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Problems laying off SD footage created in AfterEffects.
We recently upgraded a couple of older machines to MacPros with Blackmagic Decklink HD Extreme cards inside. For the purposes of this post, I will just refer to my setup since the other workstation is primarily for capture/compression. Both seem to have similar problems laying off footage, however. Here’s some brief technical information about the setup:
Computer:
Mac Pro (2 x 3 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon, 6 GB RAM, Mac OS 10.4.9)Storage:
3 TB SATA-2 RAID (2 Sonnet Fusion enclosures with 10 x 320GB / 7200 RPM hard drives)Connection to computer:
SDI in/out (embedded audio) and RS-422 for deck controlOutput device:
Sony Digital Betacam DVW-500 (NTSC, non-drop frame)Blackmagic Disk Speed Test Results:
Disk Read Speed Results: 424.4 MB/s
Disk Write Speed Results: 363.1 MB/sIn the Blackmagic Deck Control application (BDC), I have deck control, can capture any SD footage from tape, and can layoff anything I capture. I also don’t have problems laying off QuickTime files from either of our AVID | DS systems.
When I load my QuickTime (QT) file created with AfterEffects (AE) file in BDC, it fails to set an out point (which always was a tip off in previous versions that the layoff would fail). When I attempt to layoff this footage, I get the following error:
“Put clip failed
The selected clip could not be put to tape.”The easy setups for Blackmagic NTSC-8 and 10 bit both give this error. I’ve tried switching the frame rate of the deck in BDC to 30 instead of 29.97, but that doesn’t seem to help.
So to backtrack a little bit, more about the file I’m creating in AE. Basically, I’m just trying to layoff some Digital Juice JumpBacks for use in the edit suites–they are motion graphic loops, no audio. I made a 720×486 pixel comp, 30fps, and put the footage in. The project settings are set to NTSC 30fps non drop. I can render and play back, but not layoff.
Through some further experimentation and scouring through the info windows in QTP, it seems I can get output from AE to layoff to tape, but not without major hoop jumping and some show stoppers.
1) The QT movie must have audio (even if it’s silent), and I have to resave it in QuickTime Player (QTP) with Little Endian order. AE can output little endian, but QTP always reports these renders as big endian. Do I *really* need to have audio if there is none? I’m pretty sure we could layoff footage with our old Decklink card without audio.
2) Currently, I must render the AE comp at 29.97 to get it to layoff, but here’s the catch: my 6m44s of footage becomes 6m43s18f which sounds a lot like drop frame to me… Some of the motion menus I design are meticulously set to loop or transition out on even seconds. This is just not gonna fly for that kind of work.
3) The whole deal of having to rerender a render is a lot of wasted computer time and disk space.
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.
EO -
2 Replies
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This may be pertinent:
NTSC is _always_ 29.97 FPS. Drop or non-drop refers to frame numbering, not frame rate. Possibly this is “confusing” the BMDC?-jeff
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In case anyone is having the same problem I was, I wanted to mention how I got this to work.
Jeff, yeah, I know that NTSC is 29.97. There is a difference between frame rate (how fast a frame is played back on tape) and the number of frames per second of timecode though. Is there not 30 frames in 1 second of timecode? The only difference is that drop frame doesn’t have certain timecode numbers, but from what I understand, all the frames are there. In AfterEffects, creating compositions at 29.97, or nesting a 30 fps comp in a 29.97 comp makes 5s of video less than 5s duration. The only real solution is to output 30fps and let another program convert that to 29.97.
In any case, my motion graphic elements are not synced to audio. All I care is that all the frames I created are layed to tape with the correct duration. For instance, a sequence that has a 5s transition in, 1m loop, and 5x5s transitions out. Again the nesting method in AE was making those durations shorter. And creating the comp at 29.97 wasn’t working either.
As I said in my previous post, rendering out a 30fps comp and bringing it into our Avid DS systems would maintain the correct durations of the different parts of the sequence. So why can’t the BMDC application do that?
So, the fix is to layoff this AE created footage via Final Cut Pro. I’m getting the duplicated frame at the beginning of the sequence as is talked about in another thread on this forum, but 5s in my AE footage is 5s in FCP timeline and is 5s on tape. Which is why I posted this thread in the first place.
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