Jon Bagge
Forum Replies Created
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Both Apple Color and Color Finesse have more than plenty of tools to make your colour grading. A bigger issue I think is workflow and monitoring.
Without monitoring on an external video monitor grading is almost useless in my opinion. This is probably more likely on a FC studio setup than an AE setup, but you’ll have to check.
In terms of grading a whole feature you need to be able to play the timeline and compare shots up and down the sequence. That’s quite frankly not particularly easy in AE/Color Finesse. AE is much more useful for grading individual shots as part of graphics or smaller sequences.
On those grounds I’d lean more towards Apple Color. Though Color does have some really annoying workflow issues on it’s own, but you can always work around those.
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Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects -
Any conversion method you use is likely to give ‘blending’ of one sort or another between shots.
Is this an AE Project? Depending on how complex it is it may be possible to re-render using a different framerate, especially if your elements are stills or generated and not footage with an inherent framerate.
I’d expect running it through an Alchemist or other high-end converter would give the best results, but it would depend on what budget you have available.
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Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects -
1)Is there any difference in stability between running AE on a PC to a Mac?
In my experience it’s the same. So go with whatever you prefer. Although PC’s give you some more configuration options, and you can get much faster PC’s if you’re prepared to pay for it.
3) If we go the PC route, we need to run an avid on the same machine, this means we can’t run Win 7. Is Vista 64 any good for AE? Or should I look at other OSs?
Avid MC 5.0 now supports Windows 7. (released in June) Initial support is for Win 7 Professional 64.
4) Will Vista 64 allow multi core processing? Currently on the G5 I leave this off as there is a huge delay at the start and end of processing, I’d heard Intel chips don’t do this.
It should do. And new CS5 is meant to be faster at starting up multicore.
5) Will Vista 64 allow use of more than 3GB of Ram (which is what I’m currently stuck with)
Yes. With Vista64/Win 7 64 your RAM limit is now going to be how much your motherboard is capable of supporting. (though I believe Win 7 Home versions might have a limit?)
And go for as much RAM as you think you can afford. 12GB isn’t unreasonable to ask for. Or 24GB..
Intel has now released 6 core chips. With a dual 5600 series Xeon machine you’re looking at 24 threads with hyperthreading…————–
Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects -
Draw the exact shapes in Illustrator. There you can more easilly vary the thickness of parts of the lines, and generally make it look nice.
Bring your illustrator file into AE. Enable continuous rasterization.
Also copy the paths over seperately. You can do this by having both programmes running at the same time and selecting the paths in Illustrator, then pasting them onto a solid in AE.
Put the stroke effect on the solid with the path. Make it black/white. Make the thickness of the stroke wide enough to more than cover the actual Illustrator drawing.
Put the illustrator drawing on the layer below, and enable track matte.
Hope this helps
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Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects -
Jon, is the purpose of VBR to lower the bitrate below the CBR bitrate whenever it can for space concerns? So on a DVD where there are no space concerns, go with CBR?
Yes
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Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects -
A thing to bear in mind is whether you should/need to keep an HD master of the sequence for archive/future use/internet. If so you should make a 1920×1080 comp in AE and export an HD master, then use Compressor to make the DVD. That leaves options in the future for recompression to different formats without going back into After Effects.
As for DVD compression, if your sequence is shorter than 60mins you can compress using single pass constant bit rate which is much faster to compress and should also be slightly better quality.
I usually go with 8.0-8.5 Mbps if the DVD is to be glass mastered, or about 7.5 if it’s for DVD-R.————–
Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects -
AE needs to keep the full size of each layer in memory, even if you’re only rendering a small portion of it. You don’t say anything about what computer you have or how much memory, so it’s a bit hard to tell if that’s the issue.
You can reduce the layer size by using 2 or 3 much smaller layers at different scales. So for example you could do one resize to 3000×2000, and one crop to 3000×2000. Scale the cropped layer down so it fits exactly over the scaled layer, then parent them together.
This excellent tutorial https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/earth_zoom/ from Video Copilot shows you the technique.
Alternatively you could just reduce rendering resolution for previews to 1/4 or 1/9, then just stomach the long wait for the final render.
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Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects -
We’re now moving away from AE, but still:
Personally I almost never use rubberband/keyframe audio. I edit in both Avid and FCP, and I usually use add-edit with an audio mix on the cut. So in your case:
1. Set the level for the music as it should be without VO and put it in your timeline.
2. Make an add-edit in the music at the beginning and end of all your VOs. (if you select the audiotrack you can probably fastforward to next cut to find the next start/end of VO)
3. Set a decent level for the music on the first clip under VO.
4. Select all the other music clips under VO.
5. Copy-paste the volume from the first clip.
6. Apply a 12-frame (or something) mix to all the edits in the music track. (you can do this in one go I think, but can’t quite remember how in FCP)Done. That’s audio mixing by the numbers. Should be very quick. Though I recommend you listen through it afterwards…. fast isn’t always best…
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Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects -
A note about making things look ‘bad’. I don’t know if this particular example was deliberately shot bad or just badly shot, but in general:
If you want it to look ‘bad’, shoot it well and make it look bad in post. That way you can control the ‘badness’ much better. Sometimes really bad is just too bad to look convincingly bad.
And whatever you do, never ever shoot bad audio no matter what you want it to end up sounding like.
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Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects -
I’d strongly advise against shifting a large clip from PPro to AE with the intention of splitting it up.
AE is not a program you want to have long unwieldy clips in. And what happens after you’ve done your keying, gone back to PPro and realise you have to do some edits/fix something? Exporting the whole thing again might shift clips in AE out of sync. So you will be left moving single clips back and forth anyway. It could get very messy. You don’t want messy in a very large project.Just make sure you name everything consistently both in PPro and AE and export/import each clip seperately. That way you can make as many changes as you need without losing control.
In PPro put all clips that need a trip to AE on a seperate track and/or colour them so you can distinguish them easilly.
Don’t really use PPro myself, but you may be able to subclip all the clips and batch export them.The most important thing is to find a good way of naming/numbering clips to you keep control of everything.
Good Luck!
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Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects