Barend Onneweer
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You can in the Professional Edition render in 16-bit. I usually render to 16-bit .sgi sequences.
Bar3nd
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🙂
Actually, there’s no such thing as an anamorphic aspect ratio. It doesn’t exist. It’s nonsense 🙂
But “aspect ratio” exists. In film, it means the relationship between width and heigth of the image. Your old TV-set was 4:3. Your newer widescreen display would be 16:9.
For feature film, there are many many many different aspect ratio’s in use, from 1:1.77 to 1:1.85 and 1:2.35 and a lot of other variantions between and beyond them.
Now…
Anamorphic.
In the film and video world, an anamorphic image is stretched. Imagine this: you have a 1:1:85 gate for 35mm film. But you want to make an epic western picture, that really needs to be wider than that. You can crop off the top and bottom of the image, but that way you’re really throwing away 1 third of your film. So you get a lens that projects the 1:2.35 scene onto a 1:1.85 negative. Of course this makes your actress look ridiculously thin and long. So in the theater, a similar lens is used, to stretch the image back into 1:2.35.
For DVD releases “anamorphic widescreen” means that they took the widescreen image (16:9), and stretched it to fit the NTSC or PAL 4:3 image. To make sure that all of the pixels are effeciently used, and not just for black bars. The DVD player then stretches back the image upon playback.
Hope that clears up some of your questions 🙂
For further reading: https://www.thedigitalbits.com/articles/anamorphic/aspectratios/widescreenorama.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AnamorphicBar3nd
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Okay,
The technical specs for DV encoded video dictate that it’s lower field first.
So if you brought in your DV from a DV camera over firewire, using a native DV filetype, it should still be lower field first.
But if for instance you brought it into the machine using another codec, or using SDI instead of firewire, all kinds of things could have happened.
So if it looks good now with upper field priority, I’d go with that. But it’s not how it’s recorded to the original tape.
Bar3nd
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At what stage are you seeing the pixellation?
Can you see it in the comp window? Or is it introduced in the render. Are you rendering to a compressed format? If you’re rendering to DV, you may well be seeing the 4:1:1 downsampling of chroma in the DV codec.
Bar3nd
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When you’re painting using AE’s built-in paint tools you can set the duration of your strokes to single frames in the Paint Palette.
Bar3nd
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All depends on final output format.
If it’s SD broadcast or DVD release, you’d be okay just working at NTSC or PAL res, and masking out the right aspect ratio.
Generally it’s not a bad idea to work at higher resolutions, especially for film or HD output.
Many feature films do post at 2k or 1080p, which corresponds with a frame width of 2048 and 1920 respectively.
But seriously, I’d ask the client for some more specifications on their workflow so you can match those. Don’t forget framerate and bitdepth.
Bar3nd
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If you’re going to be compressing to MPEG2 in your DVD authoring application, you’re best off exporting to uncompressed avi or Quicktime Animation compression at 100%.
Bar3nd
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It’s been done, but the big complication comes with calibrating and testing.
If you’re aiming for transfer back to film, you’ll need get some test frames printed from the sequence, and calibrate the monitors to the resulting film prints, otherwise there’s no way you know what you’re doing is going to look like in the theatre.
You can also use a LUT (Look up table) in After Effects, by applying a custom Curves effect to mimic the final result of the film transfer (by comparing the result to the printed frames). Use the LUT layer as a ‘guide’ during the color treatment, and then take it off before sending the files to the transfer house.
Another tool for calibrating and matching is: Truelight. A combo of hard- and software.
https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/truelight.htmlBar3nd
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It’s not the resolution, it’s the bitdepth. If you’re exporting to 8-bit video, you can easily see banding on gradients.
Adding a tiny little bit of noise often removes the banding successfully.
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You could also de-interlace in After Effects, by separating the fields in the Footage Interpretation Window (specify upper or lower field first, depending on the field order).
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