Dave Fleming
Forum Replies Created
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Ridley,
What I did in the final analysis to get things to work (I’m on a deadline, just like everybody else), was to switch fonts a few times until I fould something that would work. I ended up using Brandon Grotesque instead of Helvetica Neue, which I think we would both agree are pretty similar sans serif fonts. But, for some reason, it likes the one and not the other. I did try “expanding” the shape (expand appearance wasn’t available), but I’m not sure what that did if it did anything. How do you know?
I did have a colleague in another state duplicate my workflow and he got the same result (error at first, then OK when switching fonts), so, in my opinion, that spells B-U-G. Plus, I have multiple other AI objects within the same comp, all with shapes made from vectors – highly complex shapes at that – and AE has no problem with them.
df
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Forgot to mention previously, also on CS6 – the whole suite.
The AE comp already utilizes 2 or 3 other Illustrator files converted to shapes from vectors – not like the one I’m trying to make, obviously, but with much more complex shapes than this one.
I’ll start from scratch tomorrow and begin with a simple shape element with a cutout and go from there.
df
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Honestly, I did not try that. I was so disgusted over the whole problem that I quit for the evening. I will give your solution another go tomorrow and let you know what happens. Thanks for the suggestion!
Dave
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Thanks for the reply, but unfortunately, that isn’t the problem. But, I do have more information about how this error is occuring. The error occurs not when making the shapes from the vector layer – that works OK. But, as soon as I try to make the new outline layer 3D by clicking the 3D box on the layer, I get the error.
To test this further, I created a box in Illustrator. I typed the letter “I” in the box, created outlines for the letter and made a compound path for the cutout shape. So, in other words, the simplest shape I could possibly make that still gives me the look I want. I imported the file to AE, made shapes from the vector layer…OK. Turned the layer into 3D – boom – got the error.
Is this a bug?
Dave
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Argghhh–thanks Todd, that was it. I hacked out the .CFA and .PEK files and everything is fine now. Good call!
df
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Thanks for the reply…first off, I am on CS6 with Matrox hardware and a robust PC. Should have mentioned that earlier. So, that’s not the issue.
Despite your baseball analogy, I beg to differ. First, I have had FAR better results from my “copy-paste trick” than I EVER had with dynamic link. You yourself have criticized DL before, now you’re defending it? Plus, if you’re saying my problem is long-gop media, how is dynamic link going to solve that? It’s still long-gop media, and I still have to manipulate it in an AE comp.
I don’t understand what you mean by “mixing clips.” This is just straight-ahead footage replacement. In fact, the XDCAM EX footage it replaced was copy/pasted from PPro to AE as well. So, it was totally apples to apples–I just got a different (and disastrous) result this time.
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Fair enough, but I had been intentionally vague to begin with because this is some murky water. Here goes:
The clip in question is XDCAM EX HD. It was transferred to my RAID drive without issue. In the clip, I had the on camera talent read the one line he was delivering several times until I was happy with it. When I found the best take, I edited the audio only into an existing PPro timeline. The talent was replacing a line from a different actor. The video in this section was a 3-box composite of on screen graphics and different actors. This is why I copy/pasted the video only from PPro to AE. I had an existing comp and simply needed to replace footage with the new actor and render.
When I copy/pasted, the clip appeared in my AE timeline. But, it was out of view of my :30 comp. So, I stretched out the zoom, found the clip (the “active” part of the AE layer), and drug it back into position in the :30 comp. My theory is that this act of dragging back the video in my AE comp is what messed up my audio. Although, I didn’t even have the audio information in AE–just the video! I then applied effects to the video, a mask, and exported the movie. It was then that I noticed the audio was completely botched. It was out of sync, completely chopped up, parts missing, as I said, unusable. The maddening thing is that this wonderful change had somehow rippled all the way back to my original clip on the RAID drive. And yes, that was my only copy of the clip. In a perfect world, I would have backed it up elsewhere, but that didn’t happen this time.
So, that’s about as much detail as I can provide. As I said before, I’ve copy/pasted countless times from PPro to AE, always without incident. This is a first. That’s the detailed information, now I hope I get an accurate response.
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Dave–While I agree with you, holy crap…talk about going back to the old days…exporting-importing-exporting-importing. But, in this case, I suppose you are right.
I still just can’t understand how a copy/paste could have caused all this madness…
df
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Hi Matt,
I watched Karl Soule’s piece on audio mapping. It accurately describes audio mapping and how to customize various audio scenarios, but it doesn’t address my initial problem, which was losing 3 of my 4 discreet mono audio channels if I dragged and dropped the BPAV folder without the help of XDCAM Browser.
I read your post and looked at your screen shot…I guess all I can say is “congratulations” because that’s not what happens with my workflow. To this day, if I drag and drop a BPAV folder to my RAID drive and use media browser to import the clips, I will get 1 mono channel of audio instead of 4. There’s simply no way I can “rescue” the other 3 channels of audio when PPro is telling me point blank that only one mono channel exists.
Is your camera capturing 4 discreet mono channels of audio? Since I haven’t dabbled that much with audio mapping, I can’t tell from your screen shot what’s what.
Dave
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Sorry…I feel your pain. This has happened to me on numerous occasions, usually when I’m using dynamic link to some AE comps. Like you, my scratch disk is my internal RAID and the problem happens after a shutdown/relaunch.
Good luck,
Dave