[Blaise Douros]

One thing that might help you streamline your files: instead of shooting 4K on the GoPros and then zooming in, why not shoot 1080P on the narrower FOV option, and just frame the GoPro images where you want them in the first place? Seems like a waste of time and data to shoot 4K just so you can zoom in.

You may be getting pixelation on the output because you’re zooming in far enough on the 4K to see a breakdown in quality. The highly compressed 4K that a GoPro shoots is not exactly the same stuff you’re getting out of a real camera.

Frankly, if you were able to take my above suggestion and were running three streams of 1080P, (or two 1080P plus one 720P) there would be no reason to transcode to proxy formats. I run multicam sequences with three streams of compressed 1080P all the time, with no performance issues. Select your Camera 1 file first (I assume the JVC, since it would be a continuous file with continuous audio), and then the GoPro files, and create an audio-synced Multicam sequence. Then the original media all goes into one Multicam sequence. You’ll need to do a little organization of that sequence, moving cameras to the correct tracks, that sort of thing, but it’ll take less time than transcoding all your media.

[Blaise Douros]

Have you tried purging your media cache? You might be experiencing a glitch where the cached frame is being displayed, and not the actual footage in the timeline.

[Blaise Douros]

No worries, it happens a lot. Glad to help.

[Blaise Douros]

Then maybe you should have at least helped with that, instead of acting like an unsalvageable sphincter. If you’ll read my reply, I demonstrated, for your benefit, how to helpfully point out the error and offer the correct framerate, as well as an explanation of why it’s important.

It’s amazing that the biggest trolls on this forum are some of the longest-standing members. It’s a situation practically unique on the internet–anywhere else, an admin would banhammer the crap out of that.

Kindness costs you nothing. You want to talk about basics, I’ve got one for you: basic human courtesy.

[Blaise Douros]

Apply a Stroke effect to a mask that consists of a single line. Animate the mask, and use the bezier handles to curve the line when necessary.
You can also use a Shape layer, but a Stroke gives you the nice rounded ends that are shown in the example you linked to.

BTW, the link is not correctly formatted, and I had to copy the link location and paste to my browser to get there.

[Blaise Douros]

Do you mean that you’re wearing the mic and dancing? A little more info would be helpful.

If that’s what you’re doing, then a headset mic may be the best solution for you, in combination with that wireless RodeLink. You’ll probably pick up some breathing noise, but it’ll be better than a bunch of fabric noise, or losing sound because of a stationary shotgun mike.

I’d suggest testing a couple at a local music store, like Guitar Center, or something. That’s a tough one to buy online.

[Blaise Douros]

That’s super rude, Dave, and not helpful at all, since it doesn’t even bother to address OP’s question. Obviously OP knows SOMETHING about framerates, or he wouldn’t have bothered to use drop-frame terminology in the first place, let alone asking the question at all. Perhaps he misremembered 119.88 as 119.98. Rather than nitpicking him on a totally irrelevant detail and ignoring the substance, you could address his (actually very intelligent) question. You don’t just say “It ought to.” Do you know? Do you have facts? Or are you just saying what should happen in your opinion? How does that possibly help Jon?

Here, watch this:

The answer, Jon, is that yes, Premiere can do what you want it to do in this case: drop a 119.88 clip on a 29.97 timeline, and Premiere defaults to a “Frame Sampling” interpolation method, which grabs every fourth frame and displays it to you when you hit play (or export). You can change it to a Frame Blending interpolation which will overlay multiple frames to create a semblance of motion blur. By the way, I noticed that you wrote 119.98 rather than .88; you may want to double check that, so you can use the correct math to slow your footage down, since 119.88 would normally be the correct number.

When you slow the clip down, whether through the Speed contextual menu, or via the Time Remapping keyframes in the Effects panel, Premiere will show as many frames as possible within the native timebase of the project. So if you slow the clip down to 25% speed, you will have one frame of footage for every frame shown on the project timecode counter. Go to 50% speed, and Premiere will show every other frame if you are Frame Sampling, or blurring every two frames together if you are Frame Blending. Go to some other rate, and Premiere will do some combination of the above.

I just tested this myself to make sure, by dropping a 59.94 clip onto a 23.976 timeline, slowing it down to different rates, and then watching the motion as I went frame by frame. This knowledge will be relevant to the way I work with offspeed footage in the future, and I’m glad you asked so I could take a moment to test this. Now we both know we can do it either way. Great question!

[Blaise Douros]

Basically, what’s happening is that you’ve drawn the circular mask too close to the edges of the pre-comp that the Saber plugin is applied to, and the glow is overlapping the edge of the layer.

You can do one of two things: shrink the masks so they are farther from the edge of the comp, or increase the pixel count of the comp (while leaving the mask the same size) so that the glow will not be clipped short by the edge of the comp.

Dave LaRonde, while it might be easy to make a circular Shape layer as you’ve described, it’s not as easy to accomplish many of the very handy effects that the free (and VERY useful) Saber plugin can accomplish. If OP Dave Lewis wanted to add more visual complexity or additional effects that Saber can easily accomplish, I think the Shape layer method would add unnecessarily to that process rather than simplifying.

[Blaise Douros]

Are there any elements in the scene that absolutely have to be continuously visible? I.E. can you break it into clips that you can track individually, and insert your assets into each shot?

For example; let’s say we pan left, and see Thing 1, then right to see Thing 2, then back to Thing 1 on the left. There will be a moment when neither Thing is visible, so you could cut there. So this sequence becomes three individual shots that cut together seamlessly.

I’ll agree with Dave; doing it the way you’re trying to do it is not very practical, nor does After Effects work well with such long sequences.

Also, the 3D camera tracker likes specific information. Find out the width of the angle of view (in degrees) of the Inspire camera that was used for the shot, and enter that into the 3D Camera Tracker. You will almost always get better results on the track and solve operation if AE knows what the camera’s FOV is.

If there are objects in the scene moving in such a way that they might confuse the tracker, mask them out with a black junk matte (and precompose the footage and matte) for the tracking operation.

[Blaise Douros]

Ricardo was making a joke that it would put your editor out of a job–he didn’t read the part where you said you were a compositor.

Your idea is good, but the problem is that Premiere relies on file names to link media. So every time you add a new version of a shot, Premiere would have to know to look for it. And Premiere doesn’t know that. So you have to do something sneaky.

The only way to do this would be to build a template Premiere project with dummy files on your server, and you need to set it up with all dummy files present at the beginning of the process. Animators would replace the dummy file with the current version, so that when Premiere looks at that file, the name remains constant but the data inside the file changes. So that means that you need to have a naming convention that works like this:

[show and episode]_[shot number]_CURRENTVERSION.mov

Then, previous versions would need to be renamed to Rev1, Rev2, etc. as they were replaced. You probably can’t track the compositor’s name in the file structure, because unless you know six months in advance which compositor is going to work on which shot, you won’t be able to build a dummy file structure that accurately reflects who is working on what.

Does this make sense? Premiere doesn’t have any ability to go and autonomously search for new file versions–but if you can fool it by putting new data in a filename that Premiere already has imported, you can have it update this way.

You also won’t be able to build a timeline that automatically scales with varying lengths of shots in each project–since shot 2 in project 1 and shot 2 in project 2 are going to be different lengths, Premiere won’t be able to scale them on the timeline. Instead, you’d leave them in the bins, select all the media, and create a new timeline each time you opened the project to check the completeness of the project.

So there you go. There’s a way to do it, but it’s a bit clunky, and will require a compromise on your media organization system.