[Al]

cheers for the input andrew, set extensions, that’s a good one…

yeah i’ve been checking out quite a few compositors reels and have optioned for a dvd option of ‘shot breakdown’ and freezing a couple of key shots, dissolving the layers on (only a few of them, the main ones) and then continuing playing the shot. some people have followed this up with text under describing what they’ve done, but i think this is overdo-ing it.

see how she goes… 🙂

[Al]

displacement maps will be your friend 🙂

[Al]

what is the crash? does it freeze? is there an error msg?

[Al]

obvious question but do you have the speaker icon turned on near the RAM preview button?

[Al]

not a problem ; it’s a gem of a shortcut 🙂

[Al]

I’m not certain what you mean by you wanting to ‘scale’ them. If you mean you have keyframes every 2 frames apart, and you want to change it so they are 4 frames apart – then you need to–

highlight your keyframes. Click the end keyframe while holding ALT and drag. This will extend them…

Is this what you mean?

[Al]

yes. just select all the layers you’re interested in, press U to reveal all keyframes, and highlight your exposed keyframes by dragging in an empty space in the timeline (this creates a box you can loop around your keyframes)

[Al]

1. you need to create in and out points of your video layer. to do this, go to your in point and hit CNTRL open bracket (close bracket to create out point) (by memory) – or just drag the beginning of the layer – the little gray bit.

2. You can scrub your audio but you need to hold CNTRL while you scrub.

good luck

[Al]

the best tool by far are the books by Trish and Chris Meyer. Good luck.

[Al]

i’d definately be using AE for this – and it sounds like a great project to get your head around AE if you’re not used to it. For example, there’s a bunch of great text animation presets which can really help to liven text.

the best thing to do is finalise your edit in PPro, then import it into AE (by memory you can import the actual PPro project). Once you’ve got it into AE, you will need to stay in AE until you’re finished and you render an AVI or Quicktime or whatever and place this back into your PPro project.

You can use audio cues in AE easily – not as easy as PPro obviously (as it’s not realtime) – but it can be done.

The easiest way i find working with audio cues, is to drop your audio into it’s own composition with nothing else. Do a RAM preview of your entire comp. Then as it’s playing back in realtime, you can add markers to the layer to indicate your audio cues (by memory i think the magic button to do this is the star on the numeric keyboard section).

Once you have your layer with all the makers, you can then add comments to the marker with the corresponding text to jog your memory. Then import this layer into your main composition and you’re ready to go.

Setting this up like so does take a little bit of time (not too long, but not instant) – but it does save time in the long run. Because your other option for getting audio cues in AE is to hold down CNTRL and scrub. This works OK if you have a script infront of you, but if you don’t, it can be tedious working out what they’re saying.

Hope that helps. Good luck!