Converting HD – SD motion graphics question

[Kevin Camp]

well the resizing is easy since your maintaining the 16:9 ratio, create a widescreen pal comp, drag you footage in and then layer>transform>fit to comp and that’s good to go.

so i guess the question is if you want to conform the frame rate by slowing the original footage (and preserving every frame) or forcing the 30p to play at 25p (losing some frames, but preserving speed). this may be a per clip decision.

if you want to preserve every frame, just chose file>interpret footage>main and change the frame rate to 25… simple.

if you want to maintain the speed, you might check out andrew’s framerate converter tutorial. he has a preset you can download, or you can download a simplified version of his preset that at http://www.mercuryjones.com/aepresets.html.

for rendering, i would set to render using the lossless animation codec, rendering straight with alpha if any of the footage is keyed.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Darren Edwards]

Cheers for that Kevin,

I actually recommend Kramer’s tutorial to other people,
myself. 🙂

Frame rates, pull down etc. I’m good with, but downcoverting
HD-SD within AE, and doing any pull-down, I haven’t seen
covered at CC (or anywhere else) yet. What I’m also interested
in, is how to not suffer the same HD render times once the
HD footage has been converted within a SD project.

I’ve got the plugin but haven’t used it yet.

Darren.
Director, X-GF Media

myspace.com/xgfmedia

[Kevin Camp]

you shouldn’t have to worry about any pulldown, unless andrew rendered everything in 24p and then added to the pulldown to get 30i, but i can’t believe he would do that. although, for you that would be better, once you removed the pulldown, you’d have 24p and that would be an easy decision to reinterpret as 25p… but since i’m pretty sure his footage is 30p, i think your heading in the right path (although there may be better plugins to change the frame rate, but timewarp isn’t bad).

now, the hd render times… i assume that there must be some hd comps in the package too, that you are wanting to convert to sd? you may need to make a decision about how you are going to convert the frame rates for all the clips (at least all the clips in a given comp), since they will need to match the newly converted comp.

i think duplicating the hd comp and then precomping the footage layers in to individual precomps (leaving attributes in the original comp). then you’ll need to change the indivual precomp’s to sd comp settings and ‘scale to fit’ the footgage to the comp. then you can prerender all the precomps.

you should now have all the footage for one of the hd comps rendered and replaced as sd footage… change that hd comp to sd settings, and you may need to change any solids to fit he new sd comp size too.

you can make a decision at this point about how to adjust the frame rate. set your sd comp setting to 25 fps… now, you can simply apply the ez framerate converter preset (mentioned previously) to each clip to conform the 30p footage to the 25p comp, or you can set the interpret footage settings for the sd clips from 30 to 25 (if the comps loop, you will need to adjust the lengths of the sd comps to match the new lengths of the slower sd clips).

either way, your new sd comp should render much faster than the hd comp.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Andrew Kramer]

The Frame Rate is actually: 60 fps Paint Splatter and Ink FX, 30 fps TV Noise. The videos are all progressive.

Well, I’m not sure it is necessary to convert the frame rate to anything but the native one. These elements are meant to be used graphically, so as long as you conform them to your project at 25fps that should be fine. You can import the folder (file import, choose “import folder”) and interpret all of the elements at 50p or 25p. Then save the project and import this project to any work projects and save the time of interpreting again.

Now if you are concerned about the frame size and the slowness of 720p in standard definition work, I can understand why you might resize but I personally like to have the freedom to scale the media up.

Then again, can give me an instance where you would need the elements to be re-rendered to a specific format? My thought was that you would simply interpret to the native frame rate of the project.

If you really wanted to thought a straight conversion of the video on a 25p time line would look fine because of the 60p. You will easily have all unique frames and minimum time offset jitter.

Good Luck,
Andrew Kramer
https://www.videocopilot.net

[Darren Edwards]

All great advice. Cheers guys.

Darren.

myspace.com/xgfmedia