[Joe Laude]

Or you might check your project settings to see what audio rate you have it set to. It should be the same as the clip you’re working with.

[Joe Laude]

Try the different Fast Previews settings in your comp window. It’s a pulldown menu that looks like a little lightning bolt, near the right side of all the icons. See which one works best for you. I find turning them off actually makes things preview faster on some comps.

[Joe Laude]

I’m speechless. Mocha has failed me on several shots where I was certain I’d be able to use it, but then it always goes and does something like this. For the hell of it, I gave Mocha a go with this shot, since the water is distant, not too choppy, and the horizon is effectively straight. It drifts maybe a pixel or two over the 200 frames, but it’s in the direction of the water’s movement, so it’s actually a plus because it’ll add a bit of realistic drift to the boat.

Thanks for all the ideas, gentlemen. I just tried this out after toying with Psunami for a while. I was getting some really good results with it after maybe an hour of tweaking and learning what the settings did, but I just decided to see if Mocha would work and I’m really still surprised that it did. Psunami is a really cool plug-in by the way. Might have to pick it up down the road when it’s needed for more than just a single shot.

Thanks again, everyone.

[Joe Laude]

Thanks for that tip, Bill. I didn’t know that existed either. Now I can totally see myself wasting a lot of time staring at this during renders. 🙂

[Joe Laude]

Just looking at the numbers, it sounds like you have 48kHz audio (DVD data rate) being played back at 44.1kHz (CD data rate). I’d load it into Quicktime, make sure it plays right in there, and then export it to a .aif file for use in After Effects.

[Joe Laude]

Preaching to the choir, Dave 😉 There are two compositors, myself and the VFX supe, and we were both hired after principle photography was completed. The other guy had been on set during most of the reshoots (not principle photography), but a few shots like this have fallen through the cracks and popped up at the last minute.

Thanks for all the tips, guys, I’ll see what I can pull off. I had heard of Psunami before, but here’s a good reason to give it a whirl.

[Joe Laude]

There are probably a number of ways to accomplish this shot, but just looking at the result, I would have shot the street part with a locked camera and built geometry to project the video onto in a 3D package like Lightwave or Maya. Then it’s a matter of rotoing the Conchords out to put that video behind them, and any camera movement you would add after the fact.

There’s always a half-dozen or more ways to pull off a shot, and another way (which would have a different look to it), would have been to actually project the video itself onto the wall with no post effects needed. Of course, you’d have to put the projected video together before shooting on the street, and then you’d have no way of changing it later. Doing it as a post effect gives you the ability to change something if you need to.

[Joe Laude]

Just out of curiosity, are you looking at your comp at Full resolution or Half? I noticed on a composition a few months back that when I had video that had a pulldown that I had removed, it would still show interlacing artifacts if I RAM previewed at anything lower than Full resolution, though that wouldn’t explain vertical interlacing lines.

If it is being caused by your 3D layers being coplanar, you might try offsetting the layers by something tiny like 0.01. The offset would be negligible, but they wouldn’t be coplanar anymore, and it might solve your problem.

[Joe Laude]

For some reason I was sure I had seen it somewhere outside of Creative Cow and I couldn’t find it with Google. That’s the tutorial I was talking about.

[Joe Laude]

You have to be in the Layer window to actually paint on the image, so what you have to do is bring up the layer you want to clone FROM in the layer window by double-clicking it in your comp. Then option+click (I think it’s alt+click on Windows) the area you want to clone. Then go to the layer you want to paint TO, again by double-clicking it, and then just paint away.

You can also change all of this after the fact, by painting the stroke you want, and then changing the settings in the Paint effect on that layer. You can change the source location and layer, even the thickness of the stroke, among other things, after you’ve already painted it.

Also remember that every stroke is saved separately in the Paint effect, so it can get a little unmanageable after a while without judicious use of your strokes.