Help with fade in and pause

[Bexley]

I'm transferring some old Christmas home videos to DVD to give to my family for Christmas this year, and I've managed to create some opening credits using After Effects that look like the text is blowing away like snow. (It's a very cool effect - the tutorial I followed is here. (http://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=1&page=http://www.creativecow.net/articles/eriksson_emanuel/sand/index.html))

Problem: The clip is 6 seconds long @ 29.97, and the full text appears in frame 1. The blowing effect begins on frame 6. What I really want is for the text to fade in over a second or so and then pause for 3-4 seconds before blowing away. I know that AVISynth can do a fade in very easily, but is there a function that will fade in, duplicate the first frame for 3 seconds, and then allow the clip to play normally to the end?

I suppose the obvious answer is to just do it in After Effects, but I've never used it before and I'm really unskilled with it, and I'm on a tight deadline to get this finished before Christmas. I'm comfortable with AVISynth, so if I can make it do what I want that's the way to go.

Any help much appreciated.

[Ebobtron]

ef = YourSourceClipFunction()

blank = BlankClip(ef, length=90) # uses "ef" as template 3 seconds long

blank + ef # join the clips

FreezeFrame(0, 95, 96) # replaces 0 - 95 with 96 when called

FadeIn()

Not very elegant but should work if you play with the numbers

good luck
Ebobtron
http://members.aol.com/avsfilmcutter <- shameless plug :)

[Bexley]

That's exactly what I wanted. Many thanks. ;)