Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
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[Steve Roberts] “Photo-JPEG (you’d think I own the licence for that codec)”
I Heart Photo-JPEG.
I’m making the T-shirts I swear I am, and I’m not paying you any royalties ;P
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[Tim Vaughan] “From what I have learned, you do NOT want it to render image cache to your memory. There is not really any need for it. Have it render to the disk. It works so much better”
Disks are slow, RAM is fast. It’s really a balancing act. If you set your Image Cache too high then AE will be pushing the limit on RAM usage and you’ll probably run into instability, if you set it too low then AE is slower to access cached data.
In my case the default setting of 60% has always worked fine.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
It’s not clear what you’re trying to do. Firstly, the pen tool in After Effects is used to draw masks. The pen tool doesn’t have a width at all it only defines a line that defines the border of the mask. Some effects in AE can use masks for the purposes of generating pixels (instead of masking) and it is in these effects that you will adjust the ‘width’ of what is drawn on the mask.
If you really just want to mask your text you need to create your mask at the edges of the text (the pen/mask tool defines edges of an area). If your text was created in AE this is easy to do: right click the layer with the text tool selected and select ‘create outlines’ from the contextual menu.
Otherwise you can try using Layer > Auto-Trace to automatically create a mask based on the Luma/Alpha/RGB channels of the image.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[roxics] “How will the change in resolution effect my overall project (text layout, image size, video size) and how will this effect my frame rate in regards to things like flash frames and other short effects?
Should I start with a PAL sized project window and just crop to NTSC, does After Effects have NTSC guide like they have title safe guides?”
I’m in the middle of altering NTSC menus right now for a PAL release of one of the DVD projects we worked on.
My workflow is to update the PSDs first with a simple image size/pixel aspect ratio droplet. Then I leave all NTSC video at its original size/interpretation in AE, pre-comp all NTSC video assets present in final comps (for the final step), change the composition settings to the PAL D1/DV preset and then Fit to Comp all of the pre-comped NTSC video. There is a very very subtle shift in aspect ratio of assets but it is literally impossible to see if you’re not looking for it.
If you have the option, going from PAL to NTSC will probably work nicer as you are down-rezing the footage. However, I don’t know what this will mean for your video assets. Going from 29.97 to 25fps is actually hardly noticeable at all, if you’re going the other way it may pose some problems.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[crea3552] “I know they will move easily but is there anyway to get feedback about the framing of the shot you are manipulating given that your camera is parked at a different point in time?”
Unfortunately no, you will probably want to set the composition to Draft 3D and scrub the timeline over the keyframe in between tweaks just to see how it feels in full glorious motion =)
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[Dave LaRonde] “As much as I like AE for its many capabilities, the application seems to fall on its face when it comes to rendering in certain codecs, MPEG2 among them.”
Although I hate to admit it, we often render out of AE to m2v for our DVD menus as they do not require optimal compression and it removes the extra step of compressing (and the large lossless files!). We never have problems with the m2v codec aside from the expected lower-quality than something compressed with Cinemacraft and the occasional user-error.
Perhaps you should try settings similar to ours:
Best Quality
6.0Mbps Constant Bit Rate
Progressive (this is set in the Output Module for main concept)
NTSC 4:3 (16:9 if you’re doing widescreen)
No Audio
No FiltersI also recommend the tests that Steve mentioned.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[beenyweenies] “Well, yeah. I said “color” because it’s really both hue AND saturation that the keyer draws upon. In my mind, hue+saturation=color.”
True, saturation comes into play in edges/semi-transparent sections and despilling, but in my mind the saturation is secondary to hue. If the pixel isn’t of a similar hue to the key color then it (obviously) won’t be touched at all and the saturation will never be examined.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[epontius] “pardon my ignorance, but what HD standard is 864×480?”
Hmmmm, I reworded the original post in my head to mean that the goal was to up rez 16:9 Square Pixel SD NTSC material to HD…
Is that what you meant Racing? Otherwise I think epontius found the source of our confusion =)
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[Kevin Monahan] “After Effects Error: unable to allocate space for a 720 x 576 image buffer. You may be experiencing fragmentation. In the Memory and Cache Preferences dialog box, try decreasong the Maximum RAM cache option, increasing Maximum Memory usage or both.”
Did you try doing what it recommends? Also I’d recommend doing an occasional Edit > Purge > Purge All.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[Ultimate Bart] “Ah, i see your point. hmm, tricky question then, without frame by frame work.”
Track Matte is the solution (;
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA