[Ben Insler]

Why not add a gaussian blur as well on the layers you want to be out of focus? This might clean up (or rather enhance) your blur effect.

-Ben

[Ben Insler]

Why not add a gaussian blur as well on the layers you want to be out of focus? This might clean up (or rather enhance) your blur effect.

-Ben

[Ben Insler]

I hope this is what you’re asking. Go into your audio mixer (tools->audio mixer or option+6). On the right side of the mixer there is a master level which control the level of the entire timeline (if ‘Master’ is not present, you should see a little left-pointing reveal arrow all the way over on the top right of the mixer, just below the source selector, that will open up the master controls). You could boost the levels of the entire piece from there.

-Ben

[Ben Insler]

The simple workaround that I’ve come up with when this problem comes up (and believe me…sometimes I have been able to add keyframes at the end of the transition…) is to set your final keyframe off of the last frame of the transition and then just drag it over to the end. If there’s already a keyframe there, set the keyframe in the middle, delete the final keyframe, and then move it over, for example:

Scaling an image from 50% to 80%. The image is already at 50%, is 3 seconds long and has a 1 second dissolve in (A) and a 1 second dissolve out (B). Place your playhead in the center of the non-transitioning part of the clip, then open it in the viewer. The hilighted section of the viewer timeline will include the transitions. Set a key for 50% scale, then move the playhead a bit within the hilighted timeline region and set another key for 80% scale. Then place the playhead at the in-point in the viewer (begging of the transition) and using the arrow tool, hold shift and click on the first key and move it to the left so it snaps to the in point (shift will constrain your movement to one direction, so if won’t change the value of the key, just the time as long as you start moving in a L/R direction). Do the same thing for the end key, and now you have keys set at the start and end of the transitions. Kind of a wimipy workaround, but it actually goes pretty quickly.

Hope it works for you,

Ben

Ben Insler
Editor
Telemark Films

[Ben Insler]

I have no experience with the AVID, but my first guess is a premultiplies vs. matte alpha interpretation issue. Maybe AVID is expecting one and you’re outputting from AE with the other?

What file type are you rendering out to?

-Ben

Ben Insler
Editor
Telemark Films

[Ben Insler]

I found it very frustrating. Sometimes moving or deleting a still in our timeline would stall the system for significant periods of time – I remeber a 10 minute stall actually. If your still segments are finalized and you know you won’t be changing them, rendering out the segments and replacing the images with the .mov files should fix the problem. I can’t remember if we were able to just place the .mov file on a new track above the stills or if we actually had to remove the stills from the timeline altogether – you’ll have to try it. But if you’re going to be deleting the stills when you add the .mov, I’d definately recommend keeping a backup of the timeline with all the stills in it so that if you do need to make a change at some point, you can just copy and paste them all again.

Good luck,

Ben

Ben Insler
Editor
Telemark Films

[Ben Insler]

I had problems with H.264 files going from mac->PC when apple first releaset QT7, but I’ve upgraded the installation since (Actually, i purchased pro, but there should be an upgrade by now) and now everything works fine. Maybe an upgrade is all you need?

-Ben

Ben Insler
Editor
Telemark Films

[Ben Insler]

I have to say if you’re just doing still photo moves, 14 hours does sound long to me. My first reaction is to make sure that you set the IN and OUT points of each layer to the area only where the layer needs to be visible, so that by the end of the 9 minutes After Effects isn’t for some reason trying to comp together 400 stills that are hidden anyway behind the top one.

-Ben

Ben Insler
Editor
Telemark Films

[Ben Insler]

There is a limit as to how many tracks you can have when you export an EDL. If you have more than is allowed, the EDL just won’t get exported… the progress indicator will scroll for a second, making you think you’re exporting, but it won’t export everything into the EDL. Check out the FCP manual (i think it’s in volume III) – it’ll tell you how many tracks you can have.

-Ben

[Ben Insler]

sorry… I thought about the expression again and realized that undesired cropping still could occur… I changed the condition so that rather than choosing the scaling method based on the longer width or height of the image, it compares the image’s width/height ratio to that of your comp. If the ratio is wider than your comp, it scales it down based on the width; if it’s taller it scales it down by the height. The expression is below.

if((width/height)<=((thisComp.width*thisComp.pixelAspect)/thisComp.height)) x=thisComp.height/height*100; else x=thisComp.width/width*(thisComp.pixelAspect*100); [x,x] -Ben