[Chris Cummings]

Thanks so much Shane – very helpful! That’s exactly the dilemma. Wondering how motion graphic artists who bump into this solve it? Luckily this is for our own project – a trailer to help us pitch/raise funds. However, just checked and Vimeo won’t let you use 60fps. Argh.

Anyway, really appreciate you taking time to answer and enlighten Shane!
~Chris

[Chris Cummings]

Sigh. Figured it out – chalk it up to being tired…I was working on an adjustment layer in a stack of many as opposed to the base layer with the video 😉

[Chris Cummings]

Thanks as well from me – just tested and worked perfectly!

[Chris Cummings]

My last post brought Mark to mind, so I sent him an email about this. I’ll be sure to post any insight should I hear back from him.

[Chris Cummings]

Thanks for the reply Ken.

I’m creating/exporting progressive frames as this is a standalone motion graphic. Being Mac/Final Cut Studio based, I’ve haven’t tried WMV much. I downloaded the trial for Flip 4 Mac and used the highest settings, but the results were awful.

Ken Stone has some great compression/encoding articles on his website. Aaron’s disc looks great, and Brian Geary (sp?) has some great books/dvds out on this as well. I’ve used the articles on Ken’s site to improve H.264, as well as the gamma workaround mentioned earlier.

Anyway, would love to get more insight to this issue if possible. Is Mark Christiansen on this forum? 😉

Cheers,
~Chris

[Chris Cummings]

Thanks again David 🙂

In this case it was 1280×720. I think the thin wide PSD might have been 2500 pixels wide. I know AE doesn’t like working with oversize sources. Maybe I should have stitched it together in AE and pre-composed? Anyway, it looked/worked fine, except for this output issue, which is likely what you’re describing.

Only last thing is that it still showed up in the H.264, but I encoded at the highest quality settings, with all keyframes, etc. Still, all these motion graphic companies seem to be able to compress high quality samples of their work on their websites, at small file sizes, so maybe I just need to figure out a better encoding solution?

All the best,
~Chris

[Chris Cummings]

Thanks for your reply David. I had similar thoughts, but when I compressed the file in Compressor to H.264 (using both Animation and PhotoJpeg as the source), I’m still seeing these little hitches (same places, same spots).

You raise another issue which is when clients are requesting QT pieces to integrate into PowerPoint, and QT for projector presentations, how are people delivering high quality sources? I’ve been using PhotoJpeg, with H.264 versions as a back-up (circumventing the gamma issue with the internal QT settings using the blend/straight alpha technique).

In this particular case, I wonder if it has something to do with the inordinate size of the source PSDs used? I created two that were very large. The first is a long strip of photos made to look like a contact sheet that the camera zips along back and forth across stopping on certain images.

Thanks again for any thoughts/replies.

Cheers,
~Chris

[Chris Cummings]

PS – linear keyframes with motion blur added to make it look like the camera is whipping between focal points.

[Chris Cummings]

Just found this thread with a little more digging: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1005458

[Chris Cummings]

A related question: I’ve got a 1080i timeline of interviews converted from HDV over to ProRes on capture. I also have various B-roll to overcut that is 720×480 and 720 x 486 NTSC DV, with some anamorphic as well! It’s all going out to SD DVD through DVDSP at the end…

So, rather than trying to scale all this B-roll up, as it’s going out to SD anyway, I’m assuming I should scale the 1080i footage down into an SD sequence per above, with the shifted fields Jeremy noted.

However, I’m still confused about the PAR, which is HD 1440:

— Will the scaled down 1080i footage the NTSC DV PAR suffice, all the way through DVDSP output?
— Also, should I keep the SD sequence 16:9 so that the 1080 footage won’t have any letterboxing?

Thanks so much for any help/advice!!

BTW, Jeremy, if you’re reading this – fantastic article in the last Cow Mag! We’ve been looking into the same workflow and your article was invaluable.