sjt » Tip

A tiny FCP tip

sjt — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:10:17 +0000

I had this issue the other day where I had at some point deleted the sound that accompanied a clip from a timeline. The quickest way I found was the ‘match frame’ (shortcut: f) command. Just put your playhead on the start of the clip you want to get the sound back from and hit f. Then the viewer loads with the source clip (not the clip from the timeline) with the appropriate in and out points. Then you can either hit f10 or use your preffered method of inserting thing into your timeline. And there’s your clip with sound.

I found this extremely useful when I had to recover the sound from around 100 shots. Then I pressed the down arrow key, hit f, f10 and repeat.

A really nice post on using GTD for animation

sjt — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 10:18:35 +0000

Jason Schleifer wrote a really nice post about GTD and some ideas about how to use it for animation.

He’s also got some nice posts about using gtdagenda.com and other nice stuff. Check it out.

Replace layers in a composition in AfterEffects

sjt — Mon, 18 May 2009 11:56:17 +0000

I found this tip somewhere and thought I’d share this as the first in hopefully several posts of the “post a week ‘othon”.

To replace a layer in a composition with a new item from the project window select the layer to be replaced in the composition window. Press option and drag the item from the project window and drop it on top of the selected layer in the composition window. Simple.

This preserves everything you had done to the first layer. So this saves you the hassle from dropping in the new item, copying animation, effects and transforms.

I don’t know why I didn’t know before last week.

Add 360 to keyframe values

sjt — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 22:08:06 +0000

Here’s a little mel snippet that I found occasionally useful while animating, all these commands do is add (or subtract) 360 from a keyframe value – which is perfect for those rotational values that need to come down (or go up).

Anyway, to add 360 degrees:

keyframe -e -r -vc 360;

Subtract 360 degrees:

keyframe -e -r -vc -360;

I’ve found this useful in certain cases (gimbal lock?). And hopefully someone can find this useful as well.

Maya’s built-in calculator (sort of)

sjt — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 03:38:29 +0000

Just a little Maya tip here if you have Maya 8.5 or later.

If you need to make some calculations and don’t want to go find your calculator of choice you can use Maya to calculate stuff for you. First, make sure you have python active in the command line (bottom left text field).

If it says MEL, just click it and it should switch to Python

Then you just type in what you want calculated, for example if you type in “4+4″ and then hit control-enter, then the results pops up in the command response window. Easy.

IMPORTANT NOTE
To use Python as your calculator you have to remember that if you are using division remember to type the number you want to divide as a decimal number (like 5.0 instead of 5) otherwise you’ll get a rounded down result. 5/2 gives you 2 and 5.0/2 gives you 2.5. This obviously doesn’t matter if you are adding, multiplying or subtracting.