[Dan O’brien]

I say take advantage of the mapping feature and customize the heck out of your keyboard settings. Anything that makes switching between machines easier is a good thing!

[Dan O’brien]

That’s exactly what it was. Thanks for the help.

Dan

PrEditors.net

[Dan O’brien]

I forgot to mention that I’ve got deck control with the capture tool, but there’s no video in the preview window (it says unavailable) and it won’t capture anything…

Dan

PrEditors.net

[Dan O’brien]

Problem solved… I found the cause…

I was doing something that was taught to me a few years ago. I was building my comps at 720×540 square pix at 24fps. When rendering my quicktime, I was adding pulldown, changing to 29.97fps, and then stretching to 720×486 in the render queue. That’s the problem.

With comps that start out at 720×486, I had no problem. But with my 720×540 comps rendered out at 720×486 the pulldown problem occurred (see original post). I don’t know why, but at least I know how to avoid it.

And I’m not quite sure why an instructor told me to build comps for tv at 720×540 and render out 720×486 when I was done. Maybe it was before the pixel aspect ratio correction feature of AE? But I know that’s what he told me.

Oh well, mystery solved.

Dan

PrEditors.net

[Dan O’brien]

Thanks for the help! I appreciate the guidance.

I’ve been testing on a different system and I think it’s an avid codec problem with my mac. Here at work we’re on pc and I’ve been rendering out test comps with much better results using the guidelines you suggested.

Dan

PrEditors.net

[Dan O’brien]

Actually I’m not working with any imported footage. I’m building graphics from scratch in After Effects at 24fps (using photoshop shapes/files and particle effects), and trying to render out the graphic elements as stand alone elements for use in a 29.97 avid sequence.

Dan

PrEditors.net

[Dan O’brien]

Here’s a couple tips…

1) make sure your camera’s keyframes are ‘easy eased’. This smooths out the speed/time between keyframes.

2) select your camera’s position/point of interest keyframes and right click… go to “keyframe interpolation” and make sure the spatial interpolation is set to “bezier”. This will give you handles to your camera’s path in the viewers. Sometime’s they’re hard to see, so take a close look if you can’t see them. With these handles, you can smooth out the path that the camera travels between keyframes. This mixed with the “easy ease” on your keyframes should give you smoother movements between keyframes.

3) If you don’t need to change the point of interest of you camera, turn it off by right-clicking on the camera layer and going to “transform > auto orient” and select “off”. This get’s rid of the camera’s point of interest property, which is one less thing you have to worry about.

[Dan O’brien]

you may want to post this in the FCP forum as well, but many times its simply a matter of checking your playback settings in fcp. also, are you looking at the footage on an ntsc monitor or your computer screen? if it’s the computer monitor only, don’t judge the final fcp output by that.

again, cross-posting in the fcp forum may help if these tips don’t do the trick.

Dan
PrEditors.net

[Dan O’brien]

There’s a lot of helpful stuff on consolidating in you “Help” menu, but if I understand you correctly… you’ve finished certain sequences, and now you want to get rid of all the media you never used… correct?

Make a copy of your sequence and bring it into a new bin. Select the sequence. In the consolidate window, choose your handle lengths (I leave it at 60 frames, more than enough to make tweaks and adjustments if necessary). Check the “create new sequence” button.

Now, the easiest way to get rid of all the useless stuff is to check “delete original media files when done”. Remember, consolidating makes NEW media files and clips ONLY of the stuff you need. Deleting these original media files is really the whole idea of consolidating… to free up space. And this way you don’t have to go back and manually delete those files. It’s already done.

Now choose your drive, and you’re done.

Dan

PrEditors.net

[Dan O’brien]

Is the shot locked down or moving? Do you want to blur or cover up the product?

if your version of xpress has “illusion fx” then the best blur you have is the radial blur, which isn’t the best option. What about creating a circle with title tool… putting a drop shadow on it, soften the drop shadow, zero out the opacity of the “fill”, and use that as a cover for what you want to hide…

Or go into After Effects…

Dan

PrEditors.net