Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
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The appropriate solution will change depending on the format of the source footage and the DVD encoding. Can you provide more information? Was the source progressive or interlaced? What was the source frame rate and what is the frame rate of the DVD encoding?
Darby Edelen
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This depends on whether you’re converting the HD footage to SD widescreen or 4:3 SD letterboxed. Pick whichever comp preset is accurate for the delivery (widescreen if delivering for widescreen).
Darby Edelen
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[Cassius Marques] “which to use? read the help and understand what’s the difference. Is it adding complexity? perhaps adobe should strip away all the other complex features AE has then?”
The feature you’re describing is not itself complex. The complexity, in so far as I can see, arises out of the workflow confusion of a new feature that could be advertised as almost-entirely-the-same-as-pre-comps-but-a-little-different. Not only that but the difference is there to solve a problem that can already be solved without the new feature.
In a cost-benefit analysis the feature as described doesn’t make sense to me.
Darby Edelen
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You’ll need to use an expression. Something like this:
l = thisComp.layer("Null 1");
l.toWorld(l.anchorPoint);That should give you the location of Null 1 in world units. This can be applied to a property expecting a position. If you’re using Particular then the position is broken into two properties and you’ll need the above on the XY position and the below:
l = thisComp.layer("Null 1");
l.toWorld(l.anchorPoint)[2];on the Z position.
Darby Edelen
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[Walter Soyka] “a more malleable render order for compound effects,”
Which is one of the feature requests I’m going to file after this conversation 🙂
It’s crossed my mind before that the Collapse Transformations/Continuously Rasterize switch should be available for bitmap footage items. I can see this working essentially as a switch that says “Transform me before rendering my Effects” much in the same way it works for vector items and pre-comps.
This doesn’t immediately solve the problem of Set Matte looking only at a layer’s pre-effect contents. I always expected (hoped) that Adobe would add a checkbox to each compound effect to either look at the source layer “pre-effect” or “post-effect.” I may file that feature request as well but I’d love to hear whether someone has another option that makes more sense.
[Walter Soyka] “some kind of effects instancing manager,”
Are there models out there for this sort of behavior? I could see allowing a special mode of “paste” that would keep a link between the source effect. Maybe this could just be some automatic expressions applied (problem: not all properties are accessible by expressions) or something else.
In Nuke you get pretty green lines connecting nodes that have had one or more of their properties linked together via expressions. Is some indicator like that necessary or desirable in order to find the ‘parent’ effect? Perhaps parenting is a better paradigm to approach the problem with, although I could see that getting out of hand. Too many layers in a comp? Imagine having to sort through all of the effects too! Perhaps just a little button off to the right of the effect in the timeline that says “Linked” and if pressed would jump to the parent effect.
Darby Edelen
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[Walter Soyka] “Grouping is overloaded. Is it an organizational feature?”
Grouping as an organizational feature is something I could support, but I don’t know that it would make other people happy. The groups would not have any transforms, could not have effects applied and have no blending mode. They would exist exclusively for the purpose of collapsing several related layers into one layer slot on the timeline.
Darby Edelen
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[Cassius Marques] “If the effects were applied like a pre-comp IT WOULD BE A PRECOMP…come on =P!”
My point exactly. But what I was getting at is if effects don’t render like a pre-comp then in many cases they will render in a totally new and unexpected (“wrong”) way. Mass confusion ensues.
[Cassius Marques] “Effects/masks would be instances applied down the hierarchy…all the rest is the same. That’s it.”
You don’t think that would be confusing in any way? Say I want to use the Set Matte effect to punch a circular hole in the middle of this group and when I apply it instead every layer inside the group gets a hole punched through it. Same problem with masks.
So now users have a new dilemma: when do I pre-comp and when do I group? Instead of making the workflow more streamlined I think this is adding complexity.
[Cassius Marques] “I want to be able to tell every layer within this group function to process the same effect (as if wired to a node), in this quick/lame example, the glow.”
That’s not necessarily how nodes work though. A Glow node in Nuke, for example, takes exactly one input.
To apply a Glow to 500 footage items in Nuke you’d either need 500 glow nodes (like applying a glow to each layer inside a pre-comp) or to merge the 500 footage items together with a merge node before 1 glow (just like a pre-comp).
Darby Edelen
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Not sure if this will help but it’s a trick one of my professors shared with me way back when to maximize resolution on a green screen shoot (we didn’t have HD cameras at the time). Have you tried canting your camera 90 degrees so that the longer portion of the frame is vertical? If you’re close to getting a full body shot normally that might be enough to manage it. Then you can rotate the footage back in After Effects.
Darby Edelen
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[Cassius Marques] “I understand and agree with you Darby, we can almost allways do it differently and get close results. Though it will take us more time, unless we had plenty of time to think it through before.”
What I would’ve done in this specific example would be to duplicate the pre-comp, apply Glow to it and set its blend mode to Add. Not an overly complicated solution 🙂 I’m not sure how a nodal approach would help in the chosen example.
Of course there are downsides (or lets call them challenges) to implementing the functionality being described. Is it an entirely new feature or an extension of an existing one? How would the layers be organized within the hierarchy? When I have a group in a group in a group how do I get to the layer I need to access? If I apply an effect to the top group does it propagate to every group under it or only the non-group (top level) layers? What can I not do to this group (time remapping? material options?)? How are effects applied to the layers inside the group: is it like a pre-comp or is an instance of the effect applied to each individual layer? In the former case: what is the benefit over a pre-comp? In the latter case: what would that mean for compound effects like Displacement Map, Set Matte or Compound Blur?
Rather than simplifying things I see this potentially leading to complication beyond necessity.
Darby Edelen
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[Cassius Marques] “I want to take out this 500 layers out of my main comp to make it less cumbersome. So I precomp them and collapse. But then I decide it needs a glow to sell the effect when it settles in, So I apply it and bamm there goes the blending modes.”
If you’re specifically set on using the Glow effect in this manner then yes: you’re hosed. Personally I would simply use another method to get the same (or similar) result.
I don’t intend to argue that AE is a perfect animal. It is problematic that it doesn’t work the way that people think it should. However, every application I’ve ever used has its own idiosyncrasies.
Nuke isn’t a perfect animal either. For me the key is understanding the limitations and finding ways to work within them. Very often the same result can be achieved in a dozen different ways some of which may be possible in one application and not in another.
Darby Edelen