[David Bogie]

[Dylan Evans] “Even better is that ive convinced my director to shoot at 720p down from 1080p but with double the framerate at 50fps, make things easier still. “

Hmm, that was our original suggestion. You need more discreet slices of time.
This gets a Duh.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Just my opinion. I was hoping the real wonks would offer some more concrete advice. Give ’em a few more weeks and try some other forums around the Net because you obviously shoudl not make any decisions based on MY dumb ideas.

Your problem, as far as i am concerned, is HDV. It’s just no good for editing.
You are forcing your users to figure out how to deal with your footage. For the technically challenged, HDV is a stumper or an inconvenient hassle of copying, transcoding, importing, and managing versions.

Figure out why you decided to distribute on HDV and then reconsider that decision based on your customer feedback. Personally, and I don’t mean to sound mean, your footage would have to be ultra-compelling for us to bother with HDV. We’d find a different source first before accepting the hassle.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

You need lights and shadows? After Effects is your only hope.
I merely tolerate Motion’s weird paradigm and instability.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

“cool” and “bad” are totally subjective. When someone blinks, they don’t perceive their eyelids moving so you’re doing what’s known as a “convention effect” similar to putting two overlapping circles up on the screen to suggest binoculars. You don’t really see those when you look through binocs but it’s the convention.

Regaining consciousness is more complicated than blinking. There are vision artifacts like blurring, color overlays, hallucinations, over exposure, double vision, disorientation, vertigo, flashes, backflashes, distortions, and more.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Dylan Evans] “Sorry, I dont think im making myself quite clear.
You can use the pen tool to smooth the path shown in after effects but this does not change the actual path of the motion, it just jumps from point to point.”

You’re new to this video stuff, aren’t you?
You have a series of images that are only 1/30 second apart. You can only place keyframes at every frame. You cannot draw an arc between the keyframes since they do not travel along an arc, they move instantaneously from one point to the next. Your problem is that you didn’t shoot enough discreet slices of time.

There are lots of things you can do to have fun with this but your insistence that the software is at fault won’t help you create an interesting effect.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Give us a few more days, the wonks will come by with better advice, I’m sort of rambling.

How do you deliver these clips? Via the Web or on disk?
The two lowest common denominators are MPEG1 and DV. MPEG1 is out of the question, it’s too low rez. DV is a compromise because you will either have to letterbox or pan and scan to selectively frame yoru shots within the DV window while not scaling the pixels.

DV is good because you can create AVI and QT DV files.

HDV is a problem because it’s a variation of MPEG2 and requires transcoding in most video apps, not all. I wouldn’t even bother with HDV but that’s just me.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Dylan Evans] “I seem to be completely stumped on one problem however, I am tracking drumsticks “

Do you mean you’re having trouble tracking the drumsticks or having trouble applying the tracking info to particle layers?

It’s almost impossible to track an object like a drumstick since it is moving faster than your shutter speed can freeze it. Best you can do is track the positions at the peaks of moves when the sticks are slowing down.
It might easier to just place keyframes manually.
or you can track a more discernible object like a ring on the finger of the drummer or his watch and use an offset to move the tracking point out towards the sticks. However, you will need to scale things up a bit to compensate for the distance form the center of the arc.

if you can reshoot it, use a shutter speed of at least 125 or 250.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

You might wan to explain what PF is for those of us who might be able to help you but aren’t clued in to all the different apps people need to be able to use.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

No idea, Motion works or doesn’t work for all of us for no apparent reasons. too many possible software and hardware conflicts to know. You can always clear the RAM cache (think it’s under Mark–where no one would expect it to be).

I always shutdown and restart my Macintosh when I’m making big changes to Motion like finishing and closing one project and starting another one that I know will be big. It’s tedious and silly and it doesn’t always help. I can lock up Motion just by looking at it.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Blend modes are weird like that. Explore the Transofrm effect and there’s another one from CC that forces some effects to fully rnder before being passed up the render pipeline. It’s realy cool and rarely used.

But… for the same of your workflow, what would suggest you do is pre-render the comps that create the background for your text. Import that movie. That way you can easily reuse it and apply all kinds of other effects and transitions to it. Plus, you streamline the rendering tremendously since it only get sp processed as a movie eliminating the redundant effects processing.

bogiesan