[Angelo Lorenzo]

I would say what’s the harm in saying you know both on your resume?

I would, however, choose Nuke over Smoke. Smoke seems to be a one-stop-shop for smaller houses which means they’re already dealing with a small team of sr. artists.

With Nuke, you can get up to speed quickly with skills like roto and clean plate painting. This would allow you to get your foot in the door when a studio has a big project and needs artists for grunt work.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
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Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Ted,

I think he means in an ideal world he’d like to parent to the anchor point of the flower to the anchor point of the stem. Lets assume that means moving the anchor point to the top of the stem.

As it stands now, the anchor point is at the bottom of the stem which makes the above possibility not a great option. He’s probably animating it to grow up/out from the source point like the flower is growing.

I do like your idea to precomp, because you’re basically able to set a different anchor point for the precomp while leaving the stem’s alone.

That might, indeed, be the solution.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
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Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Video and audio keyframes, no. There is no keyboard shortcuts but you can, in the effects panel, move from key frame to keyframe by clicking the prev/next keyframe arrows. It’s a mouse move, but at least it’s better than no command.

Edit > Keyboard shortcuts is your friend in terms of looking at how you can improve your navigation of the program.

The project bin has an awesome set of keyboard shortcuts, the only one that isn’t set is “Open in Source Monitor” which I set to ctrl+Enter. Otherwise you can navigate the panel with your arrow keys (left/right will expand and close bins) and move around renaming files and filling out log info with enter and tab, etc. You can also play previews of files right in the bin or use hover scrub with the mouse.

You may find this quick list helpful for navigating the actual panels of the workspace https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/premiere-pro-shortcut-panels/

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

You may need a special installer for QT7 which installs it in the utilities folder: https://support.apple.com/kb/DL923

More reading here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2213705?start=15&tstart=0

It is possible, I have 7 and X (10) installed concurrently on my MBP.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

First troubleshooting step would be to install Quicktime 7. Quicktime X uses a totally different API (instruction set that allows other programs to interact with it) than previous versions. As it stands, AE may not have the ability to access Quicktime without installing a legacy version.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Well there a few ways of doing it within FCP, do you mean using the pen tool to create keyframe adjustments? or…?

In terms of the keyframes/pen tool, Premiere works exactly the same.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

So:
MP4 1280×960, 29.97, 1.0
MOV 1920×1080, 20.97, 1.0
MTS 1920×1080, 29.97, 1.0
MTS 1440×1080, 29.97, 1.3333

I assume it’s a typo and you meant 29.97 for the Canon footage? The camera can’t do a frame rate like 20.97, but I want to eliminate the possibility that you did some kind of bad pre-conversion.

I think your best bet is a 720p 29.97 sequence(1280×720). All the 1080 footage can be scaled down nicely.

GoPro’s 1280×960 is a non-standard format. There could be a few reasons for using it, but it mostly comes down to using it as standard 720p with the ability to recompose the shot vertically if needed. In other words, you’ll need to crop some off the top and bottom for it to be a standard 16:9 viewing size.

In regard to the 1440×1080, this is a recording and not a viewing format. Premiere Pro should automatically de-squeeze the footage; you’ll be left with what is, effectively, a 1920×1080 frame.

From the 720p file you can easily upload it as-is to video sites or convert it out to a widescreen dvd format without issue.

All the footage is h.264 or a subset (AVCHD for instance) so you shouldn’t have huge playback issues at 1/2 or 1/4 resolution. If it’s a large project I would consider using an intermediate codec just because they scrub more smoothly; it could be an overall time saver.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
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Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Well multi-process rendering does take a little while to start up regardless. It’s doing some house keeping and starting up all the new processes and so on. On my system it’s always far less than a minute of lag though, maybe 20-30 seconds. If it’s far longer I’d think it’d be an issue.

The other thing is to look at your effects. If you’re using openGL effects then multiprocessing may be bottlenecking at your GPU. If you’re using effects that rely on caching the previous frame like Neat Video noise removal or some timewarp effects, then you may get unreliable results or really laggy renders in multi-process.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

It’s possible. Premiere Pro is a fully 64-bit program so if the OS is limiting some functionality to 32-bit then it could cause strange performance or stability issues.

Unless you’re using legacy hardware or software virtual machines, you should be fine overall. 32-bit programs should work without issue in a 64-bit environment.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

These three things will vastly improve your rotoscoping in After Effects if you follow them:

1. Break up your masks into smaller, more simple, overlapping shapes. Imaging tracing a hand, complex huh? Break it down into a set of a few oval-like shapes.

2. Reduce the amount of keyframes to reduce mask jitter. Do one keyframe a second, one every half second, one every quarter second. Work your way inward until the mask is acceptably animated. Very rarely will you need to keyframe per-frame.

3. I don’t know if this is true of CS6 because of the new cache features; I haven’t tried a roto project without setting it up in the following way. Each adjustment made to an animated mask redraws the entire frame which can end up wasting a lot of time in small increments. Try setting up your roto like this (From the book After Effects CS5- Visual Effects and Compositing Studio Techniques):

***
– Create a comp containing only the source plate.
– Add a solid layer above the plate.
– Turn off the solid layer’s visibility.
– Lock the plate layer.
– Select the solid layer and draw the first mask shape,
then press Alt+Shift+M (Opt+Shift+M) to keyframe it.

Now any changes you make to the masked solid have no
effect on the plate layer or the cache; you can RAM preview
the entire section and it is preserved, as is each frame
as you navigate to it and keyframe it. When it
comes time to apply the masks, you can either apply the
solid as a track matte or copy the masks and keyframes to
the plate layer itself.
***

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks