[Joey Foreman]

Boy was I out in left field on this one, revealing a fundamental misunderstanding of the pulldown process. I thought that it worked with whole frames, rather than fields.
I thought that the resultant repetition of every fourth or fifth frame in the 29.97 timeline was what was meant by FCP adding pulldown “on the fly”, and had somehow convinced myself the the resultant motion was acceptable.
FCP can add pulldown on the fly over firewire to DV tape, but from, as Dave said, a 23.976 timeline, not a 29.97 one.
My apologies for the misinformation.
I wish I had invested in Chris and Trish Meyer’s Videosyncracies a few years ago.
Anyway, thanks for the clarification, Dave.

[Joey Foreman]

All you have to do is drop your 720p 23.976 clip into a standard NTSC DV sequence, but with Field Dominace set to None. This will scale it down and letterbox it.
FCP will add the pulldown during playback, and when you export the sequence using Current Settings.
The motion will be visually indistinguishable from 23.976 when played back.
The is similar to how 24 fps films are converted for standard tv.

[Joey Foreman]

Olly, I see your question was answered in the regular AE forum. Just so you know for future reference, it’s considered bad Cow form to post the same question in both forums. Besides, most of us offer help in both forums anyway, so you don’t have to worry about your post being seen.

Cheers.

[Joey Foreman]

Difference Keying doesn’t really work with video. Clean CG, yes.
Video has too much noise, film has too much grain.
The results will be dodgy at best, horrible at worst.

Mocha isn’t meant for that either.

You’ll have to rotoscope, and from the way you describe your shot, you’ll be lucky to have any hair left after weeks of painstaking, yet probably still unconvincing work.

That’s why the green/bluescreen process was invented.

[Joey Foreman]

You didn’t specify which version of AE you have, but if you have 9, I strongly suggest taking a couple of hours to learn Mocha AE.
If you don’t have 9, download the demo, learn it, and try it with your shot.

Mocha tracks planes of patterns, rather than points, and the results, when used properly, are usually rather phenomenal.

What Mocha isn’t going to be able to help you with, though, is the parallax shift that would occur with 3d objects from a free-floating camera move such as yours that is basically a combination track-in and rotation without a fixed nodal point.

Mocha would have no trouble with this scene if you were trying to place a flat object on the ground, or the wall of the building. A 3d object is another kettle of fish. But i think it’s worth trying anyway to see if you can get away it.

If it doesn’t sell, then yea, you’ll need a 3d tracker like Syntheyes or Boujou. The problem there, though, is you didn’t set up any tracking markers for one of those apps to work with, so the program will struggle to find enough points that remain in the frame long enough to extrapolate an accurate track.

I don’t know if anyone has developed a 3d planar, as opposed to point, tracker, but that would save this shot.

BTW, I guess you’re planning to rotoscope the talent as he approaches the object? Not impossible, but set aside a day or two for it.

[Joey Foreman]

Depends on what you want.
Flash now has Inverse Kinematics https://www.adobe.com/products/flash/features/?view=topnew. AE’s puppet tool is similar, but the results are less predictable, and has a more organic feel with the way it deforms.
But that’s irrelevant if you’re doing cel animation. Flash has onion skinning, AE doesn’t, so I think Flash would be the better choice for that.

[Joey Foreman]

I’ve only seen a use for this in combination with the Trim Paths shape effect.
Say you have a shape that is stroked, but not filled, and you want to animate the stroke being drawn on. You can do this with Trim Paths.
When you turn on Reverse Path Direction, the stroke is drawn on in the opposite direction, from the 1st vertex.
Trim Paths does work with fill, but it’s pretty strange looking on a complex shape. It would look pretty nice on, say, an animated pie chart, or a radar screen type thingy.

[Joey Foreman]

I use AE Extensively, but it’s generally not my first choice for color correction. Not that it doesn’t have great tools for that. Color Finesse is a fantastic plugin, with an expansive feature set; and if I worked exclusively in CS4 it would be my first choice.

But like you, I edit primarily, well, exclusively in FCP. Its 3 way color corrector is top notch. But beyond that, the FCS suite, I’m sure you know, is bundled with Color, the sole purpose of which is advanced color correction. It’s feature set is vast, and rivaled only by proprietary systems like Da Vinci. And it works in the way you described, allowing you to import your timeline intact.

So before investing in a product like Automatic Duck, why not investigate more deeply what you already have at your disposal.
You paid for it – might as well get your money’s worth:)

[Joey Foreman]

Lowering the display res will shrink the AE interface with it, giving you access to the edge handles. When you go back to full res, you can expand the interface back out

[Joey Foreman]

Temporarily change the resolution of your Macbook’s display so you can see the edge handle(s) of the panels, then shrink them down.