Jon Bagge
Forum Replies Created
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Never ever render straight to H.264 (or any other compressed format for that matter) directly from AE.
Render to an uncompressed format, animation codec, or ideally a tiff/png sequence. Then use Adobe media encoder, appple compressor, sorenson or another program to encode to H.264 using multipass.
Ae can only use a single pass when encoding, so does a very bad job of making interframe compression formats.
Also depending on your particular computer setup (which we know nothing about) encoding h.264 at the same time as a render can slow you down.
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Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects -
It’s a bit more than that. Freezing the frame, changing the colour and then zooming in I’m sure you can work out yourself.
But in the first video after the freeze, the person ‘slides’ over the background in a 3D kind of way. You can see how it’s done pretty easilly in that video since they haven’t done it very well.
You cut out the person from the background using masks, and possibly other elements too. Then you position them behind one another in 3D space and resize them so they more than cover the ‘hole’ left behind in the background. Then you can move the camera in.If you look carefully at the first video you can see a rather rough mask drawn around the people, and when the camera moves you can even briefly see bits of the hole left behind in the background.
You can also take the image into photoshop and draw in the hole to allow for more movement.
Here is the excellent Andrew Kramer with a tutorial about this technique: https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/virtual_3d_photos/.
In your case you use this technique on the freeze frame after you’ve stopped the video.Hope this helps,
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Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects -
Alternatively add an expression control slider, and pick-whip from the wiggle amount to the slider. Then you can keyframe the amount of wiggle.
This will also allow you to fade up/down the wiggle amount rather than turning it on and off if that’s any use to you. Use hold keyframes to avoid this.
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Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects -
How many drives you have will depend a lot on what you’re trying to achieve as well as how much money you’re willing to spend.
Your basic setup is 2 drives; one for system/applications and one for projects/data. Having applications on a seperate drive is unlikely to give much benefit IMHO. But a render drive and/or scratch drive will give a slight benefit.
If you’re working with video media you might look into having some media drives striped together. With HD this is pretty much a requirement. A simple setup for video could be 1 drive for system/apps, and 2 drives striped together for media/projects. Or a 4 drive system: 1 for system/apps, 1 for projects/non-video graphics, and 2 striped for video.
If you want to spend the cash you can have the system drive as an SSD, but keep the media drives as normal drives.
Before you go venturing off with lots of drives though, give a moment to consider your backup options. You really should have some good recovery options if you get unlucky with a drive.
There are lots of options here, you could have another drive in your machine for backups, or perhaps an external drive.
But you should backup your system/apps partition in a way that makes it possible to recover a bootable system quickly. And your project drive needs good backup too.
Video media that you can reconform from tape or other sources are less important if you have the originals available.Personally I have a 3 internal drive setup: 1 for system/apps, 1 for projects/data and one for render/scratch/temporary stuff. Then I have an external drive that completely backs up the system and the project drives on a regular basis.
I then also use external drives for video.Hope this is of help to you.
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Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects -
Personally I think alot of it is just slow motion shots of the people shot with high speed cameras. Or maybe even slowmowed with interpolation.
Then composited together, and perhaps with a bit of puppet tool as well.
The people in the office meeting may have been shot individually on greenscreen.
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Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects -
Have you got auto-save enabled? It makes a folder in the same place as your project, you may find a good version there.
If you haven’t got it turned on, do it now!
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Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects -
What Dave was referring to is that the RAM preview uses a codec. You can change this by going to Edit->Templates->Output Module.
You can change the default RAM preview codec. However I tried doing that to something like OpenEXR sequence (which is supposed to be 32-bit) and the same problem occurs. So I’m not quite sure what else you can do.
You could try and ask on the Adobe forums, some of the staff might know more.
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Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects -
I’m pretty sure it’s not possible to view in anything else than 8-bit. If you have very special hardware and an expensive monitor you can do 10-bit, but I think that’s the limit.
16/32 bit refers to how after effects handle everything internally. At the end of rendering/previewing it turns it all into 8-bit before it goes to your monitor.
Therefore any colour in 32-bit above value 1.0 will be white on your screen no matter how high the value is. But of course you can use the higher values to achieve certain effects, and even use level/curves to bring it down if you wish.
This also applies to a linear workspace. You can achieve more subtle blending effects that way, but at the end of rendering I think AE will convert it into a gamma that you can view on your monitor. I could be wrong about how that works in preview though, my machine really isn’t fast enough to do much 32bit work yet.
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Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects -
The only real way to have lots of lines on the screen and get people to read it is to have a voiceover that reads the lines as they come up.
There is probably a reason why this is the way everyone on TV does it when they have to either make a long quote or read some legal stuff.
Other than that, as the others have said, keep it short. And assume that most people won’t read everything anyway.
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Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects -
The composition itself doesn’t actually have to be particularly big. It can be whatever size you want to render out at.
Build up the different elements as subcomps with vector art from, say, Illustrator. Then you can focus on the small animations without having to work in what will be a very layer-heavy main comp.
In the big comp just scale the elements down so they fit, then move the camera in and out. You can use continuous rasterization to keep the quality sharp.
Apart from that it’s just simple transformations. scaling, position, rotation and camera moves. There is just lots and lots and lots of them so it will take some time to make.
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Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects