[Erik Waluska]

First, try to pre-compose the black and white JPEGs sequence.

If that alone doesn’t work then apply Effect>Channel>Shift Channels and Effect>Channel>Remove Color Matting to your B&W JPEG pre-comp layer. In the Shift Channels effect set the “Take Alpha From” to “Luminance”. Leave the Remove Color Matting effect at its default settings. This will create an alpha channel from the black area of the image and remove the dark fringe around the soft edges of the images.

-E

[Erik Waluska]

Select your camera, set your composition view to “Top” (or any orthogonal view – top, bottom, right, left, etc.), hit “G” to activate the pen tool, and hover over a camera position keyframe. Your cursor will become an upside-down “V” icon. Click on a keyframe and drag out a bezier handle and manipulate your animation curve as needed:

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[Erik Waluska]

If they want a Google type of animation, then I would suggest that they purchase a license from Google to broadcast the Google Earth images. It’s a little expensive but if you’re doing several map animations per episode then it would be well worth it I would think. Google also has an application that will allow you to animate the Google Earth map the way you want and then export it as a movie file.

If you want a more sophisticated looking animation then check out Video Copilot’s tutorial called “Earth Zoom” (I think that’s the name), which uses Google Earth images but the animation is done in After Effects. You’d still have to license the images for broadcast but it may be cheaper. I’m not really sure exactly how they determine licensing fees.

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[Erik Waluska]

Robert,
Mpeg2 is does not support frame sizes other than standard-def. If you are using After Effects CS3 or higher with the production premium bundle (encore, premiere, etc.) then you will have Mpeg2 blu-ray output settings available in After Effects output module, which supports HD output settings. That is the setting you need to use for 720p output.

First, be sure your comp is set to 720p:

When you add your comp to the render queue select the Mpeg2 Blu-Ray output module preset:

Now open your output module settings and the format should be set to MPEG2 Blu-ray. Click on the “Format Options…” button to open up the blu-ray output settings:

Now set the Frame Dimensions to the 1280×720 preset and your done (except for rendering, of course):

I would leave all of the other blu-ray settings alone, including the quality slider because the default settings will give you the most compatible file possible and the quality is very good. I use the 1080p blu-ray setting all the time for our Leitch video server for broadcast and it works flawlessly.

Hope that helps.

-E

[Erik Waluska]

Hi Martin,
Invigorator will not import your materials or animation from Maya. It’s just not that sophisticated.

If you’re trying to bring an animated and textured 3D character into After Effects for compositing then you’ll have to render the character out of Maya as a movie. I believe that you can export your camera data from Maya and use it to control your After Effects camera so that your scenes match up and it will appear that the 3D character is in the After Effects scene in 3D, although it is actually a flat movie.

Check Maya’s help and search the web for information on how to do this. I searched “Maya to After Effects” in Google and came up with a bunch of links. Here’s an old tutorial link from Creative Cow:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/delafuente_rene/maya_cam_imp.php

-E

[Erik Waluska]

Hey Greg,
I make looping plasma DVDs all the time and I just make regular standard-def discs in Encore (I’m sure iDVD would probably work) and they work great and the image quality is very good if you use high-quality mpeg compression settings.

Sure, Blu-Ray would look a little better up close, but unless the razor sharp images in the plasma are the focus of your client’s presentation then I would try to steer them toward using regular DVDs.

If they still want to go with Blu-Ray then, since you don’t expect to have much call for this format in your work, maybe just see if you can pay someone to burn your project to disc and be done with it. I image any up-to-date production house should be able to do this for you. There are probably services on the internet for this as well. It would surely be cheaper and easier than buying all of the software/hardware yourself and having to learn how to use it.

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[Erik Waluska]

I was having a similar problem in CS3 but I believe that all I did to fix it was update to the latest version of 3D stroke.

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[Erik Waluska]

Zaxwerks makes a couple of 3D plug-ins for After Effects that are not too difficult to use (compared to a full 3D application).
https://zaxwerks.com/invigorator_pro/index.shtml

Cinema4D is a full-featured 3D application that has some integration ability with After Effects. I believe you can exchange camera data and some compositing data between the two applications. Very nice program but more expensive and more complex to learn:
https://www.maxon.net/index.php?id=18

You might also find an After Effects project that would suit your needs at RevoStock.com (click on the After Effects Projects tab):
https://www.revostock.com/

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[Erik Waluska]

Hey Paul,
I’m sure you’ve long since finished or abandoned this project but I saw this post today and it seems to answer your original question:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/962945

I am script-o-phobic so I never used the DemoPalette.jsx panel before but there are some very useful utilities in there, which are very easy to use, including a script that scales an entire comp including cameras, layers, keyframes, etc. Just go to File > Scripts > DemoPalette.jsx. Click on the “?” button for a brief explanation of the scripts.

I tried running the “Scale Comp” script on a simple comp with a camera just to see if it worked and it seems to work pretty well. The only catch is that it will only scale in the original aspect ratio of the comp. So if you’re scaling a standard 4:3 720×480 DV size comp up to 16:9 1920×1080 HD, then the script will only allow you to enter values that maintain the original aspect of 4:3. So if you enter 1920w and then enter 1080h it will automatically change the width back to 1620.

The way around this may be to just enter the width value and then after you’ve scaled the comp just go into your comp settings and change your comp height to 1080, which will crop the extra space on the top and bottom. Or you could let the script resize the comp to 1620×1080 and then expand the comp width to 1920 and fill in the extra area on the sides as needed. It just depends on your needs.

Also, don’t forget to change the pixel aspect ratio to “square” in the comp settings and for all of your layers as well. I’m sure there’s probably a script out there to automate that process as well.

-E

[Erik Waluska]

You should really check the After Effects Help first for something like this. Open Help and type in “import image sequence” and choose the first result, which should be “Import a single still image or a still-image sequence”. That should answer your question.

-E