[Angelo Lorenzo]

Looks simply amazing. I’ll be picking the production suite up as soon as it ships.

Any word on improvement on project/media management across multiple machines? Maybe Prelude is picking up that slack?

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Looks like it’s a precomposed video file that is being pixelated. The second example really points to the fact that there is the face of the person playing under the pixelation. The first one may be the same thing but fed a random texture that is being altered by the wiggle command (AE has some generators like gradient, noise, etc you can use for this).

It also looks like they’re wiggling the opacity of the pixelation as a whole which gives it some “movement”.

It’s a combination of a lot of little things.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Sounds like the still is larger than your video frame. PPro 2.0 may or may not have this but rightclick the image in the timeline and select “Scale to frame size”, otherwise you’ll have to manually adjust the scale of the image – Position, scale, and opacity should be available under the “effects control” panel.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Lovely find. Some of the things he elaborates on are extremely insightful and it’s worth the time to watch.

He mentioned some of the techniques that David Fincher uses such as stitched takes and ever since his assistant editor was highlighted by Adobe, I’ve been using the process quite a bit to improve timing and performance.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

After Effects isn’t designed to play back footage in real time. With that in mind, sure it might be able to play back certain resolutions with gentle effects in real time, but I don’t think many people count on this workflow.

Has anything in your workflow changed? Are you using files from a different camera (a different footage codec) than you were before? Have you started editing off an external drive? Do you have more background processes running on your computer? Are you using the same effects or is this particular project effects heavy?

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Can you discuss any of your questions on the forum? Not only does it help others who might be interested in the answer, but with Easter and Passover going on right now, I wouldn’t be surprised if a large chunk of free time was hard to find this weekend.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

It is probably a motion controlled rig. Technodolly maybe?

For the actors they most likely used a small green screen behind them in the scene. This allows you to key them out quickly because you really only have to rotoscope the edges of the greenscreen itself. And to clarify, it’s a greenscreen used on-set behind the actor who is interacting with the real location, and not shot separately in a studio.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

For theoretical comparison, you’re looking at “perfect case” scenarios concerning how many line pairs per millimeter these camera sensors can resolve (real world results may be considerably lower because of the use of low-pass optical filters and Bayer pattern pixel sampling).

For this you’re looking at pixel pitch (5.4 for the Epic as far as I could find, and 4.3 for the 7D) and airy disc size (controlled by the lens aperture). Reading charts widely available online, the theoretical maximum resolution at 50% MTF is ~90 lp/mm for the Epic and 116 lp/mm for the 7D.

Lenses, depending on their aperture size (and airy disc size) will resolve varying amounts of detail. The wider the aperture, the more possible resolution although the lens has to fight distortion and optical aberrations.

The 7D has a diffraction limit at f/6.9 (if you took a “perfect lens”) which means the sensor will out-resolve the lens at any aperture that is smaller.

The Epic, on the other hand has a diffraction limit around f/16. A perfect lens is out-resolving the Epic sensor for much of the throw of its iris.

It might mean that Canon is trading off some resolution performance for better overall edge performance, distortion control, better resolution across color wavelengths and so forth… or it could be very close, if not match the performance of their L lenses. There aren’t any official MTF readings, test chart samples, lp/mm slit test readings for these lenses.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

I like FrameForge Core https://www.frameforge3d.com/Products/ It’s pricy at $400 but it’s become fairly indispensable when working with certain client jobs.

It’s 3d with plenty of drag-n-drop people and props. You can also build to-scale floorplans and choose real camera/lens formats to see if that interior wide shot is possible for instance. You can set and position multiple cameras (making storyboards of OTS shots easy without moving a single camera). You can take screenshots from each camera and organize them in a storyboard that allows for notes and will also show overhead blueprints for blocking purposes.

You can also crudely tween animate between keyframes (snapshots) of each camera/actor/prop position. Export out the rough animation as a jpeg sequence and you can bring it into Premiere, record a voiceover and have a pretty well done animatic (commercial clients love this, since you can show them how 30 or 60 second spots really time out).

I’ve used this on about half a dozen client jobs. The animatic during the bid phase won us a job as well. They all seemed to like it.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Have you tried using FFMPEG to just simply rewrap your files?

It’s command line but fairly easy, something like (this is off memory so expect to google this):
ffmpeg.exe -i input_file.mkv -codec copy output_file.mov

The extension of the output file will most easily denote what the container should be, in this case quicktime. There is no reencoding as it just copies over the h.264 and whatever audio streams.