Conrad Olson
Forum Replies Created
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If you clip is short go for CBR. That way you don’t have to do a multipass encode to get a good result so it will be faster. And the result will be as good as it gets.
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If you are changing the camera animation do you have motion blur switched on? I don’t know how the motion blur is calculated but it might affect render times.
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If you are making a square pixel sequence to fit into a PAL output then I think you should scale everything to 1024×576. I haven’t delt with PAL for a while so my memory might be off on that but there are presets for it in Photoshop so you can check there. This should then scale properly when dropped into an anamorphic sequence.
As for bit rate, the theoretical maximum for the DVD format is 10Mbps, which included video, audio subtitles etc. So your 7Mbps video + 128kbps audio should be fine. But when I was learning about DVDs I remember reading somewhere that some players can stutter if you get too close to that max. If I only had short sequences I would encode the video at 6Mbps and 192kbps Dolby Digital audio.
Both Dolby Digital and PCM are valid formats for DVD but you don’t often get PCM. I think for the same reason as mentioned above, the extra bandwidth can cause some machines to stutter.
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From what I remember you can put 24p content on a PAL DVD and the DVD player will do the frame conversion (just a speed up). I think that is how most Hollywood DVDs are mastered.
As for DVD/Blu-Ray for reels, I would only make on if the company you have applied to requests one. Most places don’t expect physical copies these days. An HD video on Vimeo or Youtube looks miles better than a DVD, and they can choose to watch and SD version if they need to.
I think most places would view the reel on a computer, even if it was on a DVD, and blu-ray drive adoption isn’t that high to be worth the effort (especially if the person viewing your reel is on a Mac)
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You will have to do some serious scale and lens maths to make this work. You will also need to be very accurate with the measurements that you take from your tripod. And any kind of camera movement will pretty much fail unless you have a motion control rig.
You might be able to get something close and use corner pinning or warping to fix any issues.
I would be interested to hear if this setup works but I would probably go the VFX route if it was my project.
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The biggest problem you are going to have with footage like this is going to be the tracking, especially with camera zooms.
Trying to get a full 3D camera track to do any kind of 3D solution is going to take time but will ultimately give you the best result.
Mocha should be able to track the field surface and then give you corner pin data that you can apply to the ring graphic. You are still going to have to add a layer of hand animation or 2D tracking on top of this to get the ring to follow the player.
In both cases you are going to have to come up with some kind of matte (roto or keying) to mask out the players as they will screw up your tracking.
.mts files are not great to work with. They are processor intensive. After Effects will perform better if you convert it to either an image sequence or a QuickTime codec like PhotoJPG, Animation or ProRes.
I’ve just watched an FXPHD video about how they did this for the America’s Cup sailing, it wasn’t easy. Very interesting video though. If you are an FXPHD member check out the Background Fundamentals class 01.
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If the camera doesn’t move too much try this:
Duplicate your footage and freeze frame one copy.
Blur both layers a lot and the same amount.
Switch the blending mode to subtract. You now have the difference between the frame you froze on and the current frame. You might need to put your project into 32 bit to allow negative vlaues.
Precomp these two layers and place the precomp above the solid. Set it to add.
You can adjust the blur amount. Smaller blur will give you more localised differences but will fail if the movement between the two frames is too much. Bigger blur will just give you a more general difference in lighting.
If you do the same thing but set the first blend mode to divide rather than subtract and the second to multiply instead of add you can match colour rather than brightness.
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There is a lot of work involved in creating an affect like this. Do you have a particular piece of footage that you are using? If you post that then maybe we can give you more specific suggestion.
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Converting 8bit footage into 16bit won’t improve the quality of the footage. You can however work in After Effects at 16 bit with 8 bit footage. When you do this any effects you apply will benefit from the extra bits.
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You don’t need to put the player into 3D space.
The ring and the line are done in 3D space but you could use a combination of a 2D tracker, a corner pin and some hand animation to cheat that effect.
If you want to do it in 3D space you would have to use the camera tracker to solve the camera move, then create a surface that matches the football field. Then you would animate the ring or the line on this surface. When it is rendered through the tracked camera it will have the correct perspective.
You can then just use a chroma keyer to key the green field, invert it, and apply it to the ring so that they players are cut out of the ring.
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