Cory Petkovsek
Forum Replies Created
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You need to talk to the person who is the recipient of your footage and get the appropriate specs of what they are expecting. You need to have communication with the source and destination contacts; not us. If you are really unsure, send them a small test clip so they can catch any big mistakes before you do any real work.
If it looks washed out, it’s probably a linear curve in a 10-bit dpx.
Linear light is for blend modes, where the layers are blended at 1.0 gamma, and is usually recommended for more natural (physically real) blending. This is a little different concept than the linear gamma curve used to compress greater latitude into a 10-bit dpx.
32-bit will protect over range values better if compositing.
Finally, work in the color space of your output spec and let AE manage color. If the source, workingspace and output are all rec709, that makes it easy. Just ensure in your output settings to keep the same 17-236 scale if that is what the destination contact wants.
Cory
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Cory Petkovsek
Corporate Video -
First stabilize the video.
Then remove the person or object with either a matte painting or rotoscoping or both.
Then if desired you can “unstablize” the footage, either with the original destabilization or added fake stabilization.
Cory
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It means signed 16-bit little endian. Unless you’re working on big iron unix (not with AE), your processor is little endian. The difference between signed and unsigned is significant for numbers >=2^15 or negative. Look it up if interested. But basically it will probably work just fine as pcm_16le which doesn’t specify if it is signed or unsigned.
Cory
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As I said, Jpeg does not support alpha. That is why it is greyed out; because there is no alpha channel in the file. Your options are to recreate the original image with a proper alpha channel, or if it is all black and grey, you can key out the grey with the color key effect.
Also if this is stock photography, you may have two cycles of the video, one as shown and the other that looks like a black and white silhouette. If you see that, it is an alpha matte that you can use.
Cory
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One is stupid enough to do a job that costs him money.
The other is unwise enough to accept that work, knowing the relationship is going to be painful and short lived.
You are wise enough to let them have at! Don’t rant, be happy you are not involved!
Cory
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Cory Petkovsek
Corporate Video -
Jpeg doesn’t support alpha channels.
Go back to where you got the footage and export it again using a different codec that does support alpha channels, such as PNG sequence, animation codec, tiff sequence.
Also note whether you are using a straight or premultipled alpha channel and set AE to the same when interpreting the footage.
Cory
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I haven’t seen any fire proof safes (outside of vaults perhaps), only fire resistant safes, rated on an hourly basis. Magnetic or optical media cooking for a couple hours doesn’t sound very reliable. Even if it lasts through the fire, how much longer will it last after?
For your archives, you should have two copies. One on site, the other offsite. They are old archives so don’t need to be rotated. They only take one trip offsite and stay there.
The rest of your data is cycled on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual backup rotation. If you don’t like harddrives (and you shouldn’t because they don’t do revision control well, and have built in and fallible moving parts), then you should be using tapes, which are the super industry standard (across all industries). LTO are the highest capacity, giving you up to 1.5tb per tape. Use enterprise class backup software to manage them, like backup exec, and if you have the data demands and budget for it, an autoloader.
Rich, you should reconsider your position on tapes. 100gb happened a long time ago. However they don’t mount like a drive, and they shouldn’t. Tapes and backup software provide revision control; harddrives do not (without revision control software).
In any case, your backup process is only useful if it is documented accurately and followed to the letter. When you write it out, detail every step of each process. There will be many processes: The process for a daily backup, What happens for the weekly backup, The process for the monthly, quarterly and annual backup; when tapes are rotated, when they are taken off site, when data is removed from the backup cycle and turns into archive media. How to recover a single file. How to recover a whole project (you have some of it on the cloud, and perhaps some of it on the tape. How to recover files from the cloud, vs tape. Once you have your processes, test and fix them; you forgot something. Assume that the person creating the process will not be the one recovering the system.
How much do you take off site? Talk with your company principals and figure out how much risk exposure you have in order to determine how anal to be with your backups. If you are shooting new projects once a week, then taking your raw footage offsite once a week may be appropriate, twice a week is over kill. If you are doing 3 shoots every day, then taking that raw footage offsite once a week means you could potentially loose 15 shoots worth of information. How much did that cost vs employees time to take another backup?
A typical, reasonable backup cycle for a company is like this:
Daily (Sun-Thurs) – differential backup, single copy, on site
Weekly (Fri) – Full backup, copy 1, on site
Weekly (Sat) – Full backup, copy 2, taken off site and swapped with one of the offsite setsHave as many sets of tapes as you desire for your weekly backups. Some can be on site, some off site as desired. Once a month, one of these weekly backups is designated the monthly backup. Retain monthlies up to a quarter. Once a quarter, one of the monthly backups is named the quarterly backup. And so on. At any given time you can have a single annual, a single quarter or multiple, multiple months, multiple weeks, and in the drive the daily differentials for the last one or two weeks.
You don’t need to have a huge amount of tape sets, as you can recycle them (when the last quarter becomes the annual, the old annual goes back into the cycle). You just need enough to give you all the backup retention you desire. Scale the resolution up or down according to your cost/benefit assessment derived from your risk exposure analysis.
I’ve done this for public companies as an IT manager. The auditors loved my facilities because they ran smoothly and were well documented. I made my own job very easy as well.
Cory
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Cory Petkovsek
Corporate Video -
So if he gave you one second of footage, he gave you 30 frames per clip. Ask your friend to rerender it, giving you 450 frames per clip (15 seconds). Then buy him lunch because it’s going to take 15 times longer for his computer to render.
Cory
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Beyond that, you’ll need to reshoot it and overcrank the camera. Slow motion that you see in other video is shot at 60-120fps or higher and played at 24 or 30fps.
Cory