[Andy George]

Federal Communications Commission

-Andy

[Andy George]

but can I somehow apply a droplet directly to the sequence?

Sorry, no.

-Andy

[Andy George]

Hi Laura,
The best sure fire way to set up a new sequence correctly is after you create it drop a piece of footage from your bins into it. you get an alert along the lines of “this sequence is not the same as the footage you are using would you like to change it?” Hit yes and your good to go.

Now that you have a sequence set up properly and 1 piece of footage in it, copy the footage in the old sequence into your new sequence. Now you need to correct the distort that was applied by putting it into a incorrectly formatted sequence. The best way to do this is copy attributes from the first clip you put into the sequence, then select the rest of the clips in the sequence and paste attributes. Select Distort from the pop up menu. This should get you back to where you need to be.

-Andy

[Andy George]

.vpe is not supported by AE CS3

Sure it is. here is a tutorial on how to do it.

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/Vanishing_Point.php

-Andy

[Andy George]

Hi Ryan,

The “center” of any position or rotation change is the anchor point.

Im guessing your elements are not rotating in a predictable fashion because the
anchor points are different.

One way to fix this would be to use the Pan Behind tool to reposition the anchor points.

Probably an easier and faster way would be to parent the text layers to a null object. Then just rotate the null. Once you parent the text to the null the “center” becomes the anchor point of the null object. So place your null object with this in mind before parenting.

-Andy

[Andy George]

Aspect ratio and pixel aspect ratio are two different things.

Aspect ratio is the ratio of your entire image. Pixel aspect ratio is the aspect ratio of a single pixel within that image.

To find the pixel aspect ratio take a look at your composition settings. Since your working with a custom setup working in square pixels only would probably solve your problem (unless you have some reason not to be)

Non square pixels (ie anything else) always need to be converted to square pixels to preview properly. This is what your doing in Photoshop when you enable the pixel aspect ratio correction. Im guessing this is where your running into problems but without knowing the pixel aspect ratio’s your working with it’s hard to tell.

It could be that you just don’t have the pixel aspect ratio correction turned on in after effects. it’s the small box with double arrows over top of it underneath your composition preview.

-Andy

[Andy George]

Hi Geoff,

Correct for pixel aspect ratio does not actually change any properties of the file. It just converts the preview of your image from non square pixels to square pixels.

It’s hard to say what the problem is without more info-

Whats your composition size and Pixel aspect ratio?

What’s your image size and Pixel aspect ratio?

When you select the imported file in the project panel
how is AE interpreting it?(youll see this at the top of the project panel
when a file is selected)

Walk through the process that got you to this point

-Andy

[Andy George]

Hi David,

If I wanted to, could I just go into project settings and switch to 16 bit?

It’s best to establish your color depth at the start of a project rather than at then end. Depending on the types of filter you have used some things might not look exactly the same. Generally not a huge issue if you don’t mind re tweaking some things

It would probably help with your banding issues, but ultimately when you deliver the file if it’s for web or television you will be back to 8bits (or 10 at the very most) in the end with the same problem. It “might” look slightly better.

Will that affect the video clips, which came out of FCP and my understanding is that everything that comes out of FCP is 8 bit?
Final cut can do 10bit if your using the proress 422 codec. There may be others as well.
If your rendering 8 bit video in AE as 16 bit it won’t change the appearance of the 8 bit video, just the file size.

Is longer render time the only downside to increasing the bpc
files size and possibly a false sense of security would be the other drawbacks

Does Quicktime even support more than 8 pits per channel?
Yes. It depends on the codec. Some are 8 bit like animation, some are 10 bit like
prores, some are 16bit like a Tiff sequence. Im no web guy but I would assume the standard web delivery stuff would be 8bit.

-Andy

[Andy George]

Hi Alan,

If you duplicate the precomp in your project panel rather than in your timeline
you will get the results your looking for. You can right click on the precomp and select reveal in project if your not sure where it is.

If the precomp in your timeline has animated property’s that you want to carry over to your new precomp then duplicate the original in the timeline and with the second copy selected, holding down option, drag and drop the new precomp from your project panel into the timeline. Your project panel duplicate will take on the animated properties of your timeline duplicate.

-Andy

[Andy George]

Hi David,

It’s pretty common to run into banding on a 8bit project with gradients.

The traditional method to reduce banding is to introduce a small amount of grain or noise into the image. the Noise HSL filter works well for this as does add grain. Add grain is more render intensive. You might have to play with them a bit and do some test renders to get it just right.

As for the aspect ratio, your composition uses non-square pixels. Final cut and after effects are able to correct for these oblong pixels giving you a 960 x 720 image that appears 1280×720. Quicktime player does not make this correction, so your video appears 960×720. Unless there is a specific reason you are working in non square pixels you could simplify the process by changing your composition frame size to 1280 x 720 w/ square pixels (PAR 1.0) Then it will look the same regardless what program you play it in.

-Andy