Joey Foreman
Forum Replies Created
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Double check the Comp settings, and when you render again, leave the Render Settings at Best, and the Output Module to Lossless.
You don’t need to go into the Output Module in this instance, unless you need to render with audio or an alpha channel.This will give you a render that has the same specs as your composition, and will be encoded with the Animation Codec, which uses less compression than ProRes 422, which throws away some of your color depth.
Since you’re generating the content entirely in AE, your chroma subsampling is 4:4:4, so you’re losing a total of 4 bits going to 4:2:2.I’ve gotten nice results with ProRes HQ, which is 4:4:4, but go with Animation for now, until you get a “perfect” render.
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Well yea, that would make a helluva better cylinder, as far as cylinders go. But that’s a lot of dough to shell out ($995.00) to make a can.
Because no, there’s not really a way to “mess” with a 640 x 480 image to scale it up to full frame HD.
Not to mention the time investment needed to get up to speed in a 3d app, even C4D.
But if time’s no object he’d be just as well off learning Blender for free.
A happy compromise, I suggest, would be Zaxwerks 3d Invigorator for AE.Easy to use, and a fourth the price of C4D.
https://zaxwerks.com/invigorator_classic/index.shtml
Just a note, it’s generally considered bad forum form to advocate using non-commercial versions of software for commercial work by circumventing the license agreement. About a notch below advocating cracked software, so take care;)
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Rather than making a comp and dropping in the footage, have you tried dragging the footage to the Make Comp icon at the bottom of the Project Panel?
Also check to see that in the Preview Panel, the Frame Rate is set to Auto.
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Is that comp the same duration as the three comps combined?
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Did you Export or did you Render?
What settings did you use?
If you can’t remember, select the footage item in the Project Panel, and read the information at the top. Codec, Frame Rate, Duration, Field Order, it’s all there.
And here’s my first opportunity to use this, and he hope he doesn’t mind:
Dave’s Stock Answer #1:
If the footage you imported into AE is any kind of the following — footage in an HDV acquisition codec, MPEG1, MPEG2, mp4, m2t, H.261 or H.264 — you need to convert it to a different codec.
These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They have keyframes at regular intervals, containing complete frame information. However, the frames in between do NOT have complete information. Interframe codecs toss out duplicated information.
In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide variety of problems.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV (ABC) Cedar Rapids, IA -
Sometimes AE incorrectly interprets your footage as interlaced when it’s not. In the Footage panel, ctrl-click on your footage item and chose Interpret Footage > Main. In the section called Fields and Pulldown, where its says Separate Fields, see what this is set to. It might say Upper Field First or Lower Field First. If you know your footage is not interlaced, change it to off.
Before you do that, though, be sure in the comp window the resolution is set to Full, and that in the Timeline the layer is at normal, rather than draft quality.
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Here’s one way, and I’m sure there are others.
Open the layer window for a Solid, and choose the paint brush.
Pick a color, and a small, 3 or 4 pixel brush.
Set the Spacing to something like 200.
Click once to make a dot. Then decide where you want the dotted line to end and Shift-click there.
Now when you twirl down the transform properties for that paint stroke, you can rotate the beam, making it “point” where you want it to.
In the video it looked like maybe certain areas were motion tracked, maybe not.
But I’m sure someone has a clever expression, or knows some other way, to somehow tie the rotation of the stroke to the position of a track point.
Hope that helps. -
At the top right of the Comp window is a little right-facing arrow in a circle. That accesses some options, the first one being View Options. Look at those and make sure everything is checked, particularly Handles.
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Oh, and by the way…
When you’re working with masks, you can often make your life a whole lot easier by temporarily setting the mask to None while you make adjustments to a layer.
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Select your layer in the timeline. Can you see the anchor point – the circle with the X in it?
Get the Pan Behind tool. Click on the center of the anchor point and drag it anywhere you want.You’ve moved the anchor point.
If you click with the pan tool anywhere outside your masked area other than directly on the anchor point, everything will deselect.
If you click anywhere inside the masked area other than directly on the anchor point, and drag, you will move the layer and its anchor point together without moving the mask.
And if you click on an anchor point that’s inside the masked area, again you will just move the anchor point.
If you option click and drag the anchor point, you change its location on the layer but not its position in the comp, so the layer moves in the comp but the anchor point remains where it was.
If you option click and drag anywhere inside the masked area other than directly on the anchor point, you move the layer along with its anchor point, which does the same thing as not holding down option.
You can also move the anchor point of a mask, which is a completely different thing from the mask point of a layer. Double clicking a mask vertex brings up the mask’s bounding box. You can move its anchor point with either the selection tool or the pan behind tool.