[Curious Turtle]

If you don’t have Final Cut Studio installed on your system, then you probably don’t have the correct codec you need to playback these files. That’s why you’re getting the black screen.

Quicktime Pro won’t give you this feature, but Calibrated Software have some software that will let. That is if you don’t have the V1.4 of AppleHDVCodec.component, which is automatically installed by FCS.

Hope that helps,
Ben

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[Curious Turtle]

As Michael says, you there’s no magic filter that will let you do this. But have you thought about adding multiple copies of the smoke layer, and using soft masks to try to blend them together?

The Screen blend mode could also help, at the expense of the smoke becoming a little lighter in the comp.

Hope that helps,
Ben

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[Curious Turtle]

Hi Danny,

The track matte always looks to the layer above. If you’re following that guide, you should be working on the bottom layer, then take the alpha channel from your untouched key (the top layer).

Another thing you can do instead of duping layers is turn Keylight to “Intermediate” and use a regular Spill Suppressor filter afterwards.

Hope that helps,
Ben

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[Curious Turtle]

The feature point doesn’t affect the layer at all. Only the other keyframes in the Transform properties. So you don’t have to worry about that.

Do you have any keyframes on the Position property? Those would counter the Anchor keyframes.

Ditch all the keyframes you currently have, then re-stabilize the footage, as it sounds like you’re on the right track.

All the best,
Ben

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[Curious Turtle]

Sort of.

If you right-click on an audio clip, you can use the Keyframe Assistant to convert the audio to keyframes. This will create a null object with the information in there. This is then available for access through expressions, to link those values to other properties.

If you want to focus on specific frequencies, then you have to use a bit of trial and error with AE’s audio effects before you convert to keyframes.

Trapcode Soundkeys gives you a much more intuitive interface for getting the data out.

Cheers,
Ben

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[Curious Turtle]

Adjustment layers will always affect all the layers beneath it. If you want to exclude certain layers, then use pre-composing to group the layers you want to affect. You can either apply the adjustment layer inside the precomp, or apply the effects directly to precomp in the main composition.

Here’s some more information about precomposing.

Hope that helps,
Ben

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[Curious Turtle]

What application are you using to do the transcode to ProRes? If you’re using Compressor then you can just set it up to do both at the same time.

Set the codec up to ProRes and the framerate to 25 in the encoder pane. Then in the Frame Controls pane make sure that the Set Duration has “So source frames play at 25fps”.

If memory serves, that should do you.

Cheers,
Ben

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[Curious Turtle]

Hi,

I would start with the Levels effect. Start with matching the contrast using the Input/Output black and white levels. If you work on each channel separately that will get you a great way towards colour matching the element into the scene.

I would not use Hue/Saturation for this task.

Hope that helps,
Ben

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[Curious Turtle]

You seem to be confusing yourself. Start from the end and work your way backwards.

You want to output to:

i) An HD YouTube clip at 1280×720
ii) A DVD – It looks like you are wanting to go out PAL, so that gives a resolution of 720×576.

If you only want to do one animation for both destinations, then we’ll take the larger resolution to start with and create a scaled down version for DVD.

So… 1280×720 is an HD flavour. It uses square pixels. That takes another headache away for you.

If you decide to go out to DVD, create a new composition and use a preset to go out PAL widescreen/anamorphic. Drag your larger comp in, and then scale to fit (Ctrl-Alt-F or Cmd-Opt-F). The preset would have given you the correct aspect ratio, so everything scales nicely.

Bottom line, if you’re going computer only, take the square pixel route and read through this a few times ;o) It will make sense eventually.

Hope that helps a bit,
Ben
PS If you are going out to a PAL DVD, choose a 25fps framerate to give yourself an easy life later in the process.

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[Curious Turtle]

Chris is 100% right. I’ll often create little “snippet” projects that I can just import and adjust as necessary without affecting the original precomp. So give that a try.

Cheers,
Ben

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