[Dex Craig]

If you want a final output at 24P you really should shoot in 24P. Converting from 29.97 interlaced to 24P is always a pain, and Premiere Pro isn’t necessarily the best tool for converting. You’ll get better results converting frame rates in AfterEffects, and even there, you might consider some plug-ins that specialize in time-shifting.

– Dex

[Dex Craig]

Shooting a rack focus shot requires detailed control of depth of field and careful operation of the focus control on your camera. Not knowing if you’re using a pro camera or a consumer one, you might have some trouble pulling it off.

That said, you can fake that kind of rack focus by shooting your foreground item as a separate element and compositing it on your background. Apply a fast or gaussian blur to the foreground element, and then when you want the rack to happen, keyframe the blur down to zero on the foreground element while keyframing from zero to whatever looks right for the background. If your composite is clean, this works really well.

– Dex

[Dex Craig]

Hi, there —

Is PIRender included in the demo? I can’t seem to get an HD size project to render on the mac; my largest monitor isn’t large enough to allow a 1920 by 1080 window.

I do find “PIRenderBatch,” but this doesn’t seem to work, either….

Please help!

– Dex

[Dex Craig]

I produced a feature-length movie using Premiere 1.5 in 16×9 without any trouble. Where I had trouble was with the DVD authoring software. Adobe Encore 1.5 was perfect; I’d tried using some other DVD packages and would wind up with 16:9 squished to 4:3.

What software are you encoding the DVD with?

[Dex Craig]

Thanks, Aanarav. Great tips in that podcast!
– Dex

[Dex Craig]

Thanks for the response, and sorry if I’m seeming dense.

Here’s the trouble in more detail. It used to be that I was able to run AE and PP simultaneously without any trouble (versions 6.5 and 1.5, respectively). Now, I’m unable to do that, as the system bogs down. My suspicion was that there was some kind of client lurking somewhere in the software, keeping RAM previews from AE in reserve so they could be played in PP without rendering them. (That’s what I thought dynamic link was.) It seems that when I have done a RAM render in AE, it bogs down my entire system in a way that it did not do before. I tend to do RAM renders in AE when working on graphics for my news show to see how they flow, but now it causes my system to get sluggish.

So, whether or not it’s Dynamic Link, is there some way to make the software suite run in such a way that doing a RAM render in AE while PP is open that does not cause my system to run slower than my 90 year old grandmother in a footrace?

[Dex Craig]

You’re talking about rotoscoping, then, if you want to take an existing movie (say your Max render) and composite other video footage into it, so it looks like it’s behind the foreground subject.

It’s tedious, but not impossible. There are a ton of tutorials on rotoscoping around; you can search here or google “rotoscoping.”

As for mapping video with an alpha channel onto a plane in Max, I don’t work with max much, myself, but in my experience, it doesn’t add a huge amount of render time. You might give it a try; it might well be faster than you think.

Good luck.
– Dex

[Dex Craig]

You can key in Premiere Pro — I don’t have PP2, I’m still on PP1.5, but what follows applies to any and all keys.

Most important aspect to keying is lighting. Be sure you evenly light your greenscreen — no shadows, no soft fades from bright to slightly dimmer. Even a half-stop difference between light and dark areas of the greenscreen can make pulling a key much more difficult. Also, make sure that your greenscreen is at a similar illumination level to the foreground subject (try to keep the difference less than a stop). Do your best to keep green spill from your subject, since you don’t have the same spill supressors you’d have in AE. Use backlight on your subject, as well, to help pop the subject away from the greenscreen. If you can, even put a slightly red (maybe just a CTO) gel on the back and edge lights to help counteract the green spill.

Do use green for your greenscreen. DV (if that’s what you’re shooting) handles the green information in the frame with more detail, so you’ll get better keys off green.

If your greenscreen is well lit you can get a decent result with the Chroma Key effect. Select the color from the greenscreen, obviously enough. I find a similarity of about 15 or so works pretty well, with smoothing set to “high.” The Color Key effect is about as good, as well, and you can use the Edge Thin and Edge Feather to minimize artifacts around the edge of your subject, but it’s easy to gobble up details from the edges with thinning, so be careful.

Sometimes the Remove Matte effect is useful, too, but it can also create a jaggy edge to the key.

It’s not going to be the best key in the world, but depending on what you’re doing with it, it can be adequate.

Hope that’s helpful.

– Dex

[Dex Craig]

I see two possibilities:

One, render your robots in Max with an alpha channel background so you can lay them atop the layer of your cheering crowd in AfterEffects.

Two, prerender your cheering crowd in AE with an alpha channel and map them onto a plane in Max behind the robots.

Either should give you the look you’re seeking.

– Dex

http://www.pandemoniummovie.com

[Dex Craig]

Chris –

Thanks for posting the followup to your own question. I’d been lead to believe this was the case, but hadn’t checked on it myself.

See you at some of the training!

– Dex
http://www.pandemoniummovie.com