[Andy Walters]

Bad news, we don’t have encore! To be fair video production isn’t what we do where I work (design branding and advertising agency, mainly for print), this is just a one-off, though I’m hoping it’ll be the start of more of this kind of thing.

Do you think it’s worth getting a trial version of Premiere off adobe’s website (am I right in thinking encore comes bundled with premiere?) It’s just that with a very limited timeframe I don’t think this time round I’ll have the time to obtain, and then get to grips with, encore. It shouldn’t look like it when it’s finished but this really is a rush job, typical for the client really (want everything yesterday for tiny budgets)

If I render out an mpeg2 and burn onto dvd with toast titanium (we’re on macs) will I be losing any quality?

Thanks

[Andy Walters]

Wow, thanks for all that, hope you had a lie down afterwards!

The animation will be shown primarily on a large screen in the foyer of the company it’s for, and on smaller monitors elsewhere in the building, and won’t have any audio.

I do believe that both screen types will be running off DVD and neither is strictly HD – if I discover that the ‘big’ screen is HD what format and means of playback do you suggest? If they are both from DVD what format/codec do you recommend that’ll give the best quality, especially on the bigger screen?

Thanks again.

[Andy Walters]

So if the images are processed as square pixels (before I get to them) and I make the original comp square pixels, the movie won’t stretch when it’s played on DVD? I was always under the impression I had to make things DV PAL…

But since 1920×1080 is the same aspect ratio as 1024×576, wouldn’t making the DVD 720×576 distort?

So I’ll ask for the images to be processed as tiffs, and making them 1920×1080 should reduce the need to scale them down? Is there any chance I could use 300dpi images?

Will I not be able to make one high-def movie that can be played on both the bigger and smaller screens? Or will having the high-def movie basically scaled down onto smaller screens lose quality?

I was going to sequence the layers in AE to a specific frame rate and was hoping to do some retouching to the finished article in terms of levels, colour, etc, will doing a tiff sequence allow control over these things if they’re exported as separate tiffs? Or will importing back in with ‘tiff sequence’ checked essentially make one piece of footage in AE like you say that can be retouched, resized etc? Probably seems obvious but I need to make sure, I won’t have much time to revisit things that go array!

So to clarify, I make the ‘master’ comp 1920×1080 with the tiffs I import processed to that size and ratio, with pixel size set to that of the images…

After the images have been sequenced I render as a tiff sequence (not forgetting LZW) and re-import the sequence back into AE with ‘tiff sequence’ checked and do my resizing and retouching to the entire ‘movie’ and render out again as a riff sequence… is that about right??

Thanks again

[Andy Walters]

Thanks for the advice, more questions though, sorry!

Would making the movie 720×576 for the DVD do any stretching/chopping to the movie if the screens are widescreen? Should it be 1024×576 and would the PAR be DV PAL or DV PAL Widescreen?

I know it’d be ridiculous making the comp that big, I meant would the images need to be of a certain res to begin with ie. how large would they need to be processed. Do you mean scale them down in AE or when theyre processed? Also, will I need to make the PAR of the images DV PAL instead of square?

Do you mean import the tiffs as a sequence or as footage and sequence them myself? And if I render as a tiff sequence how is it preferable to making a mov?

Thanks