Appearance/Disappearance

Is your actor chroma-keyed?
If so just fade out the opacity..

if not theres 2 options: 1. you can cut the person out (kind of a pain in my opinion) or.. 2. if you lock the camera into position and shoot the actor, and shoot some video w/out anything there, you can fade out the shot w/ your actor and have the one without underneat...


as for your text, corner pin it to the wall (make sure its precomped) I'm sure there's massively large amount of tutorials, but videocopilot.net has one like "grafiti writing" or something.. that might help..

good luck!

-jeremy

Ok I see..

yeah it'll work, don't worry about the slowly part, you just have to make sure that your camera DOESNT MOVE AT ALL
lock it down tight

take your shots
and make sure you get the same shot with no one in frame, just the background

then fade your shot with actors out and have the non-actor shot next layer down, VOILA! done :D

can even put like a flash or zap or.. TWITCH .. any kind of fx you can think of.. or just keyframe the opacity for slow fade or quick pop - anything you can imagine :)

have fun ;)

-jeremy

Well if you got $45 to spend.. I highly recommend "TWITCH" from videocopilot.net .. that thing's pretty darn amazing..

http://www.videocopilot.net/products/twitch/

otherwise a lot can be done w/ just afterfx right out of the box. (Or use a combination of both).

For basic fades, just keyframe the opacity (hit T to bring up opacity, hit the stopwatch, move forward however long you want to tkae to fade, then change the opacity % and it'll animate).

Flashes, you can keyframe a 'curves' effect, or just overlay a colored solid (usually white, but w/e you like) and set the transfer mode to add and keyframe the opacity so it flashes briefly.

There's a few 'transition' effects built in and lots of tutorials on how to make your own.

The limiting factor here is your imagination.

This sounds like it'll be a fun/learning experience for you and you should take as much away from it as you can.

The most important thing about this is that you're happy with the end result.

Let us know if you need any more help with it.

-Jeremy

LOL! that'd be awesome :D

For writing on a wall, just do your writing however it is you want it to look, precompose it, then apply the 'corner pin' effect to it.

Size the four corner points up so the writing looks good on the wall.

Major tip here: the lines on the corner pins box should be PARALLEL to the walls/floor/ceiling - if it's not the effect will die right there and look like crap :( (unless of course that's the idea, but in your case I doubt that lol)

Something I forgot to mention - that works great if the picture isn't moving.. if it is you'll have to motion track it and then apply that data to your text.. if you need more in depth info you can shoot me an email jeremyfabiano a.t. gmail d.o.t. com

-jeremy