Conrad Olson
Forum Replies Created
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I might be wrong but I think frame rate can be included as part of the header of the DPX file. If that’s the case it might be overriding the AE default when you drag and drop.
Just a suggestion. Don’t know for sure.
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You will need a hardware blu-ray burner and specific blank blu-ray discs. I think you can use Adobe Encore to author the disc.
When you tired to used the laptop to play the file back what format was the file you were trying to play? If you had rendered it out uncompressed most laptops would struggle to play it. You can take that uncompressed file and use Adobe Media Encoder (different application part of the CS Suite) to compress that file into a H.264 format. This will make a much smaller file size that should still look pretty good and play back better. You could then loop this in your media player.
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If you are making a DVD from your QuickTime it will be down sampled from HD to SD and it will always look pretty crappy compared to what you started with.
Is there no other way of playing the video back? From a computer, or an Apple TV or something? That way you could keep your HD resolution and your image would look much better, even at 1280×720
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[Tudor "Ted" Jelescu] “Except for the planar tracking it almost sounds like Commotion – that was an awesome roto and paint package years ago. Too bad Puffin Designs got bought out and Pinnacle made a mess out of it.”
I started at Framestore not long after they had phased out Commotion so I never got to use it. There were a few of the more senior members of the paint and roto team that would talk about it fondly.
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Just had a quick Google. You can add 24fps footage to a DVD I know this is from Apple DVD Studio Pro but it is talking about the DVD specification:
https://documentation.apple.com/en/dvdstudiopro/usermanual/index.html#chapter=4%26section=3%26tasks=trueI would just take the encoding preset that you are using and change the frame rate to “same as source” or explicitly 24fps.
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Just to put these comments in context; I have never done any really heavy roto in Mocha so I am mainly comparing Silhouette with Nuke. The Foundry is constantly improving the roto tools in Nuke and I haven’t tried the new tools in the recent update Nuke 7.
Also, I never had to do any serious roto in the jobs that I used After Effects for so I can’t really compare the two, but from what I remember of the roto tools in AE I wouldn’t want to do much in there.
Silhouette is designed purely for roto and painting. This means that the interface, keyboard shortcuts and performance are dedicated to just that. Once you learn all the keyboard shortcuts (there aren’t that many) it is much fast to work with than Nuke.
The snappy playback and various display modes (also with keyboard shortcuts) also makes it much faster to move through the frames and check your work as you go, which means it is much easier to spot and address boiling or jittery edges as you work.
My favorite tools though are the transform tools. These allow you to skew/scale/rotate whole shapes, or a selection of points. This helps you keep the points consistent relative to each other, which in turn speeds up the work and reduces boiling. There are tools like this in Nuke but the way they work in Silhouette are just better and faster, the skew tool especially.
The combination of the nested layers and the point tracking in Silhouette allows you to use tracking to speed up your work. They do have planar tracking too but the last time I tried to use it (which was a while ago now) it was useless. Apparently the latest version has improved the planar tracking. Again, Nuke has nested layers and allows you to apply tracking, but it isn’t as fast.
The frame-by-frame painting is unmatched.
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It sounds like you have a solution but…
Why are you trying to make a 25fps DVD. From what I remember of the DVD format you can encode PAL res files at 24fps and the DVD players will do the 4% speed during playback to create the 25fps output. I’m pretty sure that most Hollywood DVDs are mastered at 24fps.
I could be wrong, haven’t dealt with DVDs for a while.
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Even though you might not be able to play back your huge animation QuickTime it is technically the best quality source. Whenever you got back to that file you can always re-encode it into some other format to work with or view. And it is always best to go back to the original source for each encode.
It is also a more common codec than any of the others mentioned above, which means in 5 years time, if you try and open it on another system, you won’t have to try and find the codecs again.
That being said, I’m sure the Avid one in particular is common enough that it will be readable for a long time to come and the difference in file size verses the quality will probably make it a more viable option.
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If you don’t already have After Effects, and therefore don’t have Mocha already, and you are looking to buy a dedicated package for roto I would really suggest Silhouette. The tools for detailed roto are the best I’ve used. I’ve worked at Framestore and MPC and they both use Silhouette as their main roto package.
Admittedly I learned to roto in Silhouette, so I’ve always stuck to it and found roto in Mocha frustrating in comparison. I’m sure if I spent some time learning Mocha I could get used to it. The planar tracking is much better in Mocha.
I’ve written some roto tip on my blog, they are based on my experience in Silhouette but apply to all roto apps: https://conradolson.com/my-top-10-roto-tips
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