[Adam Taylor]

Michael,

David is right …i often have to do a very similar thing with TV commercials. I’m based in UK and all our output has to be 16:9 anamorphic or the broadcasters would reject it.
We often get 4×3 commercials from around the world that need to be converted. Its actually quite simple to do.

I have the timeline set to anamorphic and import the material. Then open the 4×3 file in the Viewer, first i open the distort twirldown and enter 33% into the aspect ratio setting. Then i scale up the size to between 130 and 135% – i tend to give myself a little leeway so i can judge the composition by eye rather than percent.

The good thing about this method is you can move the image up/down to frame the shot better (but not by a huge amount. And whilst you do loose a little in quality, you lose a lot less than you would by deinterlacing.

adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk

[Adam Taylor]

personally i don’t have the answer – never used Max

but you will find some very good tutorials by Andrew Kramer at http://www.videocopilot.net – and i do know he has some which involve Max and AE.

adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk

[Adam Taylor]

if you have the CS4 version of AE, then you could try using the Mocha for AE application that now comes supplied with AE. Its a planar tracker that is much more accurate and forgiving than a pixel tracker such as AEs 4 corner tracker.

I can’t say if it would be better or not but its certainly a fantastic tool to have in your toolkit, and certainly worth checking out.

adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk

[Adam Taylor]

looks to me like he takes images with a very wide angle lens, then colour grades the image before applying a lens blur filter (probably more than one for the near and far effects), and using gradient ramps to control the blur amount to emphasize the midground….

but then i could be wrong!!

looks stunning though….however its done.

Adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk

[Adam Taylor]

brilliant – thanks kevin. Just what i needed.

adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk

[Adam Taylor]

why “of course its upside down”?? unless you held the camera upside, of course!

anyways – you can select a clip in fcp – and in the browser window hit Motion. Then you can rotate your clip however you want. Then if you select the clip and copy it you can then select every other upside down clip, and Paste Attributes, when the options box appears check just the option you want and hit enter.

This also means you could do all your rotations and letterboxing etc on a single clip and in one fell swoop copy the entire look to every other clip.

adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk

[Adam Taylor]

its a color correction plug-in, and i caught it by accident when trying to select the levels tool !

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk

[Adam Taylor]

you need to get Automatic Duck…..then you can export the fcp timeline and open it up in AE. easy.

adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk

[Adam Taylor]

yes i know, but that doesn’t explain why the layer at the back suddenly becomes imprinted as a texture onto the top layer once the camera begins to move.

I will be resorting to the pre-render option. I just wanted to get to the bottom of this problem so i cant try avoid it in future.

regards
Adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk

[Adam Taylor]

Tom – do you know a secret method to get this to work?

After upgrading to a new Macpro and 10.5.5 (from 10.4.11) I no longer have the Macromedia Flash export option that i had become so dependant on. I have reinstalled all my software (including upgardes) but i no longer have the flv export option. I even have new Flash export software which came with the Adobe CS4 packages. The flv components appear in the Quicktime folders in the library but still no export in FCP.

adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk