[Ben List]

Oh man, thanks guys. That solved most all my queries. It looks alot better anyway.

The only thing I can think of is that I must have had AE open when installing the drivers or something.
Also changing “project settings” to 16-bit did the trick.

[Ben List]

This topic is so old now and I’m sure most of you all have switched to 7.0 already so this is probably completely irrelevant now.
I wanted to post this though because I’m still on 6.5 and I still have this problem now and then.
It seems to happen indeed after a render and sleep. It doesn’t happen all the time in a predictable way. This is the first time
I’d seen it although I have a staff member who had reported soething similar as a kind of crash before.
I forgot to save before a render last night and this happened to me.
I couldn’t command-Q to save either.
I was desperate to save the two hours or so of work not covered by the lack of saving and stuck with the software for a while
and for some reason my menus came back and I was able to save and do “menu things” again. Obviously one should restart
after something like this, but just FYI there may be a way out!

Frankly I’m not clear on exactly what did the trick, however I did the following steps and one of them seemed to do it.

1) Pulled a movie in from finder
2) Made a comp of movie
3) changed length of time on comp (com-k doesn’t work, but right click to change comp settings does)
4) pulled an older comp into new comp
…and for whatever reason this was enough to bring back my menus… hell if I know why!!!

Perhaps this will help some other poor soul still facing this issue with 6.5.

Ben List
http://www.chromafresh.com

[Ben List]

Thanks all for your suggestions. It looks like Graeme Nattress doesn’t quite have the 4:2:0 upsampling thing quite together yet (at least as far as I can tell), though this looks like an interesting possible future solution. I managed to get myself all hyped up about the upcoming Panasonic AG-HVW200a, hopefully won’t have to wait too long for it to come out!!

Eric – Impressive key and at HD size too!! Nice!
I don’t suppose anyone recognizes the symptoms of our problem in AdvantEdge (see first image).
Namely that we can get a semi-decent key (albeit slightly blocky) on our footage within AdvantEdge, but upon hitting “OK” and viewing in After Effects, it goes super-blocky on us. For what its worth, going back into AdvantEdge we find that everything is now super-blocky within the AdvantEdge interface too. Resetting settings fixes it again, only until we hit the “OK” button again…

BTW, if some of you wouldn’t mind, I put a 20MB piece of one of our media up on our web server. Please take a look and let me know if this looks right, or if you can manage a better, more natural key. I’m still not convinced that something isn’t wonky at our digitizing stage.

https://www.dadakingz.com/BLUE_CASE1_ILOVE2_HDV.mov

Incidentally and completely off topic, but one of our recent music videos will be in RESFEST this year. If any are curious, take a look at
https://www.dadakingz.com/movies/daedelus_justbriefly_S.mov

Cheers all and thanks again for all chiming in!
-b

Ben List
http://www.chromafresh.com

[Ben List]

Its hard to get comprehensive impressions of the quality of HDV for keying, as I suppose many are (wisely perhaps) not doing it. I recently ran across an opinion somewhere about how HDV was comparable to DVCPro50 for keying and as I had some really pretty amazing results with DVCPro50 recently and was therefore much more suspicious of my own settings. Thanks for the “grounded” opinion. Naturally I’d go uncompressed if we could afford it, unfortunately we’re in micro-budget territory here and are using what we have access to, a loaner basically. Hearing generally positive comments about quality for keying here and there perhaps raised our expectations a bit too high.

Anyway, our output will be to SD and at any rate, the HD-sized HDV footage looks too blocky to use, so the best compromise seems to be to reduce the footage size down in AE to 50% and output to lossless animation codec once, reimport and to pull a key from there. Resizing and reoutputting seems to take away some of the issues of 4:1:0 compression and I’d put our results so far somewhere between DV and DVCPro50 for working in this size. Its not nearly as bad.

We did try keying in HD size and reducing afterward. This is basically what was in the link in the first post. i.e. pretty hideous.

Anyway, thanks again for your thoughts!
-b

Ben List
http://www.chromafresh.com