Joseph W. bourke
Forum Replies Created
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I second Mr. Duff’s recommendation. I had been a Combustion user for a few years when it became obvious that our parent company was going to standardize on After Effects. Granted, I was already a power user with Combustion, a compositing package, but within a couple of months of picking up “Motion Graphics with After Effects”, by Chris and Trish Meyer, I was up to speed, and able to do most of the projects that were thrown at me. Buy the book and never look back!
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV -
There’s a workaround for it that I use all the time (very frustrating bug, isn’t it?), and it consists of hitting the Home key to go to the beginning of the clip, then hitting the B key to set Beginning, then hitting the End key to go to the end of the clip and hitting N to set the eNd of the workspace. That seems to reset the RAM preview for me.
The error message only arose in past versions when you had your beginning and end marks one frame apart, hence the “need 2 or more frames” to create a RAM preview. It nails me all the time, and is particularly bothersome when I’m on a deadline. Good luck!
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV -
Jeffrey –
I generally output a still frame in the “Save Frame as” section of the Composition pull-down, or if I really want to get tricky (as in the slo-mo then speed-up style that’s used all over the place) I use “Enable Time Remapping” in the Layer pull-down. It takes a while to see what’s really going on with time remapping, but once you get the hang of it, you can do some really cool stuff.
Essentially, when you enable time remapping, you get a keyframe at the start and end of the clip. You then want to add additional keyframes in the Values section in the timeline where your clip is. Play around with it a bit and it will become apparent what does what. Reading the help file on Time Remapping will help a lot as well. You can do freeze frames, DT (dynamic tracking) effects, and all sorts of creative stuff. Good luck.
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV -
Here are some possibilities, and some info on how to. I have no experience with any of them, so check out their references:
https://www.9xmedia.com/Pages-products/2000%20-%20Xwall.html
https://www.networkmultimedia.org/NMM/current/Docs/videowall/
https://www.dotronix.com/videowalls.html
This should get you started.
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV -
I work in NTSC, and regularly render out animations for use on our aging Media Composer system (also NTSC). I ran into problems with field hash and jitter no matter what Quicktime flavor I used, until I finally went to the AVID site and downloaded the Meridien codec. It turns out that our editor works in 2:1 on the MC system, and the re-compression of my initial Quicktime compression was what caused the problems.
I posted a link to the codecs (search under “AVID codec” in the last three months) a while back. Install those babies on your system and then find out exactly what your Adrenaline editor needs (whether he works 1:1 or 2:1, etc.). When you render to the native codec, the import to the AVID will be incredibly fast as well, since no re-encoding is required. Good luck!
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV -
I work in NTSC, and regularly render out animations for use on our aging Media Composer system (also NTSC). I ran into problems with field hash and jitter no matter what Quicktime flavor I used, until I finally went to the AVID site and downloaded the Meridien codec. It turns out that our editor works in 2:1 on the MC system, and the re-compression of my initial Quicktime compression was what caused the problems.
I posted a link to the codecs (search under “AVID codec” in the last three months) a while back. Install those babies on your system and then find out exactly what your Adrenaline editor needs (whether he works 1:1 or 2:1, etc.). When you render to the native codec, the import to the AVID will be incredibly fast as well, since no re-encoding is required. Good luck!
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV -
Here’s one of the best resources for this video nuts and bolts stuff that you could find – DV Magazine. Here’s a link to an article on just what you’re asking about:
https://dv.com/news/news_item.jhtml?LookupId=/xml/feature/2003/waggoner0203
You WILL have to sign up and get a log-in, but it’s one of the best free information sources around.
Joe Bourke
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Dave –
You can’t make an .avi file with an alpha channel embedded. The workaround is to output the fill and the matte separately. We receive animations on tape all the time using this method. The fill clip has the part of the animation that will be seen; the matte clip has the alpha channel as luminance (white and black). It’s a simple matter to line the clips up in After Effects (or whatever you’re compositing with) and use the matte clip to cut out the areas that will be transparent. In AE, you put the matte clip on top of the fill clip, then select “luma matte” in the fill clip’s Track Matte pulldown, next to the Mode selector in the timeline box.
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV -
To save you some time and searching, here’s my post from the AE forum:
A week or so ago I sent a post about getting the alpha channel to work with an OMF file. Apparently no one has run across the issue, but there’s a much simpler solution, which I found on the AVID tech site. It’s the AVID Meridien codecs. I had been sending numbered targa files, Motion-JPEG-A, and every flavor under the sun to our AVID editor, and nothing worked; there was always field hash, or frame stutter, or something to make the file unusable. And since our editor edits in 2:1, a 1:1 file, which worked on import, would not mix on the timeline (older 9000 box).
I had tried many times to get my hands on the codec from AVID, but, even with a login, had been unable to download it. Well, my problem is solved, and, I hope, yours. Here’s the link to the AVID tech support website, with the Windows and Mac Meridien codecs:
https://www.avid.com/onlinesupport/supportcontent.asp?productID=10&contentID=3555&typeID=
I hope it helps someone. I am now able to render to the Meridien 2:1 codec, and our editor drops it right into the timeline, with no render, stutter, or any other problem, and, since it’s a Quicktime codec, I can send embedded alpha channels. Life is good!
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV -
Check over in the After Effects forum. I just reposted the link to the Meridien Codecs on the AVID site a week or so ago. A search on “Meridien”, or “AVID”, or “repost” should get you there.
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV