[Brendan Coots]

Let me just throw my “don’t do it” into the ring as well.

BRUTAL economy

BRUTAL downward rate pressure

BRUTAL competition

It takes a masterful business person with long-term industry experience to even keep a studio busy these days, and (no offense) you don’t seem prepared. Spare yourself the misery, just say no.

[Brendan Coots]

Need MOAR RAM!

Also, I tend to prefer having 3 hard drives – the OS drive with proggies, a fast and large drive for media and project files and a third for disc cache and rendering to. This prevents any bottlenecks, but might be overkill in some people’s minds.

[Brendan Coots]

That rig will work just fine. You can, after all, use After Effects on a wimpy laptop if needed.

As for the graphics card, AE doesn’t really take much advantage of your graphics card anyway so anything will do.

[Brendan Coots]

When in doubt, trash your AE preferences – next time you start up After Effects, hold down the Command + Option + Shift keys (Mac) or Control + Alt + Shift (Windows), and you are presented with an option to delete the preferences.

Sucks because you will lose your settings, but rules because it can fix a lot of weird problems.

[Brendan Coots]

“It seems like it skips some frames for the performance part.”

Do you mean just the audio skips, or both audio and visual? Also, when you say you “do your exports” what do you mean? Are you rendering it using the Render Queue in After Effects, and the resulting file has skips?

[Brendan Coots]

If you could provide a still frame of what you’re describing, it would really help because this isn’t a one-size-fits-all situation.

If the background behind the actor is as dark as their hair, the separation you’re looking for would typically have come from having a rim light (aka “hair light”) on the talent during the shoot, to provide a little highlight on the hair.

Without seeing what you’re working with, I would guess that you have two options. The easy option is to apply the Levels effect to the background and lighten it up a touch so the hair is darker than the background but at least has some separation, OR you can simulate a rim light on the actor. The method for doing this is a little complicated:

– turn off all of your Magic Bullet correction for now
– duplicate both the background and keyed actor layers, and move them above the original actor/actress key layer.
– hide the original background and keyed actor layers for now
– set the track matte on the new background layer to “Alpha Inverted Matte” using the keyed actor layer as the matte
– this should give you the background with a big black hole where the actor should be
– precompose these two layers together (Layer > PreCompose) and make sure you select “move all attributes into new comp”
– apply a Fast Blur effect to this new comp. only turn up the blur enough to soften the edge between the background and the black hole from the actor
– set the blending mode for this comp to “lighten”
– once again, duplicate the original keyed actor layer and move it above this new, blurred precomp you just created
– set the track matte on the blurred background layer to “Alpha Matte” using the duplicated layer from the previous step as the target
– unhide your original background and keyed actor

You should now have a soft halo on your actor. You can increase the Fast Blur amount on the blurred background layer to make the halo larger or smaller, and you will probably need to turn the opacity of the blurred background layer down quite a bit to get a natural look. Once you get a look you like, you will need to use a feathered mask to restrict the effect to just the hair area.

[Brendan Coots]

This may not end up being your problem, but it’s a good start – before you render, in After Effects select Edit>Purge>Purge All.

This will clear all preview frames out of RAM. Sometimes, as you change an animation around, old frames will get stuck in the buffer and result in screwy flickering that seems to come and go as you described.

[Brendan Coots]

“Every time I send them a high res .mov file”

Most important question here is what codec are you outputting to?

When they say “it won’t play” you need to know specifically if the file gives an error, stutters along or simply gives a black screen even though the timeline is moving along.

If opening the file gives them an error, it could be a few different things:
– The file is larger than 2GB, which a lot of PC users will have trouble with
– if you are delivering via CD or DVD, make sure that the disc is being encoded for both PC and Mac. This should be an option in your burning software.
– Make sure the client actually has Quicktime Player installed.

If it stutters, their machine can’t handle it and not much you can do about that.

If it plays black, they probably don’t have the right codec installed. You should be using Animation Codec or something equally commonplace to avoid this issue.

[Brendan Coots]

May sound obvious, but did you rip it in a way that would preserve the interlacing? If you just ripped to, say, animation codec, the interlacing would be baked into the file instead of being preserved for de-interlacing.

Your best bet may be to just copy the MPEG2 file off of the DVD instead of ripping it. You will avoid additional quality loss, and should preserve the existing interlacing in the process – assuming the original author did things correctly.

[Brendan Coots]

Everything is worth exactly what the buyer will pay for it. In my opinion there is no formula here, I think it all comes down to how valuable the media is to them, and how good of a negotiator you are.

Questions that might affect the price – what’s the nature / quality of the content? What they will be using it for? Are they asking for exclusive rights? Will they be using it in a commercial capacity, i.e. making a profit from the work itself? Would the content be difficult or impossible for them to acquire through other means, i.e. producing it themselves?

If you feel that the media is of high value to them, and that they have a good financial incentive to buy your work rather than self-produce or obtain similar work elsewhere, then you can and should hold the upper hand in negotiations. Otherwise, take what you can get and be happy to have made money from an old endeavor!

Also, just to be sure, did you produce this video on your own, or was it done for a client? May sound obvious, but if this was a work-for-hire you can’t really license it out to others.