David Bogie
Forum Replies Created
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Can of worms.
You could do us a huge favor by telling us what you mean by “HD” and where you think your production output is headed. The various workflows for FCP and the many different and incompatible version of “HD” require much patience and research before you will know if “FCP is O.K. for HD.”
bogiesan
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I don’t think you’re going to be happy with any of the possible workarounds. One is to render the upstream sequence as a self-contained movie and bring it back into the project.
bogiesan
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The usual cause of this problem is that your sequence is not actually DV. Beyond that, and since we’re not looking over your shoulder, there is nothing in FCP or even your Macintosh that will prevent your DSR11 from seeing and recording your DV signal via Firewire.
bogiesan
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No one can tell you for sure. Find someone who has one and test drive it.
Reviews are mixed but for FCP users, the indistinctness of the buttonological assignments seems to make us more nuts than we already are.bogiesan
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Working in a class is great fun but I recommend you invest in a series of downloadable or DVD-based training aids. The stuff from the cow is fabulous. Total Training is fabulous. Buy all of the books by Trish and Chris Meyer. If you don’t mind using design and animation training materials for earlier versions of AE, eBay is a great place to look for outdated books and DVDs. The principles of design and workflow are more or less constant.
bogiesan
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Your best bet is probably to just use Google and see what “AE Motion Tracking” and some variations brings you. There are tutorials available on many AE forums including here on the cow. The problem is that there are many subtle things that can go wrong with the process. Any of them will mess things up but, the good news is that most of them are simple user errors and you learn not to do them.
Be sure to check the online help for Motion Tracking, too. Todd’s extensive community help should take you to several online resources.
bogiesan
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[Jack King] “its 5d footage, being output at h.264 – 29.97 fps etc etc – and everything works fine bar the smoothcam footage that is all shaky! Its fine in the timeline!”
This workflow sounds bad to me but I’m not watching you work and you may have omitted several steps in your haste to demand a solution. The Canon footage has to be converted to an editing format, a step you may or may not have performed, and that rendered or transcoded media file should be able to execute a perfectly useful Smoothcam render. How did you apply Smoothcam? Have you forced that clip to render as self-contained? Why do you want h.264? How are you creating your h.264 output? From what application? Have you exported the entire sequence as a self-contained movie first or are you attempting to do the export from the timeline? There are no correct or incorrect answers. They depend upon your machine, your experience, and your ability to understand how Optical Flow works.
You’re going to need a big dose of patience this weekend since only those of us who have no lives are hanging out on the cow.
bogiesan
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[Keenan Jones] “To make this clear, when I drag my playhead where a start of a new clip is supposed to be it is different then what it is supposed to be in the canvas.”
Since we’re not watching over your shoulder, this is not clear in the slightest. Be so kind as to tell us what format you are shooting and what your sequence settings are. Supremely relevant information.
bogiesan
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[Eric Newman] “I am a rookie when it comes to running repairs, is it as easy as putting in the disc and following prompts? How does one repair permissions?”
Unfortunately, drive maintenance is complicated these days. As you have noticed in this thread, Onyx has been recommended (thanks Chuck) as well as Disk Warrior (I disagree DW is necessary for NLEs but it’s a great app and a good prophylactic). DW rebuilds directories and that can take many hours on a 500 gig drive.
You can spend a few minutes on Google looking for Mac system repair utilities. Also try versiontracker.com and search for some freebies there.
bogiesan
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Expensive way to avoid learning expressions and parenting but, if you’ve got the money, Trapcode gets high marks around here.
I’m not at my AE machine for a few days but I’d approach the challenge starting with three simple layers, starting at the top, 1,2 and 3. Parent the top edge of 3 to the bottom edge of 2 and 2 to 1. You already know how to move the anchor points. Moving or rotating layer 1 will bring 2 and 3 along. Now try to rotate 3 about 100 degrees on the x axis so it sticks out, it’s not going to fold up against 2 yet. Then rotate 2 on its x axis. 3 should follow logically. If it doesn’t, you start over.
Once you hve the basic operation, you can duplicate the comp, make precomps of the photo layers so you can upstream effects, and experiment with turning them on or off only as they are needed.
Create a tall comp to hold your unfolding precomps. Bring this tall precomp into your main composition and add your lighting and camera rigs. Do not try to animate a camera in the tall comp. You want to move the tall comp up or down relative to the caemra instead of moving the camera. Add finesse and class by adding camera arcs and dollies.
bogiesan