[David Bogie]

Reshoot.

Or read everything you can on the topic of rotoscoping.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

You must be on a Macintosh.

WMV functions can only be obtained through third party compression systems like Telestream’s Episode, Sonrenson Squeeze, or Autodesk’s Cleaner.

You don’t really want to render to WMV. You want to render to a conveneient interchange format and then transcode to WMV.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Tom Wolsky] “I’m curious what other NLE’s do. If you slmo a clip, what do they do, truncate the clip to its current duration? If you speed up a clip, extend the clip’s marked I/O to fill the sapce? What if there isn’t enough media? Leaves a hole in the timeline?
“

Ye Olde Media 100 was supremely forgiving in many of the situations in which FCP assumes the editor is an idiot. Anything the user told the NLE to do, M100 would do it and calmly indicate where media was missing. M100 presumed nothing except you nknew what you were doing and knew what you wanted. If the operation couldn’t be executed completely, M100 did what it could and served up the obvious shortcomings of your decisions.

Applying timing changes to a clip is just one example. Changing transition lengths, removing gaps, or replacing media are others. Place a 5 second dissolve on a clip that only has only 2 seconds of handles? M100 did it but indicated the missing media with a crosshatch.

I have a long list of silly things in FCP that insult me to the core. They are intrusive, disruptive, presumptive, and they say really awful things about how little FCP’s designers respect our skills. There should be a Child-Watch Switch in FCP that allows the mature editor who is comfortable with tanking risks to turn this babysitting junk on or off.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

sorry to butt in, I have no experiecne with any of these tools or formats (except I’ve done lots of retiming in After Effects over the years).

We just ran some regular ol’ DV through Smooth Cam in Motion, also available in FCP, and the slow motion results were quite lovely. The scene was a boat traveling at high speed on a river; camera was on a tripod on the bank so the shot is a rapid pan. The opposite river bank and the wake spray are the worst parts of the rendered image but the boat and the people on it turned out great. If we had known Smooth Cam worked so well, we probably would have shot at a higher shutter speed to DV so there was less blur on each of the fields.

Dunno how Smooth Cam works yet, we just pushed the button and watched it process. I’ll look it up later.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Waiting for Apple to drop a new shoe is not a viable decision process. buy what you need when you need it but consider the less obvious financial opporutnites of the American tax system. Talk to your accountant first. There may be far more benefit to your bottom line to make your e purchases with 2007 cash. She may know of other tax or capitalization options you should consider.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

I’ll eventually try all of these suggestions but I still find the easiest is to apply the DynamicsRange filter form the Apple group in audio filters.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

The issue is how much you can bill the idiots who produced the project.
You can apply softening to the person but only with careful rotoscoping of every single frame. Could take weeks. If you don’t roto out the performer, your softening system (whatever it is) will degrade the entire image.

Skin softening tools are available in a wide range from simple and not-so-simple blurs to complex blemish and line removal routines best done in Photoshop. That’s where I’d start, PS tutorials, and then see what you can adapt to your experience with After Effects, SHake, combustion, or Motion.

Trish and Chris Meyer have an old but relevant rick they used to call “instant sex” that is directly applicable but the techniques and concepts can be applied to skin reconditioning.
It’s in several of their AE books, page 224-225 of the original edition of their “AE in Production.”

Hope you get better advice but you ‘ve got to determine first if you can paid for your client’s screwup. It might also be cheaper for you to hand them the completed project and get paid for the work you did. Or find an experienced roto expert to subcontract. You may not want to do this yourself.

Best of luck, hold out for a few more days if you can to get more advice.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

The usual answer to this is the user often does not understand the difference between the source element and the target format. You have not provided either of those criteria nor have you indicated your experience level but I shall presume you are bringing in a large Photoshop image and it is being scaled down to fit something more useful like DV. You may be scaling an image that is 3,000 pixels wide down to something that is less than 800 pixels wide so, yes, it will look significantly less interesting than the original.

I cannot recall if M2 supports project rendering within FCP.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

I echo my original postulate:

> So, it’s easy to do, just takes some planning. You must know exactly how you are going to deliver the movies before you start planning your After Effects use. < What the heck are "LED clusters" arranged in a cone that make a real tree, well sort of. What controls the LED display? Are these miniature RGBW units? Strands fo xmas lights? Tens of thousands of 2" screens from old digital cameras? bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Never thought of using Flash but you can do pixel detection in After Effects with huge scripting and expressions.
So, use Flash. Which means: Hire a Flash animator!

bogiesan