumbs in posts that’ll hint how to find that secret.

If you’d like to help, you can comment on this post here, or send an e-mail to smeadth.studiowisp@gmail.com

Now, it’s time for me to go, for there is a far-too-large-for-most-humans-to-eat-by-themselves-pizza with my name on it, and if birthday rituals exist, then I’m sure gorging on it is mandatory!

Till next time, have a great day (or night) everyone!

~Shea

( ps: one more important caviar to mention, I set up a livestream account for Lucid Flame. Follow the link here to read more )

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11/11/2011

Export a CS5 AE file for use in CS4

By Seamus

There’s the odd trouble that when you work in After Effects CS5 at one time, then have to go to CS4 later, that you’re stuck at the start again, since there is no backwards compatibility.

Technically, there still is no way, however, I stumbled upon a helpful way of half-doing it. There’s draw backs, but if you’re in a rut with your AE CS5 not going, and you need to finish some work now, you can save a little time by following this method.

http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/981933
The instructions are located at the bottom of the page.

Basically, what you’re doing is Exporting your file for Premier Pro.
Then when you open CS4, you just Import a Premier Pro file.
You’ll get a menu to choose what o import, but you’ll most likely be wanting the whole composition, so leave everything as default.
And hey presto, your works in CS4.

HOWEVER.

  • Doing this does not restore your key frames.
  • You will need to relocate your files without the help of the magical “After Effects has found X files that were missing” popup.
  • Naturally, any effects or plugins for CS5 and up that aren’t in CS4, wont be available.
  • Need to replace solids.
  • Masks vanish.
  • I found I needed to my effects back.

Now I did say there’s drawbacks, and looking at it from this point of view, if you had a large project with lots going on, you were better off starting again. But here are the time savers, and sometimes every second can count.

  • Maintain the placement of all items within a composition.
  • Comp settings will remain exact.
  • Retain all folders you may have stored items in.
  • Missing files will have “volume/(the directory your file was in)/ in their names, so if you’ve got large folder hierarchy of work, you can still locate it all.

That’s about it… it’s a sad list compared to the draw backs, but if you need to start again, but for whatever reason will be set back from CS5 to CS4, then this is just about the only way. All in all, the process takes a click of the finger to do, and once you sort out relocating files, you may have saved yourself half an hour (but it all completely depends on just how complex your Project management system is, and how complex the layout of say, cut footage sequences could be, since crop these down is unchanged though the transfer).

On my final note: If you’re even having to consider doing this to get work done, then I know your pain and feel sorry for you. So best of luck with meeting your deadline!

(ps: if you do test this, and discover something that I hadn’t noted, or perhaps something different occurred, please drop a comment here, and thanks in advance).

~Shea

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