[David Bogie]

You need to carefully examine the source video. Most surveillance systems use a proprietary line-multiplexer that encodes those 8 cameras onto one or more frames and then splits them on playback. If so, the system should be able to be programmed to show one camera only. I mean, someone reviewing multi-camera security systems can’t be bothered to waste their time wathcing 7 unrelated cameras if the action they need to see is only captured on one.

You might be able to apply the Strobe filter to play 10 frames and skip 70. Dicey. In After Effects you would use Posterize Time.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

It’s not clear in the manuals but multicam is an effect. When you leave FCP alone for a while it decides to render the effects.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Max Huggett] “So your best advice would be to render out the MultiClip sequence for each of the cams. Could i do a QT ref file? and does it keep timecode? “

I’m jumping in with not so useful information.
The amount of material you have to conform and then edit is daunting but, in the end, getting each camera’s output assembled to frame accuracy and then creating new media is probably the best approach. The new media can easily be brought into a multiclip session.

Here’s what I’d do although i have no idea if this suits your needs or meets your producer’s expectations:
Create a separate sequence for each camera. Bring in all of the clips and move them around till they create a seamless shot. You may need to insert some slugs to cover gaps. Export this clip as a self-contained movie. You will export the sequence with its own timecode and you obviously want each of the separate camera’s sequences to have the exact same starting timecode point.

Be sure to check several points each hour to make sure all of the cameras are remaining synced. They won’t because time of day is notoriously slippery. You will need to use one camera as the master and sync all the others to it. I’d do this by bringing in the Camera 1 exported media and using that as the click track for assembling camera 2’s and camera 3’s disparate clips.

(If you must maintain code from the original tapes, this will not work. You will need to make coherent dubs of your tapes to guarantee intact code.)

I do not understand how you can get 33 hours of material without starting and stopping to change tapes but that’s another story.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

A TBC will NOT keep the audio from drifting out of sync on captured files, thats a function of the codec in use during capture. The codec in use is determined by the input device. going through a Canon camera or lower end digital convertor box is likely to create audio at a nonstandard DV rate. Methods for correcting that have been dealt with around here for years. Coming through a Sony DV camera should create an absolutely synced audio and video clip.

All a TBC will do stabilize the VHS signal’s head switching errors and, if so equipped, provide some drop out compensation and proc amp adjustments.

We dub our old VHS to DVCAM and capture the DV. But most of our old 3/4″ is useless because the oxide sheds from the base.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Dunno. But I’d never use HDV as a source, it’s not for editing.

Drive speed is not a factor as long as you are using separate drives for source and output and even then it’s not really critical, just safer and more convenient: your source footage is always on one drive, your rendered output is sent to another.

You don’t make codec decisions based on rendering time. You base your project settings on your target output and then work backwards. Most of your compositing in AE is likely to be done in the Animation codec. Whatever you’re doing in in FCP, you won’t be using the Animation codec as the timeline so all Animation files will require rendering.

These questions are quite broad. To understand the answers requires basic familiarity with the concepts in play, fundamentals for using video applications and creating media.
AE and FCP come with several thousand pages of manuals.
Video is hard.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Never used Particle Playground in all my years. Foam uses gradients to control particle flow and it requires shades of gray to do the task. The reason is that the shades have a gradual effect on velocity and direction. control layers that have only black and white areas do not interact with particles gradually. A particle can, for instance, move across the white area and hit the black area going to fast for it to be redirected or slowed down.

But that’s how Foam works.

I don’t know of a way to address individual particles with scripts or expressions.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Bianca Ghitescu] “My goal is to use AE for designing stage sets. So far I’ve made a 3D stage with some preset lights, but I actually wanted to use the beam effect for the lights! “

This really isn’t a good idea. You’ll know why after a few endless days of needless frustration. You want an application for designing stage sets. AE is an animation system. The fact that you can fly a camera through a series of flat objects creates an illusion of architectural functionality that does not really exist.

It’s rather like trying to write your thesis paper using only Xcel.

Beam is not a 3D effect, it is applied to a 2d layer. You can easily orient the layer in 3d space but the beams themselves do not emit light. Know also that every light you add to a scene dramatically impacts the rendering time.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

One of the best suggestions for improving text that is eventually going to be transcoded is to reduce the transparency in the original and to add a wee bit of halo around it. This dramatically reduces the amount of pixelation in the final transcode because the adjacent pixels do not have sharp or abrupt rise times.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

I don’t see that you split the single layer into RGB at all. Looks like three copies of the layer, set one channel of each layer.

But if you get a solutionhere at the cow, please have the courtesy to return to apple.com and let those guys who worked for you for several hours to help you out know what you received here.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Over the years, many user groups and SIGs have held countdown creation contests and collaborative projects. Each participant gets 30 frames.
We’ve seen examples of remarkably cool, over the top, insanely useless, and utilitarian countdowns come out of these exercises. Give google a try but restrict your search to movie clips for UNIVERSAL LEADER and VIDEO COUNTDOWN and similar strings.

Do you need to impress each other or your clients or whoever you ship your spots to? Those are not necessarily the same projects.

bogiesan