FX Programs and Plugins
 

Does anyone know of a program or set of plugins that would allow me to create animated grids, random numbers etc for FCP and/or AE? The grids I have in mind usually appear on military themed productions. My primary use of such a program/plugin is for animating maps and creating DVD menu FX.

Thanks,

Pat

This all can be done in AE. Search for How-To videos. I have seen them but have not used them in production so I can't explain how to do it. Actually, I think the random numbers might have been from lynda.com but I can't remember for certain.

I've barely scratched the surface on AE, but you can generate random numbers this way:

Create text box, enter a number. On the timeline panel, select TEXT and open it; select Source Text. go to Animate>Add Expression in the tool bar. An expression line will appear in the timeline panel. Right-click the arrow- in- the -circle icon, select Random Numbers > Random(). This will generate continuously varying random numbers with a decimal and a lot of trailing numbers. Or select Random (minvalue,maxvalue) you can specify, or example, (1,6) and the numbers will vary between 1 and 6. I haven't figured out how to make it limit to integers, but there probably is a way.... The grid I think you could draw by making a new layer and drawing the grid or importing a Photoshop image of the graph. I'm just a beginner at AE, maybe someone more experienced can amplify this.../Battle Vaughan

Thanks for the advice