Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
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What I’m confused about here is the entire premise. You say want the cells of the grid to be laid out like a brick wall. You also want there to be 4 distinct images/shapes that appear in the grid at random positions. However, in a brick wall there is no such thing as a random position, the cells are very deliberately not random. If you want each cell to display a random image, that’s a different matter altogether.
The cells, in that case, aren’t moving but the image in them is changing. This brings me to my next questions, are these ‘shapes’ really just shapes? Do they animate over time? Is there video footage involved? How do you want them to change? How long will each shape remain in the cell it’s in before it is replaced by a different shape?
All of these things (and possibly more) should be taken into consideration before you can come up with a real solution.
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[kristan] “what if i use square pixel assets in the comp? say a scanned still picture? do i keep the comp at .9 PAR and 720×486? or if i;m going to mix square and rectangular pixels, what setting do i use for my comps? the .9 D1 PAR at 720×540? and if so, do i then need to render that content to a 720×486 comp with rectangular pixels?”
If you’re creating assets yourself you should create them at 0.9 PAR just to be safe. If you’re scanning an image in then the asset should be interpreted as Square Pixel (or its native PAR, whatever PAR it looks correct at) in AE but your comp should still be 0.9 PAR.
As long as your assets are interpreted at their correct PAR and your comp is set to the right PAR for your footage’s final destination, AE should handle most of the dirty work.
For example, you could create a square pixel Photoshop document, draw a circle in it and import it into a 0.9 AE Comp and it will still appear as a circle as long as the imported PS doc is interpreted as square pixel footage (the PAR it was created in).
All of this assumes that you have PAR preview enabled for your comp (I always do).
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Someone had a problem with this earlier. Although I can’t speak for Adobe (they would know exactly what the issue is), it seems that there is a limit that has to do with the upper bounds of a 16-bit integer (32768). From the previous discussion we seem to have arrived at the conclusion that for AE the sequence should be fewer than 32767 images and that, for some reason, this limit doesn’t exist for Premiere =)
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[Adolfo Rozenfeld] “Color Management in CS3 is much easier, streamlined and powerful. It may not be the kind of thing that looks spectacular in feature bullets, but I believe many people will find it’s one of the most amazing additions in this version.”
This is actually one of the features I’m more excited about =) I don’t claim to be any more than a babe in the woods when it comes to video color management, but I’m eager to sink my teeth in and learn more.
I think I understand the basics of gamma encoding now, not that I would be able to help with this particular question.
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[kristan] “I understand that rectangular pixels in a square pixel display will “appear” squeezed, but in reality they are not. so if i track a corner of a index card manually, frame by frame, placing a solid object at that exact point in each frame, am i really exactly at that point, or does it only “appear” that i am exactly at that point because the image is squeezed?”
Just to clarify further, the ‘rectangular pixels’ on a square pixel display will not appear squeezed, they will appear stretched/scaled horizontally by 111%. Square pixels will appear squeezed on a 0.9 PAR display down to 90% horizontally.
In order to display the rectangular pixel video as it will appear on a 0.9 PAR device AE scales the 0.9 PAR footage (appears to be stretched 111.111…%) down by 90% (111.111…% * 90% = 99.999…% or effectively 100%).
Now, on to your specific situation =) If you want the best accuracy with placing the corners you should turn off the PAR preview for the comp when you’re placing the corners, this won’t have a huge effect (and is probably not the source of your trouble) but does give you the best view of the actual pixels on a square pixel display.
As far as the mismatch you’re seeing in size, it sounds like one of your compositions might be using square pixels. I’d recommend going back in and making sure that all of your footage and all of your compositions are set to the NTSC PAR of 0.9.
I don’t work in NTSC D1 (720×486), I work in NTSC DV (720×480). I always use the NTSC DV (or DV Widescreen) preset for my compositions to ensure that I have a uniform 0.9 (or 1.2) PAR for every comp.
I never work in ‘square pixel’ comps unless my render is going to be viewed only on a computer’s square pixel display.
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[chris Newman] “isn’t cmyk a legacy color scheme?”
CMYK is a subtractive color system, which is how dyes and paints work: they subtract colors from white light. This is just the nature of printed material, white light (or close to it) shines on the material, in order for it to appear colored it must ‘subtract’ colors from the white light. Cyan subtracts Red and reflects Green and Blue, Magenta subtracts Green and reflects Blue and Red, Yellow subtracts Blue and reflects Red and Green. K is Black and is included because 100% C 100% M 100% Y theoretically results in black but in reality doesn’t (more like muddy brown).
RGB is an additive color system, it works with devices in which light is emitted to create colors (CRT, LCD, LED, anything emitting light)
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[kristan] “do i render out at 720×486 with D1 .9 rectangular pixels? or do i render it out at 720×486 with sq pixels?”
I have to admit that for most of your post I wasn’t quite sure what your circumstances were and all of the talk of ‘pinning’ only confused me more (the corner pin effect… I think?).
But here I can be of some use. If your final output is for NTSC D1/DV then there is no difference between rendering at 0.9 PAR and rendering at Square Pixel except that other programs on your computer will be able to interpret and display the footage correctly. No matter what you set your PAR to for NTSC the output will always be 720×480 (or 720×486 for D1) square pixels. These 720×486 square pixels only appear differently with different pixel aspect ratios.
The only reason (and its a good one) that you want to set pixel aspect ratios inside of AE is so that you can preview the composition as it will appear on an NTSC monitor with rectangular pixels and the rendered footage will be interpreted properly (as 0.9 for 4×3 or 1.2 for 16×9 in NTSC) by other programs running on your computer (whose display is square pixel).
No matter how your footage is interpreted on your computer, the footage should still be 720×486 pixels. The benefit of interpreting the footage correctly and using ‘non-square’ comps with the PAR preview is that you’ll see what it will look like on a non-square display.
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[empathetic1636] “Do you not think adding memory will help?”
AE can’t address more than 3GB of RAM in any working environment. Your OS usually wants to hold on to 1GB for itself, so more than 4GB of RAM will only really benefit you if you’re running AE and other RAM intensive programs at once.
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Check your paragraph settings. My bet is that you have it set to left align and are using an abnormally large left indent. If you want the anchor point at the center of the text you should use center align and 0 indent.
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[geckorion] “Even when I move the keyframe, I still get the missing frame of animation.”
What gets rid of the blank frame at the end of the composition isn’t moving the keyframe. You need to give the end keyframe a new value, 1 frame less than it is by default. The last keyframe in a time remap of a 30;00 sec layer will be 30;00. You need to change it to 29;29 (not it’s position in the timeline, the keyframe’s actual value). Moving the keyframe back one frame is only to adjust for the fact that your last keyframe is now 29;29 and not 30;00.