[Darby Edelen]

Are you using Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously in CS6? What are your settings in that preference pane?

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

The pixel aspect ratio of your composition should match the destination device’s pixel aspect ratio. So the non-square pixel aspect ratio in your AE composition is not only expected but required for proper output to DVD.

If you’d like a rough preview of how the video will look on DVD then you can enable the pixel aspect ratio preview switch at the bottom left of the composition viewer.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

If you’re working with an essentially black/white image to begin with, then you are most of the way to having a workable luma matte. My suggested workflows would be either:

1) Use the Keying > Extract effect on the luminance to drop the white into transparency.

2) Apply a Color Correction > Levels effect on the source layer, then use this layer as a luma inverted track matte for a black solid. Adjust the levels on the track matte as you like.

Keylight is a chroma keying solution (green/blue screen) and does not work well for removing desaturated colors (white/black/gray are worst cases for keylight).

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

I stand corrected. I do get the same results as you with this project. This appears to be the result of very high values in only the red color channel. If you want your rendered results to be closer to what you see in the comp viewer then you’re going to need to add some green and blue to the solid, either by increasing the green and blue black outputs in your levels effect or by changing the actual solid color.

To preview your 8bpc render I’d recommend creating an adjustment layer at the top of the composition, apply the levels effect and turn both Clip Output to Black and Clip output to White ‘On.’ You can set this layer to a Guide Layer so that it doesn’t have any additional affect on the rendered output.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Sure, upload a sample, but I won’t be able to look at it until I get into work in an hour or so 🙂

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Also, the emitter position in Particular has a few different options under Position Subframe. I’d recommend 10x Linear if you’re seeing ugly linear bits in your emitter path. This has the effect of smoothing the emitter’s motion path and may do the job without any additional smoothing via the smoother or an expression.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

There’s also a fairly straightforward smooth() expression function. If you apply it exactly as I’ve written it above then you should get a smoother result out of the box.

If you need to adjust the smoothing then there are a couple of simple parameters you can change. The first is the ‘width’ of the smoothing which defines the amount of time around the current frame to use for the smooth, the default is 0.2 seconds. The second is the number of samples to take across this width/duration, you should usually use an odd number here so that a sample falls on the current frame, the default is 5 samples.

So, if you want less stair-stepping in the keyframe interpolation you can increase the samples, and if you want the curve to match the original path more closely you can decrease the width:

smooth(0.1, 17);

I’d recommend changing the values while you look at the temporal graph of the expression.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

I can’t reproduce this problem so there must be something else going on that we haven’t covered yet. Can you provide more information on your output module? A screenshot of your comp/timeline panel?

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Also if you want the best possible results after remapping your UVs in AE I’d recommend rendering out of C4D at 3-4x your final resolution with anti-aliasing set to “None.” Then in AE you’ll have the benefit of accurate UV mapping and you can scale your mapped layer down in order to get a nicely anti-aliased result.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

You probably don’t want a regular UV pass, which would be used to re-texture the objects. If there’s any motion (objects or camera) in the scene then a reflection will behave differently than a regularly applied texture. The application of the texture will actually be different than a reflection even if the scene is static, but it won’t be as obvious 🙂

What you might try is a sky object with a UV ramp material and compositing tag (‘seen by camera’ off) applied to it. Then render your sequence with only the sky object and your reflective objects visible. Also make sure that your objects are 100% reflective across the entire surface (no fresnel) as any variation in color will affect the mapping of the reflected texture in after effects.

Darby Edelen