-
Shoot HDV for SD composition = smart?
Hello. I’m looking to shoot in a large back lawn area of an office building. It has alot of birds, the rare squirrel, and the even rarer deer or wolf (fingers-crossed).
I’m looking to get ideally something like a MS shot of the animals. Since they move around so much, I was thinking it would be good to shoot in HDV (Sony HDV 1080i from what I have access to), so that I have flexibility to do fake pan-scans if the animal moves around alot, scaling animations, etc…
Adding some sort of text animation may also be done.I imagine I might need to go hand-held for whip-pans to catch fly-by birds, or squirrels running across the lawn. My tripod control isn’t the greatest. Does AFX have a footage stabilizer? How well does it work? Would shooting HDV allow me to create a better stabilized SD shot?
Delivery is in SD. Does all the above sound like i’m in the right frame of mind? Is the HDV codec robust enough to do animations with? Would transcoding to a different codec (e.g. DVCPRO HD) help? Thanks for any thoughts or advice 😀
-
5 Replies
-
Does AFX have a footage stabilizer? How well does it work? Would shooting HDV allow me to create a better stabilized SD shot?
Not sure I can answer all your questions… but, I’ll give it a shot… AE does not directly allow for video stabilization…however, you can do some stability adjustments using tracking information (…exactly how you would do this would take a tutorial length post… I believe Kramer has a tutorial that uses this method but it does not reference/title it as a stability tutorial directly). The easiest, best and least expensive stabilizing software I have found is Mercalli by Heroglyph (…if memory is correct, it is a plug-in for AE).
Shooting with HD will not create a better stabilized SD shot…only a stable platform and technique will do that…however, HD does give you better options as to how you might be able to enlarge the view in editing to help minimize movement of the shot. Personally, I would spend more time trying to figure out how to pan and zoom smoothly than try and do any software stabilization in post. Good camera work will make for much better video and video editing than any stabilization software could provide.
As for using HD for animation… I don’t understand the question… animation is not video generated.
FWIW Joe Moya
BTW, based on your post… it appears you are going to try an use AE as if it is an editing software… well, it can be used that way… but, it is much more difficult to do your editing than if you used an typical NLE software.
-
[Joe Moya] “As for using HD for animation… I don’t understand the question… animation is not video generated.”
Ah, I think the word I should have used is ‘composition’? I’m thinking of using HDV footage inside a SD composition. The HDV footage area gives me alot of room to play with within a SD frame size, that is what appeals to me.
phillr.blogspot.com
-
If that’s what you want to do, it should work fine. Just make sure to convert the HDV footage to something that’ll play nice with AE before you import.
-
[Gene Gemperline] “Just make sure to convert the HDV footage to something that’ll play nice with AE before you import.”
Do HDV and AE have bad blood between each other? Who gets along with AE? When transcoding, anything I should be aware of, or is it just a simple export? Should my new composition have any special settings/dimensions? Thanks!
phillr.blogspot.com
-
codecs that use temporal (or interframe) compression make ae work very hard, and thus slow it down quite a bit. 2 common hd codecs, hdv and dvcprohd (dvcpro100), both use temporal compression, so generally it s best to convert those over to a codec that uses only intraframe compression or no compression.
so, if you have the disk space, uncompressed avi, lossless (or none) compressed mov or an image sequence (like tiff, targa, psd) would be the best way to go.
if drive space is a concern, you might try photojpeg at a high quality setting (85-95) to avoid too much loss in image quality.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up