[David Bogie]

[ben mccoy] “hey can’t air HD, so I’ll just keep using the settings that have worked thus far. I did try to contact them first but nobody could answer my questions so I came here. Thank you.

“

If no one there can answer questions about their signal, you’re asking the wrong people or dealing with amateurs. Be sure you ask for cash for any and all business dealings with these cooks.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Doesn’t matter.
What you want to do is call the station and find out exactly what they want form you. Exactly. Format, codec, pixel dimensions, bit rate, on DVD or CD or tape, audio codec and bit rate. Everything. Exactly.
If they can’t tell you, it probably isn’t going to get broadcast in HD anyway. Hardly any local stations in the country, I think less than 10%, have HD origination. (I made up that number.)

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Joe Novello] “BUT render times a HUGE issue. From about 3-5 min in SD, now about a hour per crawl in HD, which is unacceptable for our workflow. “

do the math.
You went from less than 400,000 pixels per frame to more than 2,000,000 pixels per frame. There’s a factor of five right there but it’s far more complex because all that stuff has to get read,. processed, written and stored. Everything takes at least five times as long. if you’re doing motion blur, every iteration takes five times as long to process and write back into the frame. If you have 20 layers, that’s 5 times per layer. sort of.

[Joe Novello] “- more RAM?
– faster graphics card? If so, which one?
– PMac 8 core being considered – will it make that much of a difference?
– skip Boris and do similar with Motion ? (doesn’t crawl layers in a group) “

Maybe.
Not likely but spend the $250 and see for yourself. The 3870 (3780?) is state of the art right now.
Maybe. But Snow Leopard and the next rev of the Final Cut Studio (This year, next year, who knows?) will have a greater impact than merely throwing CPUs at Motion.
I haven’t used Boris for ten years, dunno why you like it over other tools but the chances are Motion and LiveType do NOT come even close to giving your similar tools and controls.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Set the capture setting to uncontrollable device.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Extrapolation from the last keyframe. Very computer intensive and almost useless while editing unless you have the hardware to support it. Easier to convert to a directly-editable format. Most of us transcode to something ProRes upon ingestion, often in realtime.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Look under Channels.
Could be done as an anaglyph but more likely you just need to move the channels independently. or you can pull a luminance copy of your footage and tint it blue or red and move them separately.
You sort of play with stuff till you get what you want or can figure out how to keyframe.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

You can’t.
You can make the pixels bigger but you can’t make any more of them.
Shoot your own at the size you needs. Shoot black paint on a white board. that will create an easily matted alpha for you, you can fill it with any color you want.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Michael Brookes] “I have a blue spot light on a white solid in my composition. I want the solid to look completely white, but in order to see the light, it is set to 3D and so the solid becomes black in shadow. If I add a second light, I cannot get the flat look I am looking for for the Solid (an Ambient light removes the blue light altogether).

I’ve tried using blending modes to remove the black and just have the blue light, but this doesn’t work either. Does anyone have a solution?
“

If the white layer goes black, the light isn’t shining on it. Open up four views and carefully examine the xyz coordinates of your camera and your blue light. I’m guessing you accepted the default creation space for the light and it’s not where it will shine on your layer.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

We see this topic often and it baffles us.
there are lots of places you can screw this up. Here are just a few.
If your text is coming out of AE as an Animation file of the same pixel dimensions as your FCP project, you are rendering at proper settings, you are previewing your rendered output correctly, and you and you have your FCP Canvas set up properly, it should look great. That is, there’s no way for it NOT to look great.

So, we get all such posters upset at us for saying it must be a user error. I can’t tell you what’s wrong with you or your rig because I’m not watching over your shoulder but I can assure you that it’s you, not FCP and not AE’s output.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

the 3780 (or is it 3870?) seems to be the to of the heap at the moment. It is not sold by Apple nor is it available as a custom build form Apple, which is either silly or a sublimely elegant way of bowing out of any responsibility for Motion’s inability to achieve promised performance goals or users’ expectations.

We all struggle with Motion’s quirks. I reduce rendering and on-screen resolution and frame rate of my project till you gain some idea of how it’s looking and then try to do some real world testing.

The future holds potential for Snow Leopard, new GPU cards, and the next several versions of Motion to give us fabulous performance and near real time feedback. That would be cool, eh?
No one knows.

You can spend an hour or two on the Net researching ways to boos Motion’s performance. They’re all trade-offs.

bogiesan