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3D scene in SD, nested in a HD comp
Ok… hopefully I can explain this properly.
I have designed an opening title sequence using AE CS3s 3D space – (it features layers moving in 3D space, plus a camera move). I originally designed this in a standard definition (PAL) composition, but now I need to render a new HD 720p version out.
Rather than simply scaling up my SD comp to fill the HD one and having my picture soften, I want to be able to render everything in HD, with AE processing the animation natively in HD.
I thought that simply nesting my SD composition into a HD comp, scaling it up to fill the frame, and collapsing transforms would do the trick, but it doesn’t seem to pick up the camera at all.
In other words, my new HD composition has a super crisp picture, thanks to the collapse transformations layer checkbox, but I’m not seeing any of my camera moves, nor depth of field settings from the original comp.
I’ve tried adding cutting the camera out of the SD comp and pasting it into this new HD comp, but the resulting picture is way off as the camera’s animated position properties (from my SD comp) aren’t in relation to the new size of the HD composition… in short, I’d have to redo all my camera animation.
Hopefully this made sense and there’s a button I forgot to click somewhere that some AE saint can help point me toward. Thanks in advance.
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“Don’t Believe the Hype”
– Flava Flav -
5 Replies
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One way would be to Change your Main Comp’s setting to 1080 and increase the Zoom of the camera, but I’m affraid DOF won’t be correct after this.
cya,
Jan
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[Steve Drew] “I’ve tried adding cutting the camera out of the SD comp and pasting it into this new HD comp, but the resulting picture is way off as the camera’s animated position properties (from my SD comp) aren’t in relation to the new size of the HD composition… in short, I’d have to redo all my camera animation. “
I’m really not sure if this will work, but give it a shot.
Create a new HD composition, put your SD comp into this one and don’t scale it yet, enable the 3D switch and collapse transforms on the comp, now bring the camera from the SD comp into the HD comp and parent it to the SD comp. Now try scaling your SD comp up to fill the HD comp, I think it should work.
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
Just a note, my previous suggestion doesn’t work… I’m looking into alternatives but in the meantime I think you’re better off trying to redo your camera animation =/
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
Alright, the closest I can get is as follows:
1) In your SD comp create a new 3D null, its position should default to the comp’s center ([360,240,0] for NTSC, [360,288,0] for PAL).
2) Parent your camera to this Null and copy both the camera and Null layers.
3) In your HD comp drop your SD comp in and paste the Camera and Null in.
4) Recenter the Null to the HD comp’s center ([960, 540,0] for 1080, [640, 360, 0] for 720)
5) Enable collapse transformations on your SD comp.
At this point you should have something that looks exactly like your SD comp sitting at the center of the HD comp surrounded by space… This is where the procedure kind of breaks down. You could parent the SD comp to the Null and scale the Null up, which would scale both the camera moves and the SD comp simultaneously… The problem is that since you’re scaling everything in the scene uniformly, nothing will appear to change.
If you scale the Null independently of the SD comp then your camera moves will increase in size, causing the SD comp to appear smaller.
If you scale the SD comp and leave the camera/null alone then your SD comp will get larger to fill the HD comp (this is good) but the camera moves will not be proportionally correct so the perspective will change. However, this gets you as close as I can figure, so at this point it should just be a matter of tweaking the camera moves so that they hit your marks.
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
Thanks so much for your input.
For now I’ve just placed the SD comp in the centre of the HD comp and turned on collapse transforms and the 3D checkbox. I’ve then added the camera from the SD comp into the HD one, and cranked up the SD nest’s ‘z’ anchor point to fill frame. A similar result to what you suggested above, and the depth of field is off, but the moves are essentially the same as I wanted them. Next stop is to experiment with different levels of zoom & distance on the camera to see if I can improve it….
I just wish I did this in HD to start with – downscaling works a tad better than upscaling! 😛
—
“Don’t Believe the Hype”
– Flava Flav
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