[Michael Duff]

pre-compose the layer that has shatter on it (ctrl+shift+c). Then apply a time stretch/time remap to that layer.

you must pre-compose the shatter for the time stretch to work. You will find that many effects like this must be pre-composed.

[Michael Duff]

right-click on the camera layer and go to transform, then auto-orient, then set it to off.

although a better and more customisable way is to parent the camera to a null, or even pickwhip each controller (like x position, y position etc) to it’s own null. If you want to do it this way, then do a search in the after effects archives for a post that John Dickinson wrote about his “fox classics” spot. It explains the process and I think there is a project file you can download.

[Michael Duff]

create a solid. Apply effect “Generate -> Ramp” – then you can animate the start and end positions.

OR

you could create a solid(ctrl-y), draw a mask(q), feather the mask(f), then animate the mask shape(m)

[Michael Duff]

it say that it should looked stretched on your computer monitor because they are not square pixels. It is probably best to work with them in this stretched state using AE’s built in pixel aspect ratio correction.

it is not a good idea to just scale it to look correct in AE, because then it is not going to look correct back on a tv.

do a search in the creative cow archives for “square pixels” and similar seaches and you should find heaps of info on the subject.

[Michael Duff]

“How is what I suggested any more effort than using Squeeze to convert to AVI?”

Because our PC only has squeeze installed, nothing else. It is connected to our edit suites via X-SAN. It’s purpose was meant to be purely an encoder, so that the suites are not held up. To do what you suggest (if I understand correctly) would mean printing back out to SP tape in our case, putting a blackmagic card into the PC, installing VD, capturing, and then encoding.

[Michael Duff]

i will look into ProCoder……. unfortunately just spent money on Squeeze so may not have it in budget…… argh, stupid me

[Michael Duff]

are you rendering with fields? and are they in the correct order? Find out what field order your NLE requires and try rendering like that.

i just did a quick test, just made a line of text using the basic text effect, two keyframes, didn’t adjust the speed, just left it at 155.16px/sec, then rendered out upper field first (cause we use blackmagic hardware) – and it plays smooth in FCP

[Michael Duff]

wow what a lot of effort for something I thought would be reasonably straight forward….oh well.

anyways…… do you know why they would have made Squeeze not able to output .AVI and .WAVs? Seems silly to revert back to cleaner 5 just to convert some audio files.

[Michael Duff]

maybe the live update button. It’s on the timeline above all the layers. It looks like two squares – next to the master switches for motion blur/frame blending

[Michael Duff]

i’m pretty sure there will be some posts on this in the archives…..

maybe try displacement maps – and use weird patterns for the map (maybe fractals) – and animate the displacement amounts real quick. At the same time maybe have a compound blur that uses the same map. and at the same time also animate the hue/saturation and levels.