[David Franklin]

When you say you used HD 24p, I assume you mean HDV 24p. JVC’s HDV codec is a 720×1280 frame size, 24 frame per second progressive codec. It’s totally different from HDV on a Sony camera, for example.

However, this is why you have FCP — because it knows this.

In FCP go to the easy setup menu and click on “Custom.” Scroll down to find “HDV 720p24”. This is the JVC codec that you had to upgrade your FCP to get. Once that’s active, when you open log and capture it should see the camera.

If you don’t see HDV 720p24, then perhaps you don’t have the latest version of Final Cut after all. I have 5.1.4 and it’s in mine…

Hope this helps.

[David Franklin]

Well, if nobody else is going to weigh in… What if you applied the particle effect to a pre-comp in which your two shots dissolved from one to the next, making sure the dissolve happens when the particles are at their most dispersed? I’ve never done this sort of thing, but if I were going to try, that’s where I’d start.

[David Franklin]

I don’t think you need to do that.

In Aharon’s tutorial he uses the keyframe information from the audio amplitude layer to directly change the wave height of his animated stroke. In other words, the stroke is already moving, then he ADDS additional movement based on the sound info. In this case, wave height.

Since you’ve already used an expression to animate your strings, you can also use the sound amplitude sliders to ADD movement. Perhaps animate the x or y scale of your strings, or the amount of blur. It doesn’t really matter what, as long as it’s dancing in time to the music.

Plus, this way, you get to keep whatever cool movement you’ve already come up with.

Try using the pickwhip to set up a relationship between the x scale of your string and the slider value of one of your audio amplitude sliders. (Remember to plug in values of 100 and 100 for the y and z parts of the expression.) If you don’t like this, try linking to a different property.

One other thing to keep in mind is that you may need to modify the resulting expression info by using a constant or multiplyer to get the slider info to produce values around 100. It depends on how loud your sound is, and how large the strings are, and what you want the effect to look like.

There’s also the chance that someone with more AE mojo than me can weigh in and give additional guidance?

[David Franklin]

If you don’t have the budget for soundkeys, the principles explained in the following two tutorials should do the trick:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/waveform_1.php

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/waveform_2.php

[David Franklin]

Wiggling will be fast, but I have used your first idea — to motion track a shot you shoot hand held of some square object attatched to a wall. (I used a poster). It worked like gangbusters.

I motion tracked the corner of the poster, then mapped the tracker onto the camera’s x and y position coordinates using the pickwhip. I moved in by keyframing the z coordinate, but I suppose you could augment the shakiness of the effect by wiggling it instead. I left the point of interest steady, which resulted in the camera panning back and forth as it moved to keep the main object centered.

One more key with this effect — make sure your foreground and background elements are sufficiently separated in z space, because then you see the relative motion better.

Hope this helps.

[David Franklin]

Well, one way to do it is described in this tutorial:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/kahlenberg_roland/game_pp.php

If I remember correctly, the trick is to use your image as a layer map in particle playground.

[David Franklin]

I had good success with a similar effect just wiggling the opacity of my hero light layer. If you make the values vary enough and the period short enough is pretty convincing. But it may not be good enough to meld with live action…

[David Franklin]

Sadly, the fields setting did not solve the problem. I had been rendering with fields off, so I tried tests both with even first and odd first. Unfortunately, they just made it look worse.

Anyone else have any ideas? I tried rebuilding the effect with all transformations collapsed all the way up through the chain of comps I’d used, but that didn’t seem to be the problem either.

Is it possible that the 10-bit 4:2:2 codec is at fault?

I also tried re-rendering the whole effect without pre-rendering, despite the chance of a crash. And it worked, in terms of not crashing, but didn’t work, in terms of getting rid of the pixellation.

[David Franklin]

Thanks both — I will check the fields thing tonight. If this news is correct that the full AE 8 is out today, I may not have to worry about the emulation issue! (That is, assuming that the full package of CC effects have been included this time around.)

But in the meantime, thanks for the responses.

[David Franklin]

Just wanted to thank everyone for their diligence here. I was having mysterious crashing over the weekend on my AfterEffects 7.0 on an Intel Xeon Dual Core 2.66GHz machine. I was tearing my hair out until I found this thread.

Just to add some actual data to the conversation, I was getting “AfterEffects unexpectedly ended” messages with the option to relaunch the app while rendering particularly complex compositions (there were several hundred layers of hand-made particles).

Using the advice offered here, I reduced the AfterEffects memory allocation to 70% of my 2GB of RAM, which came out to 1.4 GB, which was just below the 1.5GB threshold discussed above. I also reduced the cache size to 30%. That worked beautifully for a couple of days, then I got another “could not generate a 720 x 486 buffer” message, which was another messge I’d been getting over the weekend prior to reducing the memory allocation.

So I further reduced the memory to 65% (1.3GB) and the Cache to 25% (which wound up being 512MB). And then the same composition rendered without incident.

So thanks to everyone for their feedback.

–Franklin