[Gary Hazen]

Holding down the mouse and hitting escape is the same as hitting enter on the keypad.
Yes I know, a 3 stroke solution isn’t exactly a power move.

[Gary Hazen]

“What’s the standard codec for digital distribution?”
I think it would help if you defined “digital distribution”.
Are you delivering a file that will be played back on the web?
Are you delivering a file that will be downloaded and ingested into a system for additional editing or used in a playout server?

For spot delivery to broadcast outlets I think Telestream and DG systems use I-frame MPEG-2 compression to send files over IP. I don’t know the specifics of the data rate, etc.

Again I’m not really sure what you mean by “digital distribution”.
And 720 x 405 is not a broadcast size. If you have a 720 x 486 FHA (full height anamorphic) video you can scale it to 720 x 405 for web use. I suppose you could bring the 720 x 405 file into AE and output a letterboxed 4:3 file (720 x 486).

[Gary Hazen]

Here’s some a tutorial from GenArts site. It’s dated but it might point you in the right direction.
https://www.genarts.com/sapphire-ae-tutorial.html

[Gary Hazen]

Check out Euphonix control surfaces – Artist series.
https://www.euphonix.com/artist/index.php

I don’t know how well it works, but it sure looks good.

[Gary Hazen]

Jeremy is correct, the line from the movie refers to Cleveland.

Make her look a little more attractive.
How far can you pull back?

-How do you feel about Cleveland?
-Knock it off.

[Gary Hazen]

Point sizes are relative to the font that’s used. For example: 14 point Rockwell isn’t as tall as 14 point Trajan. The size of the font on screen is a subjective matter. The only rule of thumb that comes to mind is stay clear of small fonts with thin serifs – the thin lines can get chewed up by the time it hits air. I’ve never had an issue with the text being to small. Oftentimes I want to make the text smaller because it looks better, but the client jumps in and says, “could you make the phone number bigger”. “How’s this”, I reply after scaling it up 15%. Then they say, “make it even bigger”. Oh boy, here we go again.

One other thing you could try it to burn the spot to DVD and play it back on a standard TV. All of the cable and satellite companies compress everything to MPEG for delivery. So if you burn your spot to DVD and the text looks a bit crunchy on playback you might want to choose a different font or bump up the size a tad bit.

Disclaimers (for political ads, etc.) have a minimum size. For example: 20 scan lines (as measured on a waveform). This height varies fro state to state.

[Gary Hazen]

Flip4mac is offered in 4 different versions based on the users needs.
I think the studio version ($50) will allow WMV output from AE.

https://www.flip4mac.com/store_wmv.htm

[Gary Hazen]

“There’s a reason that not everything that gets produced “makes the reel.” – T2

As they say… Some for reel. Some for meal.

I’d wrap this puppy up as quick as possible and move on. If you do the math and figure out that you should have charged $10K instead of $1K, then call it a $9000 business lesson and be thankful for the lessons learned.

– GH

[Gary Hazen]

It works. At least it works for us. We recently upgraded to Deko 3000’s and revamped our show design which put the new Deko’s through quite a workout. We imported dozens of these files into the Deko without issue. A lot of these files were over 2 gigs.

FWIW, here’s our render settings:
QT Animation
RGB + Alpha
1920 x 1080
field rendered (upper field first)
29.97
audio (sorry I don’t remember the audio settings)

I’m no expert on Deko but here are a few things to consider. Make sure that the Deko is configured for HD. My understanding is that the 3000 can be configured HD or SD. But it’s not a hybrid, it can’t do both at the same time. Our engineer set up the config so I can’t help you there. The other strange thing I noticed about the way Deko behaves is that it places the converted MXF files in the same folder as the QT source files. If your source files are on CD or DVD I can see this potentially crashing the system. Our work flow entailed moving the files to the D drive on Deko before importing. Anyway, a little food for thought regarding the Deko. With regards to the Thunder I don’t know, ours is an older SD model.

I’m hoping that a future Deko upgrade includes support for Avid’s DNxHD codec. QT Animation is a workhorse but it’s a heavy file.

Good luck and chime back in if you still need some help.

– GH