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Limit your work area to just the part you want to preview. You do it by going to beginning of the part you want and hitting the “b” (for Begin) key to mark the new beginning of the work area. Go to the end of the part you want and hit the “n” (for eNd) key to mark the new end of your work area.
Now ram preview. Don’t expect AE to get the ram preview right on the first time through. Sometimes it needs to to go through it a couple of times to get audio and video synced.
Still not working? You must have a really big comp — an HD comp, for instance — and AE can’t keep up. You can check by looking at the info panel. If the frame rate is in red as it plays back the ram preview, that’s the problem. Reduce your resolution to half and the comp size to 50% and try again. Yeah, reduced resolution AND size stinks, but sometimes you need real-time motion more than you need to see every detail.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV -
You don’t have to mess with the pixel aspect ratio in photoshop; AE does a good job of handling your pixel aspect ratio requirements for this job. Just drop it into your DV-resolution comp and have at it.
More good news: you don’t have to render using fields, either. In fact, rendering without fields will probably help out the details in your image. Know that because it’s a detailed image, you MIGHT have some problems, but you won’t know for sure until you bring it into FCP.
This next item might seem a bit counter-intuitive, but turning on AE’s motion blur will make things look nicer: you’ll have a little blur when the image moves, less as it slows down, and none when it stops and you want to read things.
As for codecs, I’d be tempted to render out in animation codec, best quality, import it into FCP, and let FCP worry about making it DV.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV -
It is not the best answer. As you have learned, you can’t mix footage from thwo different systems in the same FCP timeline. You need to choose the system in which you’re going to edit: NTSC or PAL. You then have to convert the non-standard footage to that system BEFORE you edit. Nattress does a good job of that.
Doing skipping the standards conversion step before you edit will make your life a LOT harder as you come to the end of the project. It might even force you start over from square 1.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV -
In the comp timeline, highlight the layer you want to replace.
In the project window, find the replacement footage. Select it and realease the mouse button. Hold down the option key and drag that footage OVER the layer to be replaced. Release! You’re done!
Still not right? Practice, practice, practice.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV -
Know that as an editor, AE is a fine compositing application. If you can do your editing work in Premiere, so much the better: it’ll be LOTS faster.
If you have no other choice but to work in AE, continue working in AE at 720×540. Keep it up until you have what you consider to be a FINAL AE comp, something that’s ready to put on DVD. Only at that point do you do the following:
Create a 720×480 comp; use the DV NTSC comp preset. Put your final AE comp into it. Now scale your only layer in the new comp using the “Scale the layer to fit the comp” command. That’s not it’s real name, but that’s what it does. The keyboard shortcut for it on a Mac is command-option-f, and on a Windows machine I’m pretty sure that it’s contol-alt-f.
Poof! You’re done. You’re ready to render at DV resolution.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV -
Click the View Posts button in the column to the left of this message, then look at the very top of the page. You will see a title that says, “COMMON AFTER EFFECTS QUESTIONS — PLEASE LOOK HERE FIRST”.
You can’t miss it — it’s in red, and unlike any other title up there, it’s all uppercase.
Click on it and find what you seek.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV -
It’s not so much the capabilities that you’ll find in AE Help as the technical terms, descriptions, how the controls work… and the lingo, too. Heck, if you don’t know what AE can do yet, and this forum’s a great place to ask.
But if somebody writes, “You need to interpret your footage as lower field first, reverse the horizontal scale only, parent it to another layer, use it in as an inverted luma matte, animate its position with a combination of bezier and hold keyframes and use an expression to get luminance values from another layer,” AE Help can turn the jibberish into plain English in your mind, and you’ll learn a bunch of valuable concepts as you do the translation.
Adobe calls the shots in terms of functionality and terminology in AE, so you need to know it or you’ll find yourself at a disadvantage. That’s where AE Help is a big help.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV -
Well, just keep in mind that as you continue to use AE, you’re going to find that AE Help is a darned good quick reference. It’s got all the facts in it, but it’s not always organized the way YOU think it ought to be.
It’s a good idea to get familiar with Adobe’s way of organizing the facts NOW, and not later when you really need it.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV -
Welcome to AE.
AE has to render EVERYTHING. You have to forget the notion that it will play back in real time, because it won’t. So just keep your fingers off that space bar.
AE is not an editing application — it’s first and foremost a compositing application. It’s meant for making changes to the footage you have and combining it with other footage. It assumes that you’ll be making fundamental changes to your video, or you wouldn’t use it; you’d use an editing application.
Depending on whatever else you have have running at the time you’re using AE, 7 seconds sounds about right for a full-resolution RAM preview on a MacBook Pro with 1GB.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV -
Look into the topic of Bezier Keyframes.
They allow you to adjust the interpolation speed of a property. What’s that mean? Well, it’s pure AE lingo, and if you’re going to stick with AE, you’ll need to know it. In plain English it says, “you can adjust how fast something changes”.
Let’s say you’re scaling something from 20% to 100%. You want the rate of the scaling to slow down as it approaches 100% so it looks nice and smooth. You have two keyframes. Highlight the second keyframe, then in the menu go to Animation>Keyframe Assistant>Easy Ease In.
Now your scaling slows down as it approaches 100%. You want it slower? Twirl down the little triangle next to the Scale property. Put the timeline cursor over the second keyframe, and play around with the handles on those curves you see.
Bezier keyframes is a big, complex subject, and you can’t know it all in one post. But you’ll learn a lot by looking at AE help, and playing around with them.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV