[Bill Kelly]

I think it’s about halfway through that the effect starts to happen. People that are in the live action scene become cardboard cutouts and are then hauled away by a stagehand. It’s a pretty cool effect.

Seems to me to pull off the effect would take some preproduction planning. If I were to attempt to do this, I would film the actors on green screen, knowing the distance and angle they should be from the camera in the composited shot and shooting them in that position. After shooting the green screen shots, I would pick the frame from the green screen footage that I wanted them to become “cardboard” and key out the green, export an image, and have that printed to an actual cardboard cutout.

I’d then film the scene with the cutout in place, layer the keyed green screen footage over the cutout, and fade that layer out when the stagehand approached, leaving only the cutout that was beneath it (and actually there the whole time). The stagehand would pick up the cutout and walk out of the scene. If planned out right and executed with precision I think this would work.

[Bill Kelly]

Thanks for the tip. I had the new QT version show up in my Software Update earlier but didn’t install it. Think I’ll wait.

[Bill Kelly]

It was on “Lost”. Juliette’s ex-husband turned around, stepped off the curb, and got splatted by the bus.

I’d either green screen the actor or make a mask of their movements, composite that on top of the video of the bus streaking by, and then at the moment of “impact”, use the mesh warp effect to distort their body appropriately over a few frames and then keyframe their movement offscreen

[Bill Kelly]

I read this thread earlier in the day but didn’t really have a comment on it.

Just a minute ago I had render files disappear right before my very eyes.

Had just finished rendering out the timeline of a short segment (about 2 minutes long). No render lines left in the timeline anywhere. Saved the project. Then, looking at the timeline, I decided to put a 1 second black slug at the beginning and end as the final delivery will be as a Quicktime file.

So, I set the slug in the viewer and changed the length to 1 second. Went to the beginning of the timeline and did an insert of the slug on a different video track. No problems so far. Looking at the beginning of the segment, I realized I needed to fade up the first clip. I put a 15 frame cross dissolve at the head of the clip and instantaneously at three other points in the timeline (nowhere near this particular clip) a red render bar appeared over the footage that had been rendered out just minutes before.

These clips had no association whatsoever with the clip that I had just put the cross dissolve on. No commonalities at all.

So, to answer the question, yes there are still missing render files in 6.0.2. I’m operating a G5 with 3GB of RAM, 10.4.11 and Quicktime 7.3.

[Bill Kelly]

[Baz Leffler] “Just to add to that the normal requirement is the M&E to be ‘undipped’.”

True. Forgot to mention that!

[Bill Kelly]

Actually disregard that previous answer. I totally misread your question.

First, the best thing to do is make audio stems of each separate audio channel that you’re going to output (for example, your VO track(s)). Go to the beginning of your timeline, set an In point, then go to the end and set an Out point. Mute everything other than VO, File>>Export as AIFF. Bring that into your browser. Do the same thing for full mix, and so on.

When you have all your audio stems, duplicate your sequence (just to be safe), mute or delete all your existing audio tracks, and insert your full mix stem, vo stem, and the rest at the beginning of your timeline. Play parts of your timeline to make sure everything is in sync.

Make sure your sequence is set for 4 channel output (Sequence Settings>>Audio Outputs). Then right click/cmd-click over by the little lock near your A1, A2, etc. audio tabs right on the edge of the timeline. A little popup menu will appear and you’ll find that you can assign each audio track to a specific channel. Simply assign the tracks to the channel you need them to output.

Then, when you Edit To Tape, make sure in the little box in the lower right corner that you have all channels selected. Good luck!

[Bill Kelly]

It really depends on what whomever is receiving the final product wants on the tape.

Generally, the standard deliverable I’ve always worked with (unless specified otherwise) is:

Ch. 1 & 2 Full Stereo Mix
Ch. 3 & 4 M&E

Sometimes clients will want Full Mix minus VO (also referred to as Mix Minus) on Channels 3 & 4, but they will usually specify that. That’s basically your M&E and SOT channels combined, everything except voiceover. Hope this helps.

[Bill Kelly]

I’d try increasing my display’s resolution to the highest setting. You’ll have more screen space and I would think the entire log & capture window would be visible. After you drag it down, set your display resolution back to what it was.

[Bill Kelly]

A good starting point would be to check out Andrew Kramer’s After Effects Basic Training.

https://www.videocopilot.net/basic/index.html

He goes over the basics in AE from the beginning, and after you start gaining some understanding he has a bunch of free tutorials as well as products that work great for doing graphics and visual effects in AE.

Plus, the After Effects Basic Training is free. Can’t beat that!

[Bill Kelly]

Try rendering it out to whatever codec you’re using in your FCP timeline rather than using the animation codec. Once you bring a file rendered out in the animation codec into FCP and render it into your timeline, the video is being transformed to that codec anyway and FCP is playing the render file in your timeline, not the original file with the animation codec.

If you want to render out a copy of the file in animation codec from AE to have for your archives you could do that as well.