[David Bogie]

It’s entirely possible.
Do you want someone here to do it for you?

theanvel.com has several excellent volumetric light tutorials but you may have to pay for them these days. Worth every penny. Look for the disco ball series.

However, unless you have some additional plugins or lots of time to experiment with what comes with CS3, the effect you seem to be describing might be best created in a 3D application by a competent designer/animator.

The difference between your “worst thing in the world” and a pleasing/satisfying visual your audience will appreciate is subtle. Elegant 3D fractures, edge glows, and the illusion of light radiance are supremely difficult in After Effects without extensive experience in many advanced concepts such as precomping the spherical content (which could be a movie that opens your Earth) and generating mattes for the light filters. If you have the time and patience, you will end up with a delicious effect. But you need to decide if the many-many hours of screwing around are worth a few seconds of screen time.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

I can’t tell from you post what you’re complaining about, the work you’re doing during the scaling operation or after the compression to .mp4. Of course everything is going to look terrible as a highly compressed .mp4.

If Raf’s assistance hasn’t helped get a better image, try going through this one step at a time for the rest of us slowpokes.

You’re capturing at DV.
You’re pulling your DV into a custom sequence that is 744×398 because that’s your client’s weird spec.
You’re scaling your DV to fit a little monitor graphic that’s 512×384 and part of your custom sequence. That will introduce significant quality issues since you are throwing away about half of your pixels.
You’re bringing in full rez tiffs from PP that have small text and you are placing them into your custom sequence. That will introduce significant resolution issues since text cannot be rendered to any video or motion codec directly from tiffs and maintain anything that resembles the original resolution. It is a function of the conversion from still image to video.
You are then rendering to an unspecified codec for your custom sequence. If you have not specified a codec, it is probably being rendered to DV.
Then you’re compressing the whole thing to .mp4?

You’re imposing scale reduction, pixel conversions, and pixel averaging at almost every step of the process.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[JeremyG] ”
In teh encoder button click the ‘extras’ tab. You will notce a tick box that says Multiplexed MPEG-1 layer 2 audio. You can then choose program or transport stream.
Jeremy “

Cool, thanks for that, JG.

Wouldn’t it be cool if all of these formats and all of these manufacturers used the same terminology?

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

What do you mean by pixelated?
If you scale them up, you will make the pixels bigger and this usually makes them more noticeable. But if you have to scale down every frame, you are wasting tremendous amounts of processing time. Shoot at exactly the pixel dimensions you want to use in the final presentation format. Most DV cameras have a still image mode, use that if you can’t use a digital SLR.

But if you are talking about the traditional use of the term pixelation in stop frame animation, your ratio of still images to running time should not be any greater that 20 to 1. You can get away with 15 frames of animation for 30 frames of screen time, what we call “on-twos” but you really can’t take that down to “on-threes” unless you are ware of the stylistic impact such economies impart on the finished product.

Like an idiot, I’ve posted answers to both of your posts.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

The problem is that particle systems are built to be appear to be random. But they are not. They must be repeatable so they all have random seed inputs.
Some particles have keyframable random seed fields. Some filters will allow you to return to a random seed entry.

Back in the olden days, I would have created a forty second snow animation movie and created a dissolve between two copies just before the loop point. It’s easier to mess with on a timeline that to explain.

Hope you get additional advice.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Allen Freiler] “so for the time being i have either a videocamera or a digital camera to do the job with. so if you know the dimensions that the picture needs to be captured in without pixelating it, i would appreciate the info.
“

Use a still camera, use an SLR. If you don’t have access to an SLR, use your video camera. Either way, your mention of a “deadline” implies you are hopelessly screwed.

The term “pixelation” means entirely different things in still image animation and video editing further implying you have much to digest and learn before you start your project.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Yar, we have this plugin. On our old G5s it took for freakin’ ever to render. On the Intels, not so bad as long as we’re DV.

Individual and project-specific formatting decisions for readability and timing are not built into the effect nad, you gotta understand, this permanently burns your subs into your video. If you need captioning, Digital Heaven’s great little subtitler is not your answer.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Doesn’t matter what we think here.
Call your film lab and find out what they want from you.
Exactly. Get it in writing.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Archiving is quite different from backing up.
You don’t archive compressed or encoded footage, you are just backing it up for duplicate storage. The only thing you can truly archive, by definition (see a site on preservation technologies and sciences), is the camera original because you need to preserve the original so can do something else to it as future technologies become available.

Archiving is further complicated by what medium to use. Videotape is still viable after 30 years but film is still around after more than 100 years. In 10 years you may not be able to find a working DVD player.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Of course you’re going to lose something. 100% contains about 500×800 individual pixels, what is that? 400,000 pixels. 15% of that is about 50,000 pixels, so,umm, yeah, something has to give.

Scaling might not be your best option if you are motion tracking a scene like this.If you apply tracking in After Effects, you can use perspective controls. Dunno if Motion does that, never tried it.

bogiesan