Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
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[Darby Edelen (wuzelwazel)] “I don’t deal with 3:2 pulldowns all that often, so you might want to wait for someone with more experience to respond, but I’m pretty sure that you add the pulldown back in on render.”
I think I should clarify some.
My understanding of the workflow is that you should use a 23.976 fps composition for your 23.976 fps footage (pulldown removed). When you render, click on the Render Settings and make sure to render with fields in the correct order and add the pulldown back in.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
I don’t deal with 3:2 pulldowns all that often, so you might want to wait for someone with more experience to respond, but I’m pretty sure that you add the pulldown back in on render.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[Eric Barker] “You’re going to have to merge the rounded rectangles down to one layer without the additional blending options, because After Effects can’t handle the stroke effect properly.”
Just a quick note:
If a layer has styles in Photoshop you can right click it and Group As a New Smart Object and AE will see the layer styles on import.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[ReeceMix] “I searched all over the net and I cant find a simple tutorial for adding images to video and animating them.”
Import the image into After Effects and you can drop it into a composition as a layer. The image should retain any transparency it had before and you can place it above the video in the layer stack/timeline of your composition then animate its properties or add effects.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
If you already have position keyframes and you want to change the Z value at one of the keyframes be sure that you only have that keyframe selected.
For example, say you have 2 keyframes and the first is:
1st keyframe: [360, 240, -200]
and the second is:
2nd keyframe: [500, 240, 0]
If you have the playhead on the keyframe you want to edit (say the second one) but you have both of these keyframes selected the change to Z value will effect both keyframes.
If you type in a new value then both of the position values will change to the typed in value. So replacing the 0 Z value in the 2nd keyframe with 800 by typing would give you:
1st keyframe: [500, 240, 800]
2nd keyframe: [500, 240, 800]If you drag the Z value in the 2nd keyframe to 800 while you have both keyframes selected then only the Z value will change relative to what it was previously:
1st keyframe: [360, 240, 600]
2nd keyframe: [500, 240, 800]The way to get around this is by making sure you have either no keyframes seleced or only the keyframe you want to edit.
Sorry if this wasn’t at all the issue, but it’s something that people need to know anyway =)
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
If you select your camera and look at it in a top-down view you should see a few different lines defining the depth of field. There should be a center line showing the point at which everything is perfectly focused and a line on either side of that that shows the extent of the depth of field. You should be able to make this range smaller by increasing the aperture (shallow depth of field) or larger by decreasing the aperture (‘deep focus’).
Also make sure your Camera’s Blur Level is set to 100% and that you are not viewing the composition in 3D Draft mode (this disables depth of field as well as lights/shadows).
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
Two things I’d like to note:
1. As I understand it, AE CS3 will let you choose the frequency of samples for Motion Blur. I haven’t played with this yet, but my guess is that it will increase render time but give much better results in the motion blur department. There was a post about this not too long ago, although I may have misunderstood it and Adobe may have just refined the motion blur method to give much better results… Something to look into!
2. Linear blending (and optionally 32-bpc) can help give you more realistic motion blur, also at the cost of render time. If you’re not familiar with linear compositing then you might want to read up before you try this, it usually doesn’t work too well in 8-bpc.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
If you’re in the mood for something quick and easy Effect>Stylize>Texturize can help you get some decent texture/light effects, similar to bump mapping only it doesn’t respond to AE’s 3D lights (although I’m sure you could write an expression to do so).
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
Stock footage of fire would probably be the best way to go. If you’re serious about compositing fire in a realistic manner then I’d read up on working with 32-bpc and linear color spaces. Once you have the project properly setup all it requires is putting a layer of fire in and changing its blend mode to Add.
Otherwise you can work in 8 or 16-bpc and cheat it with a combination of blend modes. Add mode in gamma encoded color usually results in making the bright parts of the layer brighter than they ‘should’ be, but you might like that look.
As for smoke you can make some layers of animated fractal noise with a heavily feathered mask, but that probably won’t be enough to be really convincing. If you want billowing smoke try shooting some torn up cotton balls on black and applying a Liquify effect to them for some animation. You can also use something like Trapcode’s Particular to get some decent smoke effects.
Mark Christansen goes through the basics of doing this sort of thing (including the techniques I just described) in After Effects Studio Techniques:
There’s also a pre-order for the CS3 version:
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
With just this description I can’t be sure what the problem is, but double check your camera’s Point of Interest (or lose it all together) as sometimes animating the Position property so that it passes the Point of Interest property will flip the camera.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA