[John]

sorry for the delayed reply…

Yes.. you can render out shadows in C4D with an alpha channel that when composited in FCP will affect the background. That is, the shadow area will darken the background plate and be somewhat transparent whereas your other solid objects will be opaque. You will need to add your own lights to the scene and set their shadow cast settings. Then make sure you turn on alpha channel when you render out.

Hope that helps. John

[John]

C4D has a built-in camera that it calls the ‘Editor Camera’. By default this is the acive camera. If you’ve created your own camera, you need to make it active if you want to see your scene from that point of view. To do this, select your camera from the ‘Cameras:Scene Cameras:’ menu of the current view port. Unless you changed it, your camera will be named just ‘camera’. To switch back to the Editor Camera, just select that option from under the same ‘Cameras’ menu.

The C4D renderer uses the current camera to decide what view to render. So after you make your custom camera active, the renderer should give you what you want.

Hope that helps. John

[John]

Hmm.. I just tried it here just to make sure and it worked. I used the same settings as in my screen snaps except that the ‘Alpha Channel’ checkbox was checked (on the Save page). Don’t check ‘Straight’ or ‘Separate’ alpha. I then imported the C4D render file into FCP5 and put it in a new video track above my background video. It immediately appeared correct — that is, the black areas from C4D were transparent. I did not have to set a composite type for this new video layer. In other words, I left the composite type as ‘normal’ for that track in FCP.

Try this: in your FCP timeline, right click on your C4D clip (it should be in a video track above your background video). Choose ‘Item Properties:Format…’. In the info window that appears check to make sure that the clip’s ‘Alpha’ setting is ‘Straight’. If not, right click on the setting and change it to ‘Straight’. Your canvas window should immediately update. If this works, you may also need to change the same setting for your clip in the Project bin — just in case you place the same clip into another area of your project. In other words, a clip placed in the timeline can have different settings than the master one that appears in the Project bin.

John

[John]

I am not a complete expert on this, but I’ve been doing quite a bit of C4D graphics in FCP lately with good results. The main settings you need are in the first three panels of the Render Settings dialog, the rest you can probably leave at default values. Here are links to some screen snaps of the settings that I am using for full-frame renders that I am integrating in a 720×480 DV NTSC timeline:

https://www.alabstudios.com/C4D_render_general.png
https://www.alabstudios.com/C4D_render_output.png
https://www.alabstudios.com/C4D_render_save.png

You wll note that I am using a pixel aspect ratio of 1.185:1 in the ‘Output’ tab. This is because my video is anamorphic 16×9. If you are outputting to 4:3 you would use 0.889:1. If your footage is HD, then the res would go up to 1920×1080 (or 1280×720) and the pixel aspect ratio would be simply 1:1.

In the Save tab, just leave the Format as QT movie and don’t set any custon options. By default C4D will use the Animation codec. Be sure to turn the ‘Alpha Channel’ on if you are going to composite your final render in FCP over some other video. I did not need this which is why that option is off in the screen snap.

When you are done, import your C4D render into FCP, make sure you set it as ‘Anamorphic’ if it is a 16×9 clip, and then drag it into your timeline. You will have to render to see the final version in NTSC.

Hope that helps. John

[John]

So is there no way to create an object with a pre-defined motion and then in a timeline set up multiple instances of that object at different places in time and space? Obviously the original keyframes would have to recalculate relative to the new starting position (in both space and time).

This seems like it would be very necessary for a complex scene that had many different objects designed (and animated) by different people. Whoever assembles the scene would want to very quickly change the starting point (both space and time) on each object but not change the actual animation/motion of those objects.

[John]

To answer your question.. you are correct. Just because you select 1920×1080 pixels for the ‘resolution’ does not necessarily mean that your render will have a 16×9 aspect ratio. The ‘pixel’ ratio value(s) that appear in the Render Settings dialog determine the overall aspect ratio. The default is 1:1 which gives you square pixels in the final render.

So.. If you choose a resolution of 1920×1080 and leave the pixel aspect ratio as 1:1, then you will get a 16×9 output. This is because 1920 div by 1080 is the same as 16 div by 9 (or 1.778). Thus, your settings have been working just fine because HD is natively 16×9 and happens to use square pixels.

As a comparison.. if you were working with DV footage that is natively 720×480 pixels, you would need to enter a pixel aspect ratio of 1.185:1 (rather than 1:1) to get a final render that is 16×9. Why? The DV video standard uses non-square pixels for display. The data is stored with a square pixel aspect ratio of 3:2 (720 div by 480) but is displayed with either a 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio. So.. to get a 4:3 image, DV pixels must be squeezed horizontally and to get a 16:9 image they must be stretched horizontally.

To determine the correct pixel aspect ratio for 4×3 DV footage, you divide the desired aspect ratio of 1.333:1 (that’s 4 div by 3) by the native (square) pixel aspect ratio of 1.5:1 (that’s 720 div by 480, or 3:2). This gives you 0.889:1.

Likewise, to determine the correct pixel aspect ratio for 16×9 DV footage, you divide the desired aspect ratio of 1.778:1 (that’s 16 div by 9) by the native (square) pixel aspect ratio of 1.5:1 (that’s 720 div by 480, or 3:2). This gives you 1.185:1.

BTW.. I think it’s best to set the ‘Film Format’ popup in the Render Settings dialog to ‘Automatic’ which basically turns this feature off. All C4D needs to know is the final resolution and the pixel aspect ratio. As far as I can tell, the ‘Film Format’ option is just a data entry convenience that forces the resolution you enter just above to be of a specific aspect ratio. But that is confusing because the ratio of width to height of the image is not necessarily the ratio that it will be displayed at. It is for square pixel formats (like HD) but not for non-square pixel formats (like DV).

Hope that helps. John

[John]

Or.. you can also just increase the ‘offset’ parameter to ‘2’ in the Cloner Object. You may need to adjust the position of the cloner to get it back in place, but all your objects will now move based on an offset of the first object (which isn’t visible anymore).

[John]

[Barry Green] “if you re-capture it into uncompressed 10-bit… what you have on your hard drive already is as good as it’s ever going to get, so you can skip the whole recapture process and just re-render what you’ve got.”

Noah and Barry… this has been very helpful. Thanks for clearing things up for me. I do have one last question though.. (maybe 2)

Does either of these two workflows have an advantage over the other:

1) capture DV25 material over Firewire; place footage into a DVCPro50 4:2:2 timeline (or 10-bit uncompressed); render.

or

2) capture DV25 material through component to a AJA/Blackmagic card directly as DVCPro50 4:2:2 (or 10bit uncompressed).

Presumably there is some reason people pay extra for decks with SDI/component out and AJA/Blackmagic cards. If it isn’t to capture at a higher res than was recorded to tape what is it? And again is there absolutely no difference in quality between the two methods?

Also.. in method 1) above, am I correct in assuming that to convert from DV25 to something higher res (most likely DVCPro50) that I would simply throw the material in a timeline and render? Or is it more practical to convert the footage using the Export command? Can Compressor do this as well in a batch mode?

Thanks much. John

[John]

[Barry Green] “The misperception would be in thinking that you’d gain anything by doing it that way. “

I completely understand that once you record a DV signal to tape, you have already lost information in the 4:1:1 sampling and the compression. And.. I realize that recapturing the footage to 4:2:2 uncompressed can not possibly restore the lost info. But.. am I not going to get much better color correction and graphics compositing (i.e. titles) if I am working in a 4:2:2 uncompressed timeline?

Or are you simply saying that the recapture is unnecessary because I could just throw the original DV footage into a 4:2:2 uncompressed timeline and render it out?

Also.. what about with DVCPro HD material recorded to tape? If I don’t have boundless HD space, isn’t it a normal thing to capture your tapes in a low-res format (like DV), edit as ‘offline’, and then recapture the same tapes at the full-res DVCProHD 4:2:2 (or even uncompressed) to do color correction?

John Christensen
cdesign@airmail.net

[John]

[Dave LaRonde] “Hmmm….. What on earth would an FCP offline capture preset be for DV? YouTube-quality video?”

No I am talking about a DVX100. I guess I don’t understand the confusion. I just want to edit in 4:1:1 DV codec to save HD space then recapture the final material in 4:2:2 uncompressed. Isn’t that a pretty standard ‘offline/online’ workflow for uncompressed SD? Or do I have a misperception there?

And so my question has to do with what are people doing to be able to recapture 24pA footage in this workflow? Or do people just avoid it all together and simply capture and edit in uncompressed 4:2:2 from the start?

John Christensen
cdesign@airmail.net