Brendan Coots
Forum Replies Created
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Just to throw in an extra two cents here – I have the white Macbook with a mere 1GB Ram as my primary email/misc/on-the-road machine. I run FCP, After Effects and even MAYA 3D (but only using Parallels) on it just fine. Needless to say it’s not ideal (screen size is somewhat cramped, not enough RAM, renders are a little slow etc. etc.) but it DOES work.
I wouldn’t throw a bunch of Macbooks into production, mind you, but it does work great for on-the-road comping, editing etc. as long as your expectations are properly set in advance.
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Usually Animation Codec or Uncompressed is best.
The only problem is, using these files will force you to render your FCP timeline every time you make any changes. If your FCP project is already built around specific footage, you may be better off rendering out of After Effects to whatever format your FCP timeline is. For example, if it’s a DVCPRO timeline and footage, output from AE to DVCPRO codec. The exception is, of course, if you need an alpha channel in your After Effects render, in which case Animation Codec is a good choice.
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Here’s some things to try individually, but don’t do all of them at once:
1. Preference files get corrupted now and then, and there are actually known issues with AE on Mac in this regard. Try holding down Command+Option+Shift when you launch AE, which will prompt you to delete the Preferences file. If AE starts normally after that, problem solved. NOTE – this will cause you to lose your preferences, which may not be desirable. It’s always a good idea to back up your preferences files for all apps just in case.
2. Temporarily move the OpenGL plug-in from the Applications/Adobe After Effects 7.0/Plug-ins/Standard/Extensions folder. If this stops the crashing, you have an OpenGL issue.
3. Temporarily move all 3rd party plugins out of the plugin folder, then start AE. Again, if it works fine you have a problem with one of your plugins, though I’ve never seen this happen.
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You will need to tell us more about the various settings, such as the codec used in the source Quicktimes, as well as the codec and settings used for the Quicktimes you output from After Effects. Beyond that, you should do a simple test. Pull the rendered Quicktimes BACK into After Effects and do a RAM preview on them:
1. If the files play smoothly, chances are good that the files are too large to play back smoothly in Quicktime Player, which is normal. Uncompressed video has a very high data rate that is greater than the speed of most hard disks, processor capabilities etc.
2. If the file is still stuttering in RAM preview, you may have rendered it out to a different frame rate than the source material. To check, open one of your source files in Quicktime Player and choose Window>Show Movie Info. This will tell you the codec, size and frame rate of the source clip. Open the rendered clip and do the same thing, verifying that the settings match.
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It depends on the background you are using. If it’s a very simple, solid background you can probably get away with a cloning approach, but more than likely you will need to manually work it over to get a good result.
A clean BG plate would be very helpful provided it’s a locked off camera. That said, unless you have access to a lot of crazy high-end gear and you know how to use it all, I wouldn’t even think about doing anything BUT a locked off shot for this type of thing.
As was mentioned upstream, you will need some way to “cap off” the legs where the greenscreen ends and their flesh begins. This is usually done in 3D, but would also require you to motion track your shots and pull that data into your 3D package in order to properly line up the 3D “nubs” to the actor’s appendages.
No matter how you slice it, it’s not an easy process.
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The most important thing is that you want to avoid rendering wherever possible. Every time you render (say, your timeline out of Premiere) you add some loss of quality, and another huge file to manage/store.
The best option is to work with the original source footage. If you are using a movie called videoclip1.mov on your Premiere timeline and it needs an effect, you should pull videoclip1.mov into After Effects off of your hard drive and work with it directly. The only problem with this method is, if you trimmed it down or are only using a certain portion of it in Premiere, you will need to only focus on that portion of the clip in After Effects.
You can export your Premiere edit as an AAF as Graham mentioned, which is essentially a text file that tells After Effects how to recreate your Premiere edit.
The other option is to just look in your edit to see which part of that particular clip was used, and limit your effects work to that segment of the clip. Either way, it is vital that, once your effects work is done, you render out a movie that is the exact length of the source clip you are working with. If videoclip1.mov is 00:10:24:39 long, then the movie you render out of After Effects needs to be that long. The reason is that back in Premiere, you will have it replace videoclip1.mov with the effects footage you rendered from After Effects. If the two clips are not the same length, your edits to the clip will be off.One final piece of advice. You may want to limit your color correction to the tools in Premiere. It would be quite a round-trip to color correct the source clips in AE, render them out (adding quality loss) and have to manage/store a second copy of ALL your source footage. Unless you are intending to use Color Finesse in AE, the only color correction tools you will ever need are in Premiere as well (Levels and Hue/saturation).
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First of all, Divx is a distribution codec, meaning that it should only be used for things like outputting your final movie for the web. It should never ever be used in production. If you want to avoid quality loss, the first step is to use a codec more appropriate to video production. Given the source of your video you should probably use the DV codec, which doesn’t take up a whole lot of hard drive space.
After Effects would not accept your video because it does not like non-production codecs, Divx being one of them.
Next thing, avoid (like the plague) compressing your video multiple times, especially with a codec like Divx. Even with a high quality production codec, some quality loss is introduced every time you recompress video. This is especially true with something like Divx though, because it’s whole role in life is to toss away quality in order to crush video sizes down.
Third, don’t use VirtualDub to edit. After Effects makes it pretty easy to assemble a tight, clean edit that you can change later if needed.
The best workflow would be to capture the footage as DV, pull that footage directly into After Effects, edit and do whatever else is needed in After Effects, then output to whatever format your instructor has asked for.
Hope it works out!
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Every timeline layer in After Effects can only hold one item. There is an easier way to do what you need, however. Right-click the footage in your project bin, and select Interpret Footage. There is a looping option that can be set to as many loops as you need.