[Barend Onneweer]

Although you can convert P2 files on both platforms, I haven’t found a DVCProHD codec that is crossplatform.

The Cineform codec won’t allow you to bring your files to OSX, and the Quicktime DVCProHD component isn’t available on Windows. Avid has a DV100 codec that is available on Windows, but I can’t find it for Mac.

So if you need cross-platform projects and files, DVCProHD seems problematic. On a current project, I’m resorting to transcoding everything to Quicktime Animation to make sure we can load up projects including footage on OSX AND Windows…

I’ve been using DVFilmMaker ($145) to convert the .mxf files on the P2 cards to Quicktime movies on Windows.
https://www.dvfilm.com/maker/index.htm

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[Justin Productions] ”
Probably Keylight and the manual that comes with it :)”

That, and the clever choice of wardrobe. Black by itself is easy to key on a green background, for two reasons:

1. black doesn’t suffer too much from a green spill (unless it’s a glossy material)

2. black on a green background results in high contrast in the green channel, allowing for a decent key.

If you need your cast to wear white shirts, you’d be best off keeping them as far away from the green background as possible – since white easily takes on the color of that background due to the reflection.

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You can create multiple comp viewers, by rightclicking on the left end of the comp viewer tab – and selecting ‘new viewer’. This viewer can be positioned like any viewer in the AE 7 UI.

You can select any comp to show in the viewer by selecting them from the dropdown. You can even lock a viewer to a comp by clicking the ‘lock’ symbol on the left of the tab.

Have fun.

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As Steve says, Match Grain is a great help in matching the grain and ‘texture’ between video footage and CG images.

And if you’re using the CG as a background, you may want to add a lens blur effect to defocus the backgrounds a bit. Depending on the scene this may be more realistic, and it removes the unnatural sharpness of CG. Make sure you apply Match Grain as your last effect though, otherwise you’re blurring the grain again.

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I recently created some ink splatters for a project. Entirely in the spirit of Bogiesan (in-joke for Cow veterans – which isn’t the same as veterinarians mind you) I fixed a video camera pointing downwards, and dropped ink on wet paper…

It required a bit of tweaking in post to get the right contrast, and I played with time-remapping a little to adjust the speed of the flowing ink. But they came out better than I would be able to animate, and in less time.

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If my final delivery format is Quicktime, I’ll deliver a Quicktime of course. But usually I’ll render to image sequence first, if it’s a slow rendering project, and then convert the sequence to whatever deliverable is required. When I’m working on film based projects, it’s usually image sequences that I get, and they want the same back. But in broadcast I usually deliver movie files.

I’m assuming that the only reason you’d want to replace only a segment of a movie instead of re-rendering the entire project is that it’s a slow rendering project. Otherwise it’s more convenient to just re-render the entire thing.

Now, about image sequences. I find that many people feel uncomfortable with image sequences, because it can be somewhat daunting to see tens of thousands of .tifs in a folder.

There are a couple of benefits to rendering to image sequences though:

1. Network rendering. You can’t have multiple machines render to a single file. I often have a couple of machines chunking away at a render overnight.

2. Crashing. If your machine crashes or the render fails during a render, sometimes the partly rendered file is corrupted – forcing you to re-render the entire thing. When rendering to image sequence you just restart the same render (skip existing frames) and continue where you left off.

And then there’s the somewhat more exotic benefit of being able to render to .EXR files for HDR projects.

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[Barend Onneweer]

I usually render to image sequences. If I see a couple of frames that need to be re-rendered, I check the frame numbers in the comp (CMD or CTRL click on the time-code in the top left of the timeline viewer to switch from seconds to framenumbers).

I delete the frames that need to be rerendered from drive and I render to the same image sequence again – with ‘skip existing frames’ enabled in the output module.

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[Barend Onneweer]

I’d seriously suggest using MS Word or preferably Illustrator or InDesign to create your text layout and export to a .pdf file (a very long one) and animate this file to scroll through the screen.

With ‘continuous rasterize’ enabled this will get you nice crisp graphics and ultimate control over the text.

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[Barend Onneweer]

And make sure you download updates for all your plugins on the developers websites.

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Not to dissapoint you here, but Quicktime Animation @ 100% is lossless on both platforms. I’ve rendered to QT Anim hundreds of times on Windows, and the image didn’t degrade at all. Occasionally you can run into gamma differences between platforms, but other than that lossless is lossless.

Also, both the Quicktime wrapper and the .avi wrapper allow for higher bitdepths than 8-bit.

So I’d double check your settings once more.

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