[Filip Vandueren]

Do they have any way of importing a text-file ?
Is their own file format text-based ?
When you copy keyframes in their app, can you paste in a texteditor and see understandable values ?

if any of these three apply, it could be possible to convert from copied keyframes out of AE.

[Filip Vandueren]

Well, unless you render to an uncompressed format, you’re bound to have some generation loss, possibly a slight colourshift.

However, What’s probably happening is that the DV footage’s been imported as Lower fieldsinterlaced, but is rendered out without fields. You’re ending up with half the vertical resolution;

If your footage is non-interlaced, interpret it as such, if it is, also render out as upper field interlaced.

[Filip Vandueren]

Perhaps you’re not viewing the DV quicktime in high quality (in Quicktime player), or a de-interlaced version of it (interpreted as lower field first in AE) ?

[Filip Vandueren]

It was the Color Stabilizer effect.
It was introduced in 5.5 if I’m correct, the effect is pretty straightforward, though the curret manual doesn’t offer any nice pictures, perhaps the 5.5 manual did.

[Filip Vandueren]

I created a script a while ago that will highlight the next word responding to markers,
You can highlight the words using any text-property that can be animated: color, size, opacity, blur whatever.

read the post here, there are a few examples in flash and the project file for downloading.

karaoke after effects

[Filip Vandueren]

Orient to path in this context means: the camera moves upwards, so it looks upwards, and it doesn’t see the cards because they’re in front of the camera, not above it.
Use no auto-orient or use a point of interest positioned inbetween the two cards if you want the cam to automatically tilt a bit while rising.

[Filip Vandueren]

You can just precompose your final comp, collapse geometries, and do a stretch of 125% on that layer.

[Filip Vandueren]

You can just precompose your final comp, collapse geometries, and do a stretch of 125% on that layer.

[Filip Vandueren]

True,

but it seems like it takes longer to render an animation codec in than doing a basic FCP color key on Blackmagic footage.
Or is that a misconception ?

[Filip Vandueren]

Hey Aharon,

the script cannot display whatever is the text of the marker, because like Dan said: reading the text of a marker is broken in the last few versions of After effects.

The script uses a different method that’s not broken: you can say marker(2) or you can say marker(“2”) to select a marker: the first one selects the 2nd marker, the second one selects the marker who’s text is “2”

So if you check all possible names a marker could have, and see if you ‘hit’ an existing marker, you can then compare the time of that marker to the playback time to determine if the found marker is the ‘current’ marker.

In my example it creates possible names by adding a number from 1-110 after the word “scene “: those are the only markers the script will find. You can empty the ‘prefix’ string if it’s just numbers.

Another possible method would be to compare markernames against a list of possible values like
[“marker 1″,”marker 2″,”the third marker”,”intro”,”outro”,”music cue”] etc. which is not very helpful either.
Any way: you have to know or calculate all possible values of the marker’s text for this to be succefull.

I hope this helps.

Let me know if you need a script utilizing the second aproach, though mind that I’m on a CET timetable 😉
If you know someone who’s more versed in scripts rather than expressions, I still think that it would be a piece of cake to write a script that converts markernames to textsource keyframes, because I think the functionality is not broken in the scripting side of after effects.

Oh, and thanks for your podcasts… They’re fun.