[Daniel Christie]

I will second Dave’s recommendation of Colour Finesse. It is an extremely powerful grading tool. Red Giant make some great products, but I can’t stand the Magic Bullet range.

As for tutorials on encoding… my best advice would be to keep searching ‘the cow and immersing yourself in as much learning as possible. Good encoding is a real art form and can get very technical. There are so many different delivery platforms that it would be possible to cover all bases in a single tutorial.

I’ve lost count of the number f times a client has asked for delivery in H.264. Okay… what for? mMobile? Blu-Ray? Web? What particular web video service? Frame size? Data rate? Audio sample rate?

Cheers,

Daniel

[Daniel Christie]

Why are you rendering an H.264 out of AE? I would always recommend rendering a master version out as uncompressed, ProRes or DNxHD at your comp’s native resolution and then creating versions with different resolutions and CODECs from the master, as required. Much quicker if you have multiple versions to render and just a little neater in terms of work flow and archiving.

As the previous poster has alluded to, the behaviour you are seeing is usually indicative of a particularly complex or processor intensive part of the comp. Certain effects (such as particle emitters) heavily layered or intensive 3D comps with lots of lights can cause slow renders.

Hope that helps a little bit.

[Daniel Christie]

Thanks Walter! I’ll give the Null idea a shot.

I had messed around with the ‘world transform’ settings, but it seemed a rather inefficient way to get the effect I wanted, given that I would have to animate around the path.

Cheers,

Daniel

[Daniel Christie]

Keylight does a fine job of keying and handles detail and translucency very well, Primatte has however saved me on a couple of occasions when I have been given particularly badly lit shots and tricky spill/reflection. I have used the two in combination on a job where I had to key a dancer with a big feather head piece and silver shoes. Keylight did a great job with the feathers, but was struggling with reflections in the shoes.

I find that Primatte isn’t quite as good with hair and such. It is also a bit more fiddly to finesse the matte in Primatte. Primatte does, however, have quite a good spill suppressor in my opinion. It can suppress green spill without introducing a major magenta bias like some spill killers.

Daniel

[Daniel Christie]

One of the issues with a camera like the gopro that makes them look very video-ish is the fact that they use shutter speed to control exposure and therefore end up shooting at a fast shutter speed in daylight- as many handycams do.

There are some options for faking motion blur in AE but such as motion trail but I’m not sure the results will be all that satisfactory. When you are shooting, try sliding a little bit of ND gel in front of the lens to force the shutter speed down (pick up a lee or Rosco swatch book for nothing and use the swatches).

The goPro also suffers from fairly severe rolling shutter artifacts, so try processing it through the Foundry’s ‘Rolling Shutter’ or similar. Aside from that, some creative colour grading will help, but you are very much at the mercy of the H.264 compression that these cameras use. Sometimes they compress and expose very welll, sometimes they do not.

Daniel

[Daniel Christie]

Thanks for the reply, Mato, but I needed the actual pin in the puppet tool to anchor to a specific point, not just the layer.

I found a solution using the following expression applied to the pin position parameter:

n=thisComp.layer(“name of null layer”);
nullpos=n.toComp(n.anchorPoint);
fromComp(nullpos);

It converts the comp position value of the null position to a relative value within the layer the puppet tool is on.

[Daniel Christie]

As a work around for what you want to do, you could Precomp the video layer and then render and set a proxy for the precomp, not the video clip.

Daniel

[Daniel Christie]

Hello Xavier,

I am curious, given you are looking for freelancer to undertake some AE work independently, as to why you are adiment that they not work on a windows set up. I’m asking from a business perspective because if potential clients such as yourself are specifying ‘must work on Mac’, then the guys who are working in Windows need to understand why that is, so as to better place themselves in the market.

Given that AE is cross platform, what difference does it ultimatly make, in your opinion, if a designer is working in Windows instead of MacOS so long as they can deliver to specification. Admittedly the one drawback I am very aware of here is the lack of support for encoding ProRes in the Windows Quicktime output module, but I work with material coming from FCP and going to FCP on my Windows set up all the time without issue and sharing project files with AE on Mac.

Regards,

Daniel

[Daniel Christie]

Hi Maxime,

I don’t have a tutorial for you, but have a play around with the ‘distort’ filters in AE and you should be able to work something out. You could animate the ‘spherize’ filter to make the word bulge, for example. Or make a solid layer and use the mask tool to make a shape and animate the scale for a more classical, comic book styled ‘boom’.

Daniel

[Daniel Christie]

Try the ‘strobe light’ filter, which is standard in AE. The parameters are all fairly self explanatory. Depending on the exact effect you are trying to achieve, you may want to add the ‘posterize time’ filter as well.

Daniel