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I’ve used all of the AE plugins for time remapping and if you work at it Timewarp gives pretty good results, it’s built from the Kronos filter from the Foundry’s Furnace collection do it’s got a good pedigree. Twixtor gives good results too and uses standard time remapping keyframes which makes it really nice to set up, ReTimer is nice too. The best results I could get came from the Algolith plugins but last time I used them they were kind of buggy.

All of them work pretty well for stuff like pans but once you get foreground objects crossing a busy background you’ll start to see artifacts and will end up having to roto to get really clean results.

Glennser

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If you just want to break it up and the duration of each segment isn’t that important you could also change the preferences so that output movies are segmented at “x”MB, depending on the codec each section may or may not be the same duration but it would save you having to set the work area and queuing it up 10 times. Of course this is no good if you need the breaks at certain points but if you’re just avoiding big files it does the trick.
Glennser

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Not sure if I get you right but why not precompose the layer before applying the tile effect, you could then scale or reposition the layer within the nested comp to crop off or add borders.
Glennser

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I don’t know if I’m going to be able to explain this right but I’ve had better luck using the CC Power pin plugin than the after effects standard version (it’s included too). Basically I apply it the same as the standard corner pin but use two instances of it. At the first frame of the effect apply move the four points to the correct position on to the corners of the picture frame, it’s usually best to turn the effect off while doing this so you can see the points right. When you have them in the right place duplicate the effect and turn it on the first instance, check the “Unstretch” box, what it does is stretch the four corners of the frame out to the edges of the layer, essentially cropping and distorting it to just the area you need to pin, this effect does not need to be keyframed in but it’s important that the four corners have exactly the same starting values as the second instance which is a normal tracked corner pin the second pin pushes it back into the picture frame. I know it seems like a lot of work but it gets around the problem of corner pin effects using layer co-ords not comp co-ords (in your case probably not a problem, it is if you need to corner pin something that’s a different size to the composition, messing up your tracking info), you’re on the right track with the nulls, I usually link them to the effect using an expression. (Another sweet trick is using the “value +” expression to “parent” effect points to tracking data).

Hope I explained this right, in the hundreds of hours I’ve spent corner pinning I’ve found this method the best, nulls or small solids are great too because you can see their motion paths, spot wobbles easier and are much easier to adjust than motion tracking channels, don’t try to track all four points at once either, do one at a time and use nice labels so you don’t get confused.
Best of luck.

Glennser

PS I know this method is weak in that you’re stretching up to squash back down again but it doesn’t look too bad, epecially if you add some reflections or reduce the contrast to make it look more like a photo than frozen video.

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[Keith Koby] “My bet is that it has more to do with latency of the hd codec vs. sd codec you are using.

Go to A/V settings. Go to device presets. Duplicate your HD device control. Change the ETT latency setting from the default 4 to 5 frames. Then save your setup as a custom setup with the new device control.

Check to see if your laybacks are then consistently frame accurate.”

I’ve tried everything with the D5 with no luck, the odd thing is that there doesn’t seem to be a linear relationship between the playback offset and the delay on tape, I don’t have the numbers written down here but sometimes a difference of one frame in the playback offset would result in no change on the tape and sometimes one frame difference in the playback offset resulted in two frames on the tape. Oddly while I was playing around changing the offset it did seem somewhat consistent, only when I went to do a longer test did it go off again. I couldn’t get it dead on using the playback offset as it seemed as though I needed to enter a half frame offset and couldn’t do it, is there some trick entering less than a single frame?
I agree the delay could be the codec but why is it so random? I haven’t been able to tie it to restart, disk speed, other apps running or anything, all I want is consistency, I know I keep saying it but I have no problem with workarounds as long as they work, not knowing where fcp is going to dump stuff on tape is very frustrating.
Glennser

PS I’m testing FCP 6 right now, to early for results but my heart jumped when I saw this
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/124/866331?

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This sounds great, are they all intel boxes or any G5’s?
Glennser

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We mostly use the gender benders but I’ve also chopped two cables and soldered them back together a few times when it was too late to get one.
Recently I’ve fallen in love with those 9pin connectors with a standard network socket on the back (RJ45?), they really kick ass and we’ve been able to remote stuff over the existing network cables, you don’t even need a soldering iron to rig them, just push the pins through the holes in the same order at each end, I don’t know what the max run would be but we have one that’s about 60ft and haven’t had any trouble at all.
Glennser

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Just want to chime in that we’ve had exactly the same problems with 5 decklink bays here, it used to happen with the original Kona cards we had too but less frequently.
It wouldn’t be a problem if it was consistent but I can’t see any pattern to it at all.
We’re having worse trouble with D5 layoffs, sometimes they’re 3 or 4 frames off.
Glennser

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hdforindies blogged a leak that it’s being discontinued in favour of the Eclipse, he heard the rumour before checking and seeing that it was removed from the website so seems like it’s true.
Anyone from BM got more info?
Glennser

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[Paul Carlin] ”
The problem I am having seems to be related to version 7 of AE where the SPEED of the timeline changes when this (and other similar) plug-ins are applied. This messes up the plug-in which expects a 100% speed clip. Why does AE Automatically (and silently) change a layers speed? Is there a way (Prefs file?) to disable this behaviour?”

Please tell me more about this, is there any indicator that after effects is doing it? I always knew there was something strange going on but could never figure it out.

Glennser