[Andrew Rollo]

Oh yeah and that setting in the project preferences for anti-aliasing was for the video and not just the motion blur. It was set at normal and I should have set it to best. But that wasn’t the issue with the DV codec as it still made blocky output with the best setting.

[Andrew Rollo]

I discovered that I was using the animation codec with Shake but the DV codec with Motion. The DV output was awful but using animation output from Motion worked very well. Pixlet also worked well and even beat animation for file size on most occasions. However, I’ll be playing the movie on a lower-end laptop and animation uses half the CPU of Pixlet. Plus the animation format is more widely supported. I can also get away with using 75% quality with the animation codec as there is no visible degradation of the image and that saves a bit of space.

The only downside is that I can scrub through Pixlet video faster. I hope that doesn’t mean the animation codec isn’t frame accurate. I’m pretty sure it will be.

I also managed to convert both Pixlet and animation to DVD using ffmpegx and the quality was *still* better than Motion’s DV output. It’s weird because Quicktime says it is exporting 28mbits/sec video.

[Andrew Rollo]

Yeah it looks like Apple’s in it for the whole lot too. I knew Shake had a Windows version but I didn’t know about FCP and LiveType. I was even surprised to hear itunes was based on SoundJam.

I noticed that about DVD Studio Pro when I was trying to get a price for a standalone version. I don’t like it when companies make you buy their whole software suite when you just need one app.

I’ve actually found a free app called Edo for OS X and that might suffice for what I need just now. It says it supports z-depth compositing:

https://www.anioni.com/edo/

I think I’ll have to more research before settling on a commercial version. I’ll check out the Combustion demo.

[Andrew Rollo]

It seems Combustion gets better reviews from what I’ve seen and is cheaper than AE. I’m glad you mentioned it because it looks ideal weighing up cost and features. I can’t believe Autodesk own that as well, it’s like they are trying to take over the digital world – they own Maya, 3ds and the discreet stuff now.

So the workflow would go something like

Renderman>Combustion>DVD Studio Pro

Possibly imovie and Premiere in there too. That seems like a reliable and cost effective workflow.

[Andrew Rollo]

Thank you for your fast reply. I’ll have a look at that book and see how feasible it is. I’m a little disappointed that the company I work for spent so much money on Final Cut Studio when it doesn’t really do what I need. They do a lot of film editing but it’s fairly simple stuff and I’m sure you can do such basic editing in a compositing application. They have Premiere anyway and have even used imovie for some stuff. So far, FCP has been underused.

Shake seems really expensive so I think After Effects would be the best choice. I wonder why Shake is 3 times the price if they are in direct competition.

The only application I really like in the Final Cut Studio is DVD Studio Pro so maybe that + After Effects would meet my needs. Final Cut Pro 5 is quite unstable on the quad G5 at work too so I think returning the software is the only solution.

Thanks again for your help.