[David Bogie]

Nick, sorry, I’ve got to refer you to the major expression sites.
Expressions make my brain hurt.

I see you applied a multiplier to get a reasonable swing.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

[Wayne Carey] “Now, Bogie… You know that’s not true.
“

Sorry, I had a major sarcasm attack this morning. But, unless they’re just looking at a rough cut of this program, the whole approach to the release medium was wrong from the beginning. I think so.

If you shoot real HD in a widescreen format and then letterbox it down to fit on a DVD (assuming we’re not talking Blu-ray or some obscure HD capable DVD format) don’t you end up with MPEG2? Even using the best compression practices (which I don’t think were in the OP’s time allowance but I’m not going back to read the OP), you end up taking a thousand horizontal lines of information and smooshing the pixels into a display that is only about 400 pixels/lines high.

But, yeah, I know there are ways to improve that.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

go out and buy a DVD recorder with a hard drive in it, Panasonic makes several. Transfer your file to the HDD and then set the machine to record to DVD from HDD.

To pull HD to DVD is a waste of everyone’s time. You could have shot the thing through a Coke bottle onto VHS and it would have looked better that your DVD is going to look.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

[Nick Pitcavage] “I like where you are going with that, but it sounds like some more complex scripting would be involved…
“

Not at all. You _can_ create an expression that links the movement of the chains to the far end of the sign but, since the sign/chains are in their own precomp, you can easily add rotation to the sign (in the sign precomp) that syncs with movement of the chains in the main comp. You can do that just by adding those keyframes to the sign after you’re happy with the movement of the chains.

I do not understand 3D apps any more than I understand spreadsheet apps. Because I’ve been using AE since it was CoSA, I see precomposing workflows in my sleep. I still don’t get AE’s 3D but I stumble through it.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

I’d have built the sign and cables in their own 3d comp. This would have allowed you to add some inertia and reaction to the sign, lag and follow physics simulations.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

You’re facing hand drawing a mask around everything you want to remain in focus and applying a blur filter (look for real camera blurs, not just a blur). Each frame will require its own had drawn mask, 30 of them every second. Easier to reshoot it.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

[Mick Haensler] “However, when I bring the Motion projects into the FCP timeline, FCP rerenders them every time I make the slightest change. I’ve tried rendering them out of Motion as MOV files and bringing the Motion project straight into the FCP timeline with the same result. “

If I read you post correctly, the problem is most likely the sequence settings in FCP do not match precisely the settings of the Motion files.
But you haven’t said what is actually rendering in FCP (and it’s quite confusing without lots of experience). is it the timeline that’s rendering or the Motion file? Since your’e in FCP, it’s probably the timeline. Is the .motn or QT movie on top of another layer? Then, yes, of course it has to render. Every pixel under the Motion clip is being altered by the Motion clip.

If you are importing .motn files, they’re not really rendered yet. The best you can get as a preview is the best your machine’s GPU can deliver.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

and be prepared to get results you were not expecting. You probably are hoping for fluid time compression and you cannot get that with bursts of motion video. You get speeded up video. The best video timelapse is shot as stills.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

“Realistic” when used to describe puppetry is a stylistic decision, but, yes, sophisticated scripting tools would make using the conventional approach of simple parenting seem a bit primitive.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

[Josh Evans] “Hope this helps someone else…”

It sure will. Thank you for posting this information. the “general error” is so useless but at least we have some realworld experience to refer others to, “Look for corrupt image files or movie files, no matter how difficult it might be to find them.”

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”