[Aaron Keast]

Ah, that sounds like it would work just fine, I forgot Photoshop could do that. Perfect and straightforward.
Thank you much!

[Aaron Keast]

It looks like a straight-forward, key-lit with a black background. When ever the graphics pop up behind him, there’s a camera change, and he appears to have fill lighting added to him to give him the left side of his face and next some “flesh data”
Other times it looks like a good motion tracking job, the kind where you manually delete the spaces in between his fingers and the halo effect.
Then of course you’ve got relatively fancy pants keying system, something like the best a weatherman gets multiplied by 50.

Judging from the ligting changes, I’d say they green/blue screened him when elements were flying around him. A little spit and polish from people who make a New York living doing it every day. No problem for them.
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In my inexperience I’d say give something like that a shot. But test looong in advance. You may actually find that cranking a couple knobs in the color keying / Color Replacement, you could come with some interesting looks. They wouldn’t look like that, though.

Oh, and those sectioned areas with the different video, I’m about to do a much less elaborate bit with some videos playing in the corners over the credits. Should just be a matter of importing the video clips, resizing them, and key framing them to appear, play, then fade. At least I hope to God that’s about how easy it’ll be. Adobe may be listening, though…

Good Luck!
-Aaron

[Aaron Keast]

At this moment it’s rendering pretty much everything else I’ve changed, so I can get a photo before I hit the sack, sorry.
Let me see if I can describe it more clearly.

Basically it looks like the photos are there, clear and dandy, except three or more are laid on of them, their opacity turned down a bit. If there’s a pole in the photo, there’s now two pulls. Buildings have a “ghost” that poke out around them. And on either side (not top and bottom) the translucent photos lead and trail, like the photos’ sides were cut and pasted on with %50 opactity. I’ve tried using 2 samples per frame, no motion blur checked, speed, shutter angle, and every combination.

What really baffles me is that the first few photos in the line are about a good as I could hope for, and then these artifacts and phasing get worse and worse in a matter of 20 seconds through ~16 photos.
Also to note, the photos were all brought into Photoshop and made to have all the same size and color profile.

At this point, if I can’t figure it out, I’m going to shrink all the photos, and have them scroll by in an “exploded” line, all move straight horizontally, but spread out over the sequence. They would be small enough that graphical anomalies wouldn’t be serious, and everyone watching would just know their photos of buildings and take it at that.

This all appears to be linked to the simple act of moving the photos from out of frame, in a line, through and out the other side. Everything else I’ve down in AE has worked without issue.

Another idea I have is to have the frame rate extra high, like 120fps, then import that into the 24p timeline. Would that help clarity, then boost the speed of the clip up to the only 30 seconds I need it for? Any pitfalls to that?

Thanks again!
-Aaron

[Aaron Keast]

Fantastic! Thank you very much for explaining that. That info was exactly what I was looking for.
You guys are life savers!

Cheers,
Aaron

[Aaron Keast]

The guys paying me for the video would like the photos as clear and smooth as possible. What’s the best shutter angle for quality/smoothness?

Also, you mention samples per frame, are you referring to two pass rendering, or is this something else?

I’m also going to try rendering with Animation codec, that ought to improve it. The results I was getting rendering with a DV codec seemed to be fine, with the exception of these scrolling photos.

Thanks for the quick reply, I’m going to continue digging around.

[Aaron Keast]

But why the white box…

I did try installing Magic Bullet, a copy that came with my DVX, and it’s for PPro 1.5 , and was giving me messages about not being ‘serialized’. First time I’ve ever heard that.
Anyway, I ended up just staying all night re-doing everything from the ground up.

I think Adobe out to replace the 2 million and 1 vague error messages with a giant middle finger that renders over the video.

[Aaron Keast]

Haha… aw crap…
Seeing as I’m kind of playing by ear with AE (it’s been about five years since I’ve touched it) I expect to do everything in the most tedious manner possible, and that sounds pretty tedious. But that sounds like what I’ll need to do!

Ok, have some work ahead of me…
Thanks for the prompt response!

[Aaron Keast]

Yep, I actually stumbled across what I was looking for about an hour ago. I knew it was going to be something easy I was just not seeing.

Regardless, thanks for the reply. I’m a little behind on the project than I care to be, and all kinds of stressed out.