Bill Russell
Forum Replies Created
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Ah, thank you. I am able to do that in Illustrator (and Word, it turns out). In illustrator if you hit CTRL-SHIFT-T you get a tabs bar. (I don’t see it in the menu, but this seems essential!) So question: Is there a way to access tabs for text in After Effects?
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>>Dang! With the left image, I’m only seeing issues along the bottom and left edges. The black dotted areas look fine. Are we on the same page?<< Hi Roland, thanks for thinking this through with me! Some more info: Keep in mind that what you are seeing here is an extreme close-up of my full animation. This animation, graciously provided, is not something I created or that can be redone, but it is central to our HD documentary, appearing often. The artifacts are not a good thing the way we have to use it. The graphic was created in India from composite 3D maps, to track a historical route through the mountains. The animation was rendered to a GOP frame codec -- yup. As the 3D image moves, the 3D texture mapping jumps to a new state from time to time -- that is what you are seeing with the large "hour glass" shaped below and right of center: It jumps in the left frame, but "morphs" in the right frame. This sample movie is just a tiny slice in both space and time, to show how the applied inter-frame morphing result "erases" these jumps. Unfortunately, there is interlace line crawl (which I don't understand, since it was rendered 23.973... but anyway, it is not included in the CU slice here, so you can't see it) and dot crawl (which, as you say, you can see along left edge and bottom -- but it is actually in places all over the whole frame not shown). Also, in the first frame at the very top you see a hint of the GOP frame artifact. Those blobs appear at regular intervals over large areas of the frame. The "morphing" helps to hide them because they blob in and out of existence instead of jumping in then breaking up. >>The effect you applied seems to have solved your initial problem but inadvertently created another.<< Well, I think you may be referring to the white "spots" you see kind of floating on their own in the morphed result? Full size at full speed that stuff is not noticeable at all, and the whole thing really is an improvement on a 42'' 1080p display. I haven't really experience undesirable consequences -- for that I'm quite giddy -- just haven't been able to achieve as much of the effect as I need to fully solve all the problems. For instance, the line crawl (which does not appear in this CU sample). It is better, but still there as a subtler "running water ripple" where once there was a jaggy crawl. So I had used the 8 point garbage matte in FCP (I'm familiar with it) to add a blurred layer over the line crawl to hide it yet more, then "coated" the whole frame with light small grain to hide the blur. That's as close as I got. Piling these TMTS noise reducers on top of each other is such a kludge and offers no control, but it seems there must be a technique or tool that can accomplish this result, hmm. So that's my angle here! Thank you!!!!! “THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA” –
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>>What are the chances of getting the original animation, thus sidestepping all of these hoops you’re jumping through?<< That would be nice! No, no, not an option here. They were created on proprietary software as a kind of science project to map a very specific historic route. They are essential to my motion picture and not replaceable. This is a fundamental problem for me. “THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA” –
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Did you bother to ask them if they accepted ProRes files?
Oh we went around on that a bit — everything had to be transmitted through the rep — but the final message was yes, indeed. They understood what ProRes was (Apple proprietary), sounded like they’ve worked with it, and said it would be good.
did they prefer something else and you just gave them the ProRes.
No, not that they told us anyway.
I agree that this sounds as if they out put via AE in windows on a machine that was not set correctly.
Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking happened. Can’t think of anything else. AE or another “converter” that is not real ProRes friendly. (Unless, as Jeremy touched on, maybe they made a visual determination, found some banding on a shot or something, and declared the media 8-bit? Though that would make me stomp my feet and make annoying little noises in the corner, as I’m really attentive to these thing, or try to be!)
I will confirm that ProRes is a 10bit container,
Wow, thank you, that would be good to know! The white paper overview says PR handles 8-bit and 10-bit material, but the way it is worded it is unclear if they simply mean that 8-bit benfits, well, just like DVCPro handles well when converted to 10-bit uncompressed, or that ProRes actually has an 8-bit data structure option like DNxHD. (If latter is the case… then back to the original question… how to determine and control bit depth!)
but that does not always mean the content in the file is 10bit.
You mean original visual quality of 8-bit, like in example of DVCPro upconverted to 10-bit uncompressed? or do you mean actual resulting data structure, like DNxHD 8bit instead of 10bit?
what was your camera master and how was it handled prior to being laid to D5.
Super 16mm, telecined (all of us there for days doing careful shot-for-shot grooming) at Post Group, to D5 — all ‘spensive, intensive and pro like. The resulting digital projection and 35mm film prints (of the actual movie, not the trailer in question in this thread) are gorgeous. All that work was uncompressed.
Later…Only recently did they digitize the D5 edited master for us directly to ProRes HQ, from which we made the trailer and delivered ProRes HQ for film-out…. which film-out people (different, also reputable company) said was 8bit.
(Whew – sorry for the long story!) Short answer: Telecine to D5. Definitely full bit depth source.
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Okay, off the beaten path a bit, but here is more I found on the After Effects ProRes at 8-bit problem:
For anyone looking to modify the After Effects setup file, it is (on a Mac) located at /Library/Preferences/Adobe/After Effects/[version #]/Adobe After Effects [v#] Prefs
For me it was about line 1800 under
[“QuickTime 64-bit Output Codecs”]
that I added
“apch” = “1”apch refers to ProRes(HQ)
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Thanks. You exported from the timeline and not the viewer, correct?
Yup. Of course.
Did you add any effects or anything that are 8 bit only? What the D5 tape laid off 8bit to 10bit (meaning 8 bit material to 10bit tape). What was the original source footage? 8 bit?
The ProRes file would be 10-bit data no matter what, no? That’s what people are saying here. So if there is quality loss or artifacts like quantization from prior 8-bit processing, it still wouldn’t matter — it is now ProRes, which means 10-bit density, whether it came from prior 8, 10, 16 or 32 floating point. Have I got that right? DNxHD is different, in that it can be either. But it seems the wisdom here is ProRes is always 10bit, just like uncompressed 10bit is of course always 10bit.
… ah, unless you mean that they may have made the determination purely visually. Now that would be strange – hm, I really have to found out what they meant!
Anyway, as far as the D5 tape, the raw footage is telecine at 10-bit.
Not obscure, just make sure the project is in 16bit, and render out trillions of colors(although trillions doesn’t make much difference as it’s beyond 10bit, but I do it anyway). Shouldn’t be too hard, but if you didn’t set the project to 16 bit, then you are rendering 8 bit and compressing it to a 10bit codec, so essentially, it is 8 bit.
No, actually I think it is more than that 🙁 … see these:
“AE reads ProRes in 8bit rather than 10bit. Same with shake.” (and there is also this from google.)
Mmm could be, hard to know without knowing what they did. What triggered the film out place to say your movie was 8bit is my question? What were they looking at?
Yeah, you got that right. I haven’t been able to speak to the ones in the trenches who were actually hands on, so I don’t know. Hence my speculation that they may have been using AFter Effects (or Shake), any program that did not treat the ProRes appropriately.
Thanks hugely for thinking this through with me! If I find out how they determined that it was 8-bit, I’ll let you know here!!!
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“AE reads ProRes in 8bit rather than 10bit. Same with shake.” (and there is also this from google.)
Yes, that’s what I remember being the case. And there is a workaround, a way to “fix” AE so that it treats ProRes correctly.
(Anyway, only relevant here if the film house used AE or Shake, or another program with the same ProRes limitations, to derive the image sequence. I don’t know that answer.)
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Hello — okay, to answer your question, I did a Quicktime export using current settings. (I did NOT export through Quicktime Conversion.) The properties of the resulting exported file are Apple ProRes HQ, HD dimensions, 24-bit audio, same as sequence settings.
If the film-out folks said my file was 8-bit, and the Quicktime I gave them was Apple ProResHQ, and Apple ProRes HQ can ONLY be 10-bit… then problem is on their end, no?
Although something just came to mind… I have a dim memory that After Effects does not correctly handle Apple ProRes as 10-bit, but rather treats it as 8-bit, and you have to do some obscure tweak to make it do ProRes right. Is this accurate? I wonder if the film-out folks used After Effects, OR if the same problem shows up in other software they may have used to create the image sequence. Thoughts?
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Weeeeelllll, Chris, John and Shane, thank you! That means it wasn’t my fault. I’ll have to find out what process the film-out people used to read Quicktime movie file and make the image sequence. (This is a reputable outfit at that! I won’t name the silly blokes 😉
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