[David Bogie]

Find other stock video shops and see what they’re selling but your delivery format is secondary to your acquisition format. Most likely they offer a variety of delivery formats that all begin with full 108060p HD masters. These days, the last word in acquisition is RED.

Everything suffers during compression or scaling, can’t be helped, something has to be discarded when you make a 10- or 50-to-1 transcode. Better compression is achieved by learning how use the scene-by-scene controls in the compression system of choice. Compressor is fine for most things but I think shops selling RED footage are using more sophisticated applications and highly skilled operators.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Nikon D90 will shoot full HD video at 108024p.
Canon’s new machine does, too. Dunno if the frame rate is adjustable.
The discussions on this topic are volatile. From a videographer’s POV, it’s a toy. But it shoots through Nikkor glass! From a still shooter’s POV, HD video is a cool new medium.

There are HUGE drawbacks and no one really has a firm handle on the workflow that I can tell. The focus and exposure controls become useless while shooting video. You’re limited. of course, to the capacity of your storage cards.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Anyone asked where the output is being viewed? You can’t use the computer monitor to evaluate the graphics in FCP. You need to see it on a video screen or TV before you make any decisions about crispiness.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[James Roberts] “I’m sure I’ll figure it out soon and feel dopey for even asking, right now I just can’t compare it to what I’m used to in Flash.”

Yar, that’s going to be a big problem for you. Flash shares almost nothing with After Effects in terms of how one approaches a seemingly similar challenge. The two people in my department who use Flash approach everything from a weirdly PowerPoint-like point of view. I cannot relate to them at all. Collaborating with them is almost impossible because of how differently the two apps are designed.

Changing the transparency of layers in order to switch mouths in and out is remarkably labor intensive and ignores all of the higher functions Adobe has provided for you in AE.

Character animation in AE is a specialized function with many solutions. We’ve been doing this stuff for more than a decade. Back in the olden days, we used an obscure function of AE called Motion Math that could analyze audio and apply a scaling factor to a “mouth” object. The result was a sadly inadequate lip movement in rough sync with changing levels in the audio track. Several hours of tweaking the individual scaling keyframes usually resulted in something we could pass off as cell-style animation. Add a tooth and a tongue layer behind the mouth and the scene got much more satisfactory.

If you need to move limbs, expressions and parenting will give you the fundamental tools you need to simulate inverse kinetics although I understand CS4 has a more sophisticated IK too. I don’t have CS4 yet. You can control eye movement with a radial expression control, just move the pointer around the circle and your eyes will follow. Blinks and unblinks can be handled with a slider or a radial expression controller.

Learning expressions has been very difficult for me but if you can code in Flash, you can handle the syntax easily.

The Cow’s AE Expressions forum will give you many suggestions if you search carefully. There are many other AE Expressions help sites on the Net that should come up while you are cruising the forum.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

There is much that could be done to make it more fun to use, easier to navigate. But the graphical presentation isn’t the problem so much as the design of the UI and the total lack of common interface elements among the suite’s applications.
Will they finally stick a stake through AutoSelect? Aw, nevermind, that just starts me on a long list of gripes for which I have no truly helpful suggestions.
We’ll update when FCS3 ships and be glad of it.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Do not try to re-invent this wheel.
This is a relatively simple application for After Effects. Tens of thousands of character animators have perfected several different methods. How you would find them is anyone’s guess but my favorite involves a simple Expression Control for your phonemes. There are really only 7 or 9 basic mouthshapes for speech and these can be nested inside other moutshapes for emotion or they can be created into a full set of 20-60. Same with eyes.
Each of the individual phoneme items resides on its own layer (built in Photoshop or Illustrator). Each layer has a number in After Effects. You can use an Expression controller to make visible only one layer at a time. You keyframe the Expression Controller, not the mouthshapes themselves.

There are many different ways to accomplish the same control and they’ve all been invented and they’ve all been pretty much perfected for creativity and efficiency. Spend a few evenings on Google looking for character animation tutorials and fan sites. Locate good animators on YouTube and Vimeo and contact them. Many are willing to help out budding animators.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Conor Smith] “Hello all, I am having a problem when I export my master time line through compressor. I have various Motion projects in my time line that look great but after it is exported some of the layers half disappear or are totally gone. Sometimes revealing the underlying video track. The only way I have found to get around this is to make all motion projects quicktime files and then export but this is a pain in the a hole”

This implies a serious misunderstanding how things work in the FC Studio. Since you have posted in the Motion forum, I can safely infer you are trying to export the Motion timeline through Compressor and that would be improper. You should render first. Compressor really wants complete files.

Reading between the lines, you could also be implying that you are trying to export your FCP sequence via Compressor without having first rendered everything and that also would by improper. Or, at least, rather risky, as you have seen.

You do not need to make your Motion projects into QT files, you just need to render everything in your timeline BEFORE you try to process with Compressor. I hesitate to suggest exporting out of FCP using Reference because you do not seem to grasp those gotchas so export a self-contained movie from your timeline and bring that into Compressor. Do not try to Export Using Compressor. Save learning how to do that for another project.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Ron Craig] “Now I’ll try to find out in AE can handle the flavor of raw files we’ll be generating.
“

Do you mean the camera raw files? Don’t bother, you gain nothing staying in raw. It merely adds a complex layer of pre-processing. You want to process all of your stills in a batch in Photoshop or the native image editor for your camera. You will need properly numbered images to import as a sequence. However, I disagree with some of the suggested workflows but only as a matter of practicality. there is no reason to over-resolve your assembly format unless you absolutely must.

I often post to timelapse threads with a long list of online timelapse resources. I’m not at that computer today, don’t have the list, but you should be able to search for the topic and filter to my username.
The best timelapse photography is done with still images from DSLR or simple point and shoot cameras, set to manual focus and manual exposure.
If your realtime event is less than 40 minutes, you can shoot your HD video and then speed it up but do NOT shoot timelapse video unless your camera will do single frames. Use a fast shutter speed is general advice but depends on your exposure needs and look and feel. You can always add stylization filters but you can’t easily go back and sharpen blurred motion.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

SmoothCam and Optical Flow are covered extensively in the manuals. You’ll need them.
Gotchas: The ENTIRE media clip is analyzed. If you have 10 seconds out of a 20 minute capture in your timeline, the whole 20 minutes gets analyzed. That’s so all of the footage from the capture is processed at once. It’s a great feature but the requirement to do the whole clip is mostly misunderstood. It just requires preplanning. There are workarounds, you make independent subclips, I think. Or export trimmed bits of the media and analyze them separately.
And, of course, you already know that motion stabilized footage often has to be scaled up to cover the edges that get brought into the frame as the elements are stabilized. Of course you knew that.

The results can be surprising and sometimes stunning but you must have some patience and you should practice on short clips like 10-30 seconds.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Also depends on how you shot it.
All of the free or bundled motion blur and echo or time cuta’n’paste filters are indiscriminate, they blur everything, all pixels all the time. If your runner was photographed so he can be easily isolated with a mask or keyer, this will be easy.

There are two fabulous time enahncement filters hardly anyone understands, CC Force Motion Blur and CC Time Blend Efx. Visit the cycore site to download the manual for their filters, it was not included with CS3.

bogiesan