[David Bogie]

[Ben Scott] “you are right, this is the only way

You mean a watch folder won’t work? Seems to work for me.

[Ben Scott] once you get compressor and understand it
makes final cut pro work with any format
and you become liberated “

that’s only your opinion. If compressor worked like a video application instead of rip off of cleaner, I’d be a lot happier. Screw “batches, just five me an interface I can understand.

The other point, “makes fcp work with any format” is misleading. One must first push one’s AVI through Compressor before FCP can use it and one must know exactly how to tell it what to do to maintain the quality of the original. It’s not easy. but it should be.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

This indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of how keyframes work.

Your best bet is to split the layers as LaRonde has suggested.

Please come back in a few days and tell us how you met the challenge.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

We’re having a severe translation error and a culture disconnect.
Compressor is an Appel product. “the compressor” might refer to any application. PC is generally a Windows-based computer in the States but PC is generic enough in the rest of the world to refer to any computer, including Macintosh.
bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

[Scott Geersen] “it’s quite annoying and i think that adobe should implement this in future. “

I have a similar reaction to posts such as this. The solution is simple and sadly subtle.
In the far left of the viewer is a tiny button. Hover over it and the tooltip will say “Always preview this view.” It’s way cool. You cannot render any other view, though, and that’s still too bad.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

You can search the AE tutorials here for all of the smoke and dust videos. Most show you how to turn text into something that will blow around. Good places to start.

I don’t do 3D anymore (Infini-D almost killed me) but it seems your Maya objects are only 2D projections of them now that you have brought them into AE, yes? shatter will give them a real 3D dispersion but the particles are still based on a 2D layer. .

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

I edited this file once back in AE3. My machine never worked the same.
You will want to work on a copy of this file and you will want to make sure you spell everything correctly (separate not seperate and ratio not ration) so use a good text editor and then cut and paste after spellchecking.

Before diving into this, search the online help carefully and then cruise blogs at adobe.com. Start with the after effects forum from this portal:

https://www.adobe.com/support/forums/index.html

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

[Matt Gray] “My quality is awesome, until i import into After Effects. The problem i think i might be having is when importing into After Effects its Downgrading my footage. “

You’re dealing with a basic misunderstanding of AE’s interface. You are probably using a low rez setting on the canvas. Time to break out the manual.
After Effects does nothing to your footage when you import it, your project merely points to the file. Nothing happens to your footage until you place your footage into a comp and even then you must apply filters or do something to it in order to make any changes to your footage.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

After Effects is not a good transcoder.
You want a dedicated application like Winows Media Encoder or cleaner, Compressor, Sorenson Squeeze, etc.

Getting a good small file is trade off, a dark art or unholy compromises. Animation is a production codec, not intended for delivery. WMV is a delivery codec but you have dozens of adjustments to experiment with to compensate for the differences between Mac and PC monitor defaults, file size, bitrate, frame rate, frame size, color space, interlacing, audio interleaving (or not) cropping…….. the list is stupid and it’s long.

There are no quick shortcuts to getting good transcodes except to immerse yourself in the literature.

here is one setting prest we use in cleaner:
windows Media 7
320×240
Deinterlace, blend or remove top filed, your choice.
Adjust gamma plus 15
adjust bright minus 5
adjust contrast plus 5
frame rate 30
video data rate limit to 200kbits
audio 32kHz

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

What does the red look like on a vectorscope?

Rendering settings get very subtle when trying to do reds. The color space that is specific to any particular codec will force certain adjacent pixels (known as pixel risetime) to be handled in certain ways since you are doing severe compression going from vector text to rasterized bitmaps. Something has to give. SD and HD are only descriptions of the format, they do not indicate the exact codec used in the rendering. Nor do you really indicate that the timeline is exactly matched to the codec of the AE files. If not, then your AE clipsa re being processed to the fit the timeline codec and that involves more color space and pixel risetime conversions.

This doesn’t help, sorry.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

[jenna banana] “The video is a camtasia file converted to .mov, the image is a screen shot of the computer screen while doing a tutorial. I do tons of other videos and dont notice any quality issues, but just with these the screen looks blurred. Any help?”

Camtasia is PC only so your export settings may have been incorrect. Most tutorial developers capture a full screen, maybe 1200 pixels or more in any one direction, and are surprised when they put it in a DV timeline, which is only 500 pixels or so wide. If FCP scales the image to fit, of course it’s going to look terrible, 75% of the pixels have been smooshed into 255 of the space. If you don’t tell FCP to scale the image to fit the timeline, you will need to pull it around using wireframe view so the part fo the screen you want to see is under the itty bitty video window.

bogiesan

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