Split personality

[Jerry Hofmann]

Shouldn’t need to do anything special with Photoshop files, however the AE files may present some challenges. You’ll need to export self contained QuickTime movies from AE so they will work with FCP on the laptop. An anamation codec and uncompressed QuickTime should do the job I’d think, but you’ll have to render them in FCP probably.

Jerry

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Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D

[Bill]

it should be pretty much seemless unless your switching formats dv/sd/hd….. and so forth. AE sees the codecs installed on the machine so if it was installed on your laptop it would see all the FCP codecs and you could output direct with no rendering. thats not to say the windows machine can’t spit out a usable quicktime.

just press apple-z

15″ g4 1.25
2.0 gb ram
superdrive
lacie 320 bigdisk
fcp hd
lots of mahjong

[Ed Dooley]

Hey Jerry,
I’m speaking with some ignorance here, so please bear with me. Isn’t the Animation codec RGB, so you’d be taking the YUV video, converting it to
RGB, then back to YUV in FCP? In my Media 100 days I always used the Animation codec because it kept the quality of Uncompressed, but at a much smaller size, but I thought I’ve read that you can run into color issues with the color space changing from YUV to RGB to YUV.
Is it possible to install a more appropriate codec from AJA or Blackmagic onto the PC (like DV50 or Uncompressed 8bit), so the AE files can be input
in FCP without changing color space (assuming that codec is also installed on the Mac)?
Ed

[Jerry Hofmann] “Shouldn’t need to do anything special with Photoshop files, however the AE files may present some challenges. You’ll need to export self contained QuickTime movies from AE so they will work with FCP on the laptop. An anamation codec and uncompressed QuickTime should do the job I’d think, but you’ll have to render them in FCP probably.
“

[Bret Williams]

The first thing After Effects does to every single file it processes is load it into RAM as uncompressed RGB for compositing. Everything AE does is in the uncompressed RGB color space. All elements are uprezzed and processed as RGB, rendered, and then converted to your codec of choice. aSo it doesn’t make a differece. If it goes to AE, even if it gets rendered out as a YUV format, there can possibly be a color shift.

[Ed Dooley]

Doh! I knew that (but should have remembered, thanks Bret)!
But, rendering out an AE project as RGB Animation, rather than into the YUV codec it will be used for, is
the best way? It seemed that rendering out directly from AE into the proper codec gains better
results than going from AE in RGB to Animation (in RGB), *then* into YUV in your favorite flavor
in FCP. Still pleading some ignorance here. 🙂
Ed

[Bret Williams]

The point was for cross platform compatibility, not for the ideal situation. Of course the right codec would be the best solution. However if someone was hiring me to make an animation, I’d create an uncompressed or animation codec version and a version in their codec from the uncompressed version. I’d want to give them the highest quality. They might online somewhere else in Digibeta vs. DV etc.