[David Bogie]

[Aaron Keast] “Hi, I’m back again. I’ve been playing with the various settings to try and get a clear scroll of pictures with minimum blur and chop.
I’ve come to the conclusion that to get 30 seconds of clear animation, I’ll set the time line to about 3 minutes, maybe more, then speed it up in Premiere. “

That’s a completely subjective judgement and I don’t understand how you could possibly arrive at that conclusion. We do photo animation in After Effects, FCP, and Motion almost daily and get wonderful results.

You haven’t clearly explained where these artifacts are being seen: in your output from After Effects or in your output from Premiere? There’s obviously something different about the settings or sources for your first 8 photos. Turn off all motion blur and render to frames without fields and then what happens?

[Aaron Keast] “I’m having an issue though, that doesn’t appear to be attached to motion blur, shutter angle, or samples per frame- the photos just seem to have 3-4 overlayed with varying opacity. The first 8 photos do not, then the rest scroll in, it’s incredibly ugly, and pausing it allows me to see why it’s headache inducing. “

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Simon Malcolm] ” When I import the clip into FCP 6.0.5 it shows the frame rate as 14 fps and doesn’t play the animation smoothly.
“

What is your sequence setting in FCP?
The Animation codec cannot be played smoothly in real time on most Macintosh systems without proprietary hardware support.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

q[Steve Price] “I know slo-mo is a controversial issue with FCP, but I am still no nearer to understanding why. “

Not really, it’s almost always unrealistic expectations or failure to comprehend how these tools work in Apple’s software.

Why you’re receiving the warning that there isn’t enough room on your drive is curious but you must understand that Optical Flow analyzes the entire clip’s source media unless you tell otherwise. if your clip is part of a 30 minute master clip, the whole thing has to be analyzed.

DV is not a particularly good candidate for Apple’s optical flow technology but we usually get surprisingly beautiful results if we shoot with post-processing in mind. Our favorite technique is to shoot with at faster shutter speeds to make the fields crisper. This makes it much easier for optical flow’s algorithms to process the pixel vectors.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Depends on what you want to do with or expect to accomplish with your FLV.

Flash Player will recognize H.264 natively.
You can also change the extension on lots of different codecs to >flv and Flash will open them.

If you’re expecting miraculous file compression like you get out of vector-based swf, forget it.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

the only plugin I know of that can keyframe the amount of spherical distortion and wrap is from Boris. It’s clunk and the illusion might not be what you’re expecting. I have never used Zax’s products, might be worth exploring.

The best way to achieve controlled wrapping from flat to true 3D sphere is with a 3D application.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Have you tried to change the footage interpretation?
If it cannot be changed, you may have actually shot it progressive.
Also help us to know the source camera, codec, and ow you ingested the footage.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Yar, but, heck, EVERYTHING about After Effects is hard to wrap your head around.
Patience. Some of us have been cranking in AE for more than a decade and we still don’t use more than 20-35% of the features and capabilities. I’ll never understand expressions.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Use time displacement also, referencing the same source and grayscale. If your source file is fading on, time displacement will return pixels form different temporal locations giving the impression the blocks are fading at different rates or times.
Sorry we can’t simply give you a button to push. These things are always only as complicated as you wish to make them but I often find the solutions are not as complex as first imagined.Please come back and tell us how you solved this challenge.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

You mean you’re losing the applied effects? That’s odd. but the solution to such problems is to simply render the precomp, reimport the movie, and just use it to replace the precomp in your card wipe.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

You really just need to select the mask before trying to edit its path. It’s tricky, yes. Open the Mask section of the online help and study it carefully. Sometimes it’s easier to do this in the comp canvas, sometimes it’s easier to do it the layer viewer.

bogiesan