[David Bogie]

I think the issue is defining your collaborative goals and expectations. When I break up a complex project among our team, it’s usually based on their expertise in separate applications; the Photoshop wonks are responsible for still images and graphic/text resources, the FCP guys provide video resources and handle the final assembly, the audio guys etc.

If I were to break up a stupidly complex AE project, I would use the same paradigm: each user does what he or she does best and provides movies to the workgroup. I would not want to attempt to combine separate AE project files for the very reasons expressed here; it’s a nightmare or naming conventions, resource compilation, and file access privileges.

When I have required realtime design assistance and editorial suggestions, we either move our workstations next to each other or just sit at the same machine.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Stuart Bruce] “Is there a way to resize a clip on the Timeline, but to make sure Final Cut Pro just does it the basic way? And yes, part of the point is to deliberately make the SD look visibly uglier.
It’s stop-motion animation so fields aren’t an issue.
In Photoshop, under Image Size, this would be the difference between ‘resample- bicubic’ and ‘nearest pixel’- I’m looking for the Final Cut equivalent?
“

Tell us again—in different words—what you’re actually trying to accomplish because there may be a better way to do this. One would be to use two projection systems running simul-rolled SD and HD footage.

Your HD timeline sets the resolution for your project. Using round numbers, your HD sequence is about 2k pixels high, your SD footage only contains about 500 horizontal lines. If you put them side by side without scaling, leaving each clip at their relative pixel-to-pixel resolutions, the SD clip will be 1/4 the vertical size of the adjacent HD clip. It will also only be 1/4 as wide. That’s the incontrovertible math.

If you scale up the SD, all you do is create bigger macro-pixels. You cannot create new pixels without doing a resample and the tools to achieve a PS-like change in image quality are expensive, IIRC.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[marc martinez] “I am trying to place a motion lower third template over video that is keyed over a background. When I try to put the video in the drop zone of the template, I cannot. What am I doing wrong? “

I cannot imagine what you’re trying to do. Here’s what I discern from your explanation:

You have three video tracks: 1. background, 2. chromakey source with chromakey filter applied, 3. .motn file that is a template. And you have another fourth video clip that you are trying to place into the .motn’s drop zone.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[sammy jay] “There is so much to learn about video codecs! “

Yar, understatement of the day.
You got your delivery codecs and your production/acquisition codecs.
There are literally hundreds of video codecs but only a scant few are platform agnostic. Almost none of the main Windows codecs ever made it to the Macintosh and those that did have not been updated in a very long time so they’re not really considered viable.

Your number of choices is reduced further by the fact that only the Animation codec is lossless and carries an alpha and is usable on almost any motion graphics or video application. “Usable” does not mean “playable.”

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Bill Kelly] “In the Render Que, right below the render bar, there’s a little menu that you can click called Current Render Details.”

It wasn’t all that long ago that my Macintosh took a weekend to render 10 seconds of video in AE. It was easy to spot the processing intensive layers. My current Mac simply screams through rendering and I think it is only previous experience that helps me figure out which layers may be slowing things down.

3D makes your scene render at least 3 times as long, maybe 9 times. A light or depth of field increases render time by a geometric progression.

Anyway…if you can locate the problem layer, your next challenge is to figure out how to streamline you rendering pipeline. For me, that’s always a question of deciding what layers I can pre-render and import as movies or which 3D layers can be turned back into 2D or even offloaded to the video editor. I do a lot of text items and few of them require the sophistication of AE. Most of them can be done in FCP.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

There are really only two choices:
1. The native codec in which you are building your Premiere show.
2. Animation.

You’ll need to supply a bit more information like what kinds of effects you’re using in AE and why (instead of editing effects directly in Premiere) and what motivates your need for quality. “Quality” is often mistaken around here for resolution and color depth.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Todd Kopriva] “I always wonder why someone like Kevin or Dave or Bogie would type the same few paragraphs time after time “

That’s an easy question to answer: Attitude. It’s taken me ten years to get conversational with the basics of After Effects (another decade for expressions and scripts?). For newbies to presume AE is—or should be—”easy” rankles.

However, I take supreme umbrage at the implication that Kevin, Dave and I (among others) do not often include helpful and gracious advice and assistance in our curt or enjoyably eloquent RTFM-ish responses.

Todd, bless his FAQ-oriented heart, is an Adobe employee and the Adobe logo in one’s sig file carries the imprint of maintaining customer relations. This often is possible only at the expense of access to what seems to be an inexhaustible supply of grace and patience. We are glad he’s here, glad his company pays for his participation, and, if interested, we can learn something from his posting style. Todd, unlike the rest of us, really doesn’t have the flexibility to be an offensive jerk unless, of course, he has established an alias account.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Jeremy Allen] “While I somewhat agree with your sentiment, I don’t think your attitude fosters much of a community spirit. And since you’ve only made 13 posts since may 2006, it doesn’t seem like you’ve made much of an effort to help people at all. So I don’t think your lack of participation will be missed here. “

Not sure who you’re talking to, son.
It can’t possibly be me.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Gene Hoffman] “While I’m grateful for all the great years of the Cow, but after spending the last hour shaking my head and posting things like look at the help docs, buy a book or take a class. I feel it’s best I just stop visiting The Cow.
“

We were ALL new to this stuff at one time or another and some of these poor souls don’t ever get it. Hopefully they find a mentor or just go away.

You’re just a kid. I’ve been around since the Cow was the WWUG and there was only one forum. Where would this place be if we all had your attitude? You have a choice to leave, participate, assist, educate, cajole, tease, harass, or embrace.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

What we’re trying to get you to do, fundamentally, is convert the bad video to the better video’s native format. Render it all, export it as self-contained movies, reimport all of the new media, discard the original so it’s no longer cluttering up your project.

bogiesan