[John Mitchell]

Kevin – that’s brilliant!

Your script is better than one that automatically centres the text on layer because that will automatically centre it around any vertical point. The offset needs to be half the value of the line spacing value – I don’t know if you can reference that with an expression. I tried to search the web and it seems you can’t – but I’m an expression novice.

So I did it with blunt force – first I set my line spacing to 0, then I added the line spacing animator control to the text layer.

I then adjusted the expression to:

temp = thisComp.layer(“Text1”).text.animator(“Animator 1”).property.lineSpacing[1]
offset = [temp]/2;
txt = text.sourceText.split(‘\r’);
y = (txt.length-1)*offset;
value-[0,y]

Where it says “Text1” – that is the layer name of the text layer.

If you don’t want to rename your text layers then you can always use a Control slider on a separate layer. I created one called LineSpacing and pickwhipped the line spacing animator control to it.

You then have to adjust that expression unless you want to indent as well as line space to:

temp = thisComp.layer(“LineSpacing”).effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”);
[0, temp]

Then the expression for the text value position property is:

temp = thisComp.layer(“LineSpacing”).effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”)
offset = [temp]/2;
txt = text.sourceText.split(‘\r’);
y = (txt.length-1)*offset;
value-[0,y]

The only thing you lose with this is the AUTO setting in line attributes but I have found in the past that most fonts simply use the font size value for that.

temp = thisComp.layer("LineSpacing").effect("Slider Control")("Slider")
offset = [temp]/2;
txt = text.sourceText.split('\r');
y = (txt.length-1)*offset;
value-[0,y]

[John Mitchell]

Yeah – that won’t work. It’s an idea copied from the client’s website (where I guess they animated it with Flash or HTML) and the style has to match. I’ve never done it but I suppose I could create a new character in a new font but surely there is a way in AE to get around this problem.

I’m no scripting or expressions guru – I guess what I need to know is can I use valueAtTime to place objects along an animated path so their position updates as the path updates?

[John Mitchell]

That’s great and thanks for the information but what if I just want to interpret a clip as having a different colorspace to the project?

eg what if I have some clips shot in full swing but the project is 709? And premiere hasn’t compensated automatically. And the clip is not one of the aforementioned types.

I don’t want to apply a LUT as multicam tends to stutter and become unusable if you do that, I just want to do what I can do in AE and change the source’s colorspace.

[John Mitchell]

Neat video is what I call an “expensive” effect. It does a good job of reducing noise in video but as you’ve discovered it takes a long while to render. It’s analysing every pixel in every frame before it can process.

I would only use it on footage that actually requires it. If you expose correctly and light correctly then you shouldn’t need it. Moreover using it on good quality footage which actually have a negative impact reducing resolution.

You might actually email Neat video and ask them if there is any way of speeding things up – it may be your video card that needs a boost but it may just be that no matter what you do it takes a long time to process.

[John Mitchell]

Not Premiere expert but is it as simple as right click on the imported H4N clip (which is presumably flagged as stereo) and choosing modify audio channels and setting up two mono channels with the left assigned to 1 and the right assigned to 2? Note because Premiere is behind the times in audio you have to do this before editing (unlike Avid where audio channels can be split or combined in your timeline)

[John Mitchell]

Hmm – not sure why you thought that would work – you have no audio on your timeline and you just thought it would magically appear? Ideally you would have included dummy audio with your original clips and edited that into the sequence – then it would have worked.

Anyway the solution is – simply match frame the head frame of each clip, set your target audio tracks up, mark the clip in the timeline so you have an in and out edit and overwrite, then navigate to the head frame of the next clip and repeat the process if you map the appropriate keys to say F2-F6 should be pretty quick to do.

[John Mitchell]

So what do you do if the software stops working and then when repair it, it comes up with this message?

Only the hardware hasn’t changed and all that happened was the software stop launching and I don’t have the serial number on me..

I have dozens of pieces of software, many licensed in the same way and none of them delete their activation just because I re-install over the top of the original. If you are going to use software activation the program should remember the already entered serial number.

[John Mitchell]

[eric pautsch] “Thats not true at all. You can get “better compression” all you want with the finest and best encoders and it will still be SD in the end. Its like taking a pint of milk and putting it into a gallon bucket”

Eric while the spatial quality won’t be any better (absolutely correct) there are some cases where Blu-ray may give a superior result to DVD for SD footage. Two examples off the top of my head – anything over 3 hours long even on a DVD9 is going to look far superior if encoded at 15Mb/s H264 on a BD25 with PCM audio as opposed to DVD encoded at 6Mb/s MPEG2 and down.

Second example – if you did want to present uprezzed footage on BD you will get amuch better result upscaling the original less compressed footage (for example 1:1 Digital Betacam) than upscaling highly compressed MPEG2 video from a DVD using on the fly hardware scaling.

[John Mitchell]

Ok – sorry to re-hash an old thread but this may come in handy for a lot of people as it seems to be a common complaint 🙂

I ran into this problem today – I had a pre-comp which was playing audio correctly and then in the master comp the audio was muted. The layer audio was definitely turned on and no keyframes applied. WT…?
The clue was the audio would play if I solo’d the layer. So I started turning other layers off until I found the culprit!

Because I was using the same pre-comp in a number of different cuts in the main timeline it turns out the if ANY instance of that pre-comp has a time re-map effect on it and appears in the comp and that time re-map effect includes a freeze (mine did – I haven’t tested but i suspect any time-remap will have the same effect) then all the audio for any layer with that pre-comp gets muted. The solution is simple – turn of thaudio for the layer with the time re-map effect on it (after all it appears you can’t use time-remapped audio in AE anyway:)

I’m not sure if this is documented anywhere but i couldn’t see it in the help file – really audio should only be muted for the time remapped layer (so it is a bit of a bug) but there you go – problem solved!

[John Mitchell]

I realise this is a bit late but your delivery format depends on where it is going. DVD must be MPEG 2 DVD Compliant streams and audio in Dolby digital. Blu-ray and be H264 or high data rate MPEG2. For the web you have a bunch fo different choices although Flash seems to have the highest penetration amongst the different browsers. For the web got to the Quicktime trailers site and Vimeo andYou Tube and you can see a bunch of different files sizes and codecs in action and guague download and streaming times for your end users. Mobile phones, iPods and iPads all ahve their own solutions and most of the aboe are built into progams like Sorenson Squeeze, Compressor and Adobe Media Encoder.