[David Bogie]

The difference between 24 and 30 fps is only about 20%. If you’re experiencing a truly dramatic 60% increase in apparent speed, you have different issues. You may be interpreting each frame as a separate field, that would result in an apparent 12 fps.

I don’t know anything about your camera but most of the tools I have used will bake in a fake 24fps but it still records at 30.

bogiesasn

[David Bogie]

The suggestion to export a reference movie is fine but I’d carry this a few steps further. the idea is to create three new media files that represent your cameras as if they were properly synced.

Begin with the camera that holds the most useful or longest takes.

1. Create n empty sequence called Reel Syncer.
2, Bring each reel into a corresponding track but you’re going to do this with only one reel’s resources at a time.
3. You will deliberately edit each resource to end up with a start-to-finish track. You will use the razor blade to chop up and delete or move the chunks between starts and stops. You will fill the gaps with colored mattes (not black slugs, use a different color matte for each reel).
4. Once it’s all in position, turn off the track and start work on another one. You will use the stage action or the audio tracks to sync things up precisely.
5. Depending on the complexity of the shooting or the stupidity of your camera operators, this will go together very quickly or take you many frustrating hours.
6. You can copy the contents of an entire track and paste them into an empty sequence. Export it as new media. Yes, it consumes 12 gigs of drive space for an hour but having the media makes everything from this point much easier.
7. Bring the three new clips into a new project and make them your three angles in a multiclip.
8. Have fun explorig the multiclip editing interface. It’s great fun but it does NOT work like you think it should so read up on it first.

The presence of a colored matte on the screen represents a segment that must be filled with b roll.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Somewhere on the Net is a photo taken of an Apple banner that was on display at the 2009 WWDC where Snow Leopard was a main topic of discussion. Several of the application icons on the banner were subtly different from the ones we know and love and IIRC FCP was slightly different.

Anyone remember where that photo originated? I’ve checked wired.com and Macworld for their WWDC coverage sets.

here’s a uselessly small copy:
https://images.macworld.com/images/news/graphics/140959-wwdcbanner_original.jpg

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

First, save your project using Increment and Save.
Now you’re working on a duplicate and you can always go back to your original.

Debugging AE’s more complex media management is usually a case of user error, simply not understanding the practical limits. You have discovered many of the gotchas on your own but they are all spelled out in the manual. Now that you have some practical experience, the manual’s often less than crystal clear explanations might be easier to understand.

When you say the canvas “goes blank” do you mean the whole project goes to black or just the layers you’re trying to replace?
Try stepping through the comp one frame at a time till your layers disappear. Once you find that location, start turning off and soloing layers one at a time till you get some reaction that starts to make some sense to you.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

the first many times I saw these on the air I thought “massive 3D modeling, design,, rendering” but now I think most of the parts were built rather simply in After Effects. It’s the combination of layering and carefully designed transitions that make these look like a complex 3D modeling application was used.

Once you’ve spent a couple of hours experimenting with CC Sphere (look for every tutorial you can find including the crystal globe and light rays globes) you can deconstruct the BBC pieces.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Add some very cool perspective to your project easily. Create a couple of additional layers of stars with much fewer stars and maybe a couple of them slightly larger, and place this layer half the z distance from the existing box’s surfaces. Now as you move the camera, there will be a foreground layer of stars that moves against the background.

another thing that adds incredible drama to the standard ho-hum starfield is a couple of images of galaxy clusters.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

when you sharpened up your frames with shorter shutter speeds, you made the intervals between the frames much longer but you did not increase the number of discrete time slices you captured.

For buttery smooth slow motion, you must have more than 30 frames per second. You need like 90 or even 2,000.

There are several products that will attempt to create the pixels you do not have. Sometimes Apple’s SmoothCam can do it but you generally need an expensive thingy like Revision’s Twixtor.

Hope you get better advice, stay tuned.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

I’m not at my AE machine to check this for you but look for a filter called Optics Compensation. it won’t necessarily correct perspective distortion caused by a tilt but it can help. You are probably going to need to turn the layer into 3D and tip it. This is a very unsatisfactory solution since it requires up-scaling about half of the image. Those pixels will tend to get noisy.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

You’ll need to explain the situation as you seem to be asking if the water can be keyed out. If the water is sufficiently pigmented, it’s easy.
If you’re asking if the water can be keyed out as water, key everything else out and reversing the alpha. Easy.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Our usual response to such questions is:

Before we go trying to figure out if the problem is with Knoll, which I’ve not heard of before, it’s pretty benign, we need to ask: “Are you absolutely certain that’s the problem and how do you know?”

Then we ask, “What did Red Giant have to say when you asked them about their product’s problems?”

bogiesan