[Michael Duff]

can you rip the audio seperately as a .WAV or .AIFF and then use that?

[Michael Duff]

is it video source? or graphics made in AE?

if it’s video can you look at a quicktime outside of AE and see if it’s pixellated there?

did you find the Pixel Aspect Ratio correction switch?

[Michael Duff]

sometimes ram previews don’t run at full speed and therefor the audio gets out of sync. If you hit ctrl+2 you will get the info box which will give you status while your RAM previewing. If it’s not running at realtime it will show you the framerate in red.

Maybe do a normal render to test – maybe the audio is out of sync on your MPEG-2 ?

[Michael Duff]

hmmmm – what composition settings are you using? what is the source? graphics/DV/3D?

There is a Pixel Aspect Ratio Corrector for the composition window so that your canvas doesn’t look squished, this will reduce the quality. But shouldn’t effect the output monitor.

oh, also make sure your layers are set to best quality by clicking the little check box next to layer name that has a diagonal line in it. A staircase line is draft quality while the smooth line represents best quality.

[Michael Duff]

there are shortcuts do what you are asking…. is that what you mean?

for cropping the length of a layer just set the timeline where you want to crop, select all the layers you want to crop, then hit alt+] or alt+[

for setting the work area use b and n – so a regular combination of shortcuts is to select a layer that is the length of your render and hit “i, b, o, n”

[Michael Duff]

well I don’t really know the techie side of magic bullet so maybe someone will want to correct me… but, I’m lead to believe,

in AE each missing field is interpolated by looking at the one above and below and just averaging out what should be in the middle. Magic bullet basically does the same thing but it has a smarter algorithm for calculating the missing pixels. I also believe that it does temporal sampling as well as spacial sampling. So it will look at the fields before and after to get a more accurate interpolation.

[Michael Duff]

some layer effects don’t translate across into AE. Try rastering the layer in PS.

in PS you can create a new empty layer, link it to your problem layer, then do merge layers (ctrl-E). Remember when layers are rasterised you lose the ability to change the effect. So maybe duplicate the layer first.

[Michael Duff]

you are correct that it would still be interlaced when it goes to air . . but de-interlacing still creates a more “film” sort of look.

Interlaced footage from your camera has a different field (or half frame) 50 times a second (for PAL anyways). This 50 fields a second gives a very “video” look.

When you de-interlace in the most primitive of ways you are basically removing every second field or half frame. Then duplicate the one that is left so that you get a full frame. You’ve now got 25 frames every second, but you’ve lost vertical resolution. So when this goes to air it is still getting broadcast with fields but every two fields are exactly the same.

So instead of capturing a moment 50 times a second you’re now seeing it 25 times a second.

Instead of just duplicating each field there are options to re-create that missing field. AE does a pretty good job on it’s own, but plug-ins like Magic Bullet really are the best option.

Does that make more sense?

[Michael Duff]

it’s super handy in the main timeline…. along with

ctrl+[
ctrl+]

and

ctrl+shift+[
ctrl+shift+]

[Michael Duff]

not at the workstation at the moment….. but does

alt+[
or
alt+]

do it?