[John Mitchell]

Well I went straight from CS3 to CS5 so that explains why I didn’t notice it. While AE updates the PARs automaticaly for PAL to 1.46 (from 1.42) it does not update my old square pixel comps or solids to 1050 x 576 from 1024 x 576.

It is a nuisance as if you multiply 16×9 you get 1024 x 576 – so I’m guessing the PAL spec is not exactly 16×9 but more like 16.40265×9…. now I’m thinking it would be a good idea to quietly do away with those that wrote the original spec!

[John Mitchell]

I just created a 3D layer in AE applied a mask and rotated it and the mask rotated in 3D and moved properly in Z space.

Is that the workflow you used? Or did you create your masks another way?

[John Mitchell]

can’t read a lot of your post as it is in French but I’m guessing your image is not getting stretched out properly, but where? If I could only speak French I’d probably know. 1440 x 1080 HDV is horizontay compressed (not square pixel) so you have to adjust this in two places in AE.

First I’d suggest you interpret your footage correctly as 1.33 PAR in the interpret footage dialiogue box. The it sounds like you are settign your comp up the same way – I wouldn’t. Work with square pixels comps once you’re in AE, it is much simpler. So work with tha footage in a 1920×1080 comp and provided you’ve interpreted t source correctly it will look right…

[John Mitchell]

Hi Daniel

Have confess I didn’t look at the whole thing that closely the first time. It looks to me like he’s built all the black solids and framed images in 3D space using the camera before he started and then mapped out the move between targets using SureTarget.

So the actual position and orientation fo each of those targets is actually dictated by the way the black solids track through 3D space.

It’s neat and i don’t iamgine there are many shortcuts – you just have to create a bunch of black solids and startlinking them at 90 degrees in various directions in 3D space and place your targets along the same path….

[John Mitchell]

Well you could author in Encore and output in Flash but this would not work with a DVD player and neither would a USB stick. What is the reasoning behind not using DVD-Video?

[John Mitchell]

You need a software DVD player or an MPEG2 decoder that windows can use. The former is preferred. WinDVD, PowerDVD, Nero and many more come free in OEM versions with a lot of drives and most PC manufacturers include one on their systems..

[John Mitchell]

Hi Kate – how many slides do you have?

From memory Encore is limited to 99 per show (which is actually part of the DVD spec).

Remember if you add effects between slides, Encore has to render those things out, and I’ve found this to be buggy in the past. Make sure your render presets are set to the right format as well.

To try and get around your problem you can try a number of things – delete all the files in the various caches that Encore has – this will force Encore to re-import all it’s media and recreate the various jpegs and mpegs it creates for still frames.

Limit each show to about 45 slides especially if you are using Encore’s built in transitions.

Make sure you use the check project command to check for errors.

You can try rebuilding your project from scratch (yikes – but I’m here to tell you this has worked for me before as a last resort).
If worst comes to worst it is possible, with a little planning to put together lightning fast slideshows in AE by preplanning you moves, using Photoshop to prepare your stills properly (fit image, automate), creating some preset zooms and transitions, that you can copy and paste between layers and then using the sequence layer command to set them out along a timeline. You would be swapping “cheesy” for “classy” that way 🙂

Best of luck and don’t panic!

[John Mitchell]

It isn’t a plug in it is a set of presets called Sure Target that allows you to move between the 3D targets in the fashion shown there. Andrew has a bunch of free tutorials on the site and the Sure Target presets are free as well. Much of the other stuff on You Tube vid is lifted straight from the Sure Target tutorials, but the actual wipe itself is probably the simplest part – I think it is just nested in the target layers themselves.

[John Mitchell]

use the text layer as a track matte, unless i’m misunderstanding your use

[John Mitchell]

Go and check out videocopilot.net – Andrew Kramer has a free plug in and tutorials there that will show exactly how the You Tuber did it and more 🙂