Brian Berneker
Forum Replies Created
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The black bars on the side suggest that you are setting the project to widescreen but not the clip itself. I’m not too huge on my vegas, but see if there is a clip properties you can adjust. Just because the file is shot widescreen, doesn’t mean the app always knows that automatically… look for pixel aspect ratio or 16:9 etc.
Brian
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You could make multiple PSD files or a layered PSD file of all the pages of the book, and then make the layers into 3D layers and rotate them with keyframes.
Unforunately, that would only give you rigid turning pages, instead of a nice elegant page curl as you fold the pages over. Look through the 3D effects and see if you can’t combo it with a 3D effect like cylinder or bend?
(darn, I gotta get home in front of my AE machine to answer this question properly)
Brian
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I sometimes use quicktime to capture directly from my HV30, using the device native setting in the preferences recording tab. This gives me usable HDV footage that I can work with in AE with no problems.
However, I DO have FCP installed, which I sometimes use when I want to grab more than a single clip. I’ve tried my HV30 at work without any special software installed, and it still let me capture HDV straight off firewire. I might have played back the clips with VLC instead of Quicktime, so getting the file is one thing, and reading it is another.
I don’t know if AE supports HDV out of the box, or by installing FCP, I’ve indirectly installed HDV support to Quicktime. Have you tried installing the Quicktime MPEG2 Codec? That might do the trick without having to install FCP.
Brian
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Sounds like you have more time than you have material to fill it. You could make the picture waft around a larger area, which gives you a bit more movement, but in the end you will probably have to pad the scene.
Perhaps you can pad the scene with more related or thematic pictures hanging on the wall, panning across the wall… maybe have a decorative vine crawl going across the baseboard, leading to the photo… anything to take up time before the final picture flies out.
Is this a title sequence? Maybe you can use the opportunity to embellish some names..
The more time you fill ahead of the picture animation, the faster you can make the final move out.
Think about the intro to Forrest Gump, where the feather floats around before finally landing next to Forrest. It’s a casual and slow movement, but the scene is all over the place, through the sky, over a car, in front of a bus, before the final drop.
30 seconds is a long time to have nothing happening, let alone FIVE MINUTES! I would take advantage of the opportunity to put in some more animated elements to illustrate the theme of the story, or negotiate for a different clip duration.
Brian
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Create a new solid just beneath the layer with an alpha channel and set the layer mask to point to the alpha for that layer. It will turn your solid into a cutout.
If you need it to be a B/W mask, you can do the whole thing inside a pre-comp, make the solid white, and create an additional black solid beneath it, so that the transparent areas show through as black.
I’m not sure, but there might even be a simple filter (i.e. levels etc) that lets you show the alpha channel directly with the channel pulldown.
Brian
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I’d say it could be a number of things. First off, if it plays fine on the computer screen but not your video output, then my guess would be it’s a field order problem.
Video out on your mac should automatically take care of that issue if you don’t render fields (progressive), since you would simply get the same frame twice for each scan giving you an effective 30fps instead of 60 fields, and the video device would deal with that.
I’ve had video that started out looking perfect go all steppy on me on output though because the field order was reversed to the that of the output device, which basically makes time go backwards within the two fields, but not the frames.. not pleasant at all… try a copy with lower field first, and another with upper field first. (and have a progressive version handy too, if the project doesn’t required days and days to render 😛 )
Failing all the above, your video output device might be scaling the video to the screen rather than full overscan field-to-field matching, which could bugger up the interlace altogether, in which case I would say just go progressive and leave it at that (OR look for a feature to enable overscan).
Honestly, since I got my HV30s, I shoot everything in 30p and leave interlacing behind. It all displays nicely on any set I’ve tried and just looks cleaner somehow.. Interlacing is a legacy hold off from the old days when displays couldn’t refresh fast enough to hold an image for a whole frame and is (hopefully sooner than later) going to become a thing of the past anyways.
I hope I’ve interpreted your situation properly and my comments are of some use…
Brian
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Thanks Jeremy!
There is never just one way to do a creative project, otherwise they wouldn’t be creative would they? One of my favorite parts of watching tutorials isn’t so much learning the technique, but getting a feel for each teacher’s thinking style.
For example, Andrew Kramer takes a fairly laid back approach, working with extra layers and comps as necessary without worrying about it too much… gets explorative and experimental, tying in the loose ends later. Watching his tutes are like going along for an adventure.
Maltaanon, on the other hand, while he is equally fun and adventurous, seems to be challenge oriented and looks for interesting ways to tighten and optimize techniques for doing things, making the project file itself very tight and compact, elegant in its own way. He also seems to be a bit more of an expression junkie and that’s really cool too…
I guess personally I have similarity to both of these guys, but I’d say my signature is in finding a way to invert the problem and somehow isolate it to the simplest elements. I don’t always succeed to that end, but it’s part of the way I like to think of each project… and have fun too of course…
Best of luck to Kevin in finding his own personal style and techniques, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the final clip looks like!
Brian
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Maybe you can post a link to the project file. I’d like to see how my system responds to it…
Brian
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Colorista is probably the most similar to FCPs 3-way color corrector.
https://www.redgiantsoftware.com/coloristafeatures.html
Other than that, there are plenty of photoshop similar filters in the effects > color correction menu to play with!
Brian
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Thanks Kev…
You can take a look at this tutorial to see a more advanced method to create a virtual set. In this example they only had a few green screen shots to work with and the rest was artificial!
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/oneil_bill/3d_world.php
Brian