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There have been a couple of threads in the past, that contained pointers.
First, make sure you talk to the posthouse that you’re sending your files to. What does the compositor need from you? Are they going to do color grading on your project before transferring to film?
It somewhat depends on the type of project, but I always work in 16-bit, and usually export 16-bit tifs or .sgi files. Somehow AE doesn’t import 16-bit tifs, but it does export. I find it more convienient to use files I can also import into AE and hence usually use .sgi.
Render in 16-bit, although you can usually switch back and forth between 16 and 8 bit during previewing.
Make sure you don’t blow out your highlights flat, because that will usually come out looking bad on film – and it’ll leave the colorist with little room to play.
If you tell us a little bit more on the project, I could give more specific pointers. There’s a whole lot to tell about calibrating for film-out, but that may be a bit too much at this point. Are you doing titles that the compositor will place on top of footage? Are you using footage in the background?
Bar3nd
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It’s not true. Adobe has said explicitly more than once that they are still very much tied in to the Mac platform.
These rumors have been out there for years, but there has been no solid information from Adobe to actually support these.
And how exactly would this instructor know? Some of the people at the COW have pretty good ties with Adobe, and when there’s news to break about Adobe (without breaking NDA’s) you’ll be sure to read it here.
Quote from Steve Kilisky, Group Product Manager for After Effects:
“While I certainly understand the reason there is speculation about the future of After Effects on the Mac, I want reassure our customers that the After Effects team is commited to maintaining its leadership position on both Mac & Windows and we have no plans to stop developing for the Mac platform.”Bar3nd
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Currently AE is a 32-bit app, so you can run it in XP64, but it won’t be much faster.
You can get the fastest dual machine you can get, but it’ll never be as fast as you want. Especially with the transition to HD… we’re back to where we were a couple of years ago 🙂
Bar3nd
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The entire issue of pixellation is caused by the chroma downsampling in 4:2:0 or 4:1:1 video.
You can smooth out the colors a bit by placing your source footage in a comp, placing an adjustment layer on top with a 4 pixel gaussian blur applied and setting blend mode of the adjustment layer to ‘color’.
This essentially smoothes out the colors while leaving luma details intact.
Drag this comp into a new one and apply your keyer there. It’ll look a lot smoother.
Bar3nd
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You can parent the flying elements to a null layer that’s located at the center of the tornado, so they’ll rotate around that center point.
As to the distortion of the ad layers, you could play around with bezier warp. Not true 3D, but it should work.
Bar3nd
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No… even if there were, AE converts everything to RGB color space anyway, for compositing.
Do you have continuous rasterize on? That could slow down things. Sometimes it helps to create tifs from the illustrator art, unless you are going to need the vectors up close.
Try previewing at half res, or skipping every other frame during RAM preview to speed up previewing.
Bar3nd
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Apply the lens flare to a black solid and apply Knoll Unmult to it: which will create an alpha for the lens flare.
Knoll Unmult is free:
https://www.redgiantsoftware.com/unmult.htmlBar3nd
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Looks like it could even be Foam, that comes with AE Pro – with a custom bubble texture. Use an image as a flow map to force the dots into a shape.
Pretty cool effect though…
Bar3nd
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Sounds like you’re seeing ‘banding’. If you work in 8-bit color depth, there are only 256 shades of each color available – which basically means you’re seeing banding because you’ve run out of colors.
Adding a tiny amount of noise will fix this.
Bar3nd
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My Decklink board has performed flawlessly in After Effects. It can be a bit more fiddly with Premiere Pro because it demands a lot more from the system integration and compatibility. But for AE I don’t think there’s any issues with the Decklink series on Windows.
Bar3nd
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