[Justin Vaillancourt]

If your end goal is a DV/NTSC sequence in FCP then render DV/NTSC in After Effects. Rendering in AE then FCP again will only re-compress your movie. H264 is an end-user codec that should really only be used for final display. It does not edit well in FCP and does not re-compress well.

If your not limited to DV/NTSC then try and stay ProRes the whole way. I’ve also had a lot of success with the Photo JPEG codec.

[Justin Vaillancourt]

If your videos are already shot, then there’s not much you can do outside of rotoscoping (masking) out each individual frame. If reshooting is an option, if you lock the camera on a tripod, shoot a clean plate (without talent) and then another shot with your talent, you can pull a difference matte.

[Justin Vaillancourt]

You have to be a little more specific about exactly what you are doing and what’s happening. The immediate answer is all 3D layers in your comp need to be stacked together for them to interact in relation to each other. If you have a 2D layer between 3D layers, the top 3D layer will always ‘sit on top’ of lower 3D layers.

[Justin Vaillancourt]

I’ve also read the EX-1 takes a serious resolution hit during fast motion. Not artifacts, just a resolution drop.

[Justin Vaillancourt]

PNG allows for an alpha channel and correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it’s about 1/4 the size.

Takes forever to render though!

[Justin Vaillancourt]

You can use Trapcode Shine or some radial blurs for the lights in the BG, it all depends on the logo and what you want the lights to look like.

Just use Shatter for the breaking apart. If you need it to break apart at different times like the trailer, build your image in pieces in photoshop so you can choose which parts you want to shatter at which times.

Just a wiggle expression for camera shake.

[Justin Vaillancourt]

That’s what I thought too, but the boss wants what the boss gets.

I managed to fake it by designing a 3D Octagon Drum and using a particular layer inside the drum. I gave the ballots the appearance of tumbling by having them follow a light path similar to the drum shape. Looks pretty darn good, I’ll post when it’s finished.

Here’s my question (I’ve actually had for a few other projects), I’ve built the ballot drum with 2D layers in 3D space and mathematically matched all sides of the octagon up to the pixel. Even if I have motion blur on or off, I can still see seams between the pixels as the drum is turning. Is there any way to fix this without the obvious method of overlaping the layers?

Thanx Dave & Dave

[Justin Vaillancourt]

Thanks for all the insight. I’m now aware you can pretty much convert anything to ProRes through Firewire. This helps my decision a lot.

As for the EX, I’ve read it has some huge advantages and disadvantages over the HVX and H1. I think they all have different workflows that can function properly, your choice just depends on the style of shooting you are doing.

Thanks all
Justin

[Justin Vaillancourt]

Thank you for all your responses. After reading and doing some more tests, if you just take your DV footage from FCP into AE and render Seperate Fields OFF to DV compression, it produces a file that looks visually identical.

The best way to test this was going into Quicktime and toggling the ‘Use High Quality Setting When Available’ in the preferences. I believe you have to quit the program to get it to take a effect. By toggling this, the fields off footage was matching the original footage exactly, but by toggling the lower field first footage, you never saw the interlace lines from the original footage, it just always looked soft.

As far as compression, my 19 second clip was 66mb in DV and 536mb uncompressed. Seeing that I have to render to DV in FCP anyway (while creating an extra render file) and there was visually no difference in the files, it seems like a no brainer. I haven’t used FCP6 yet, so I haven’t been able to test the open source timeline.

Thanks for the responses!

Justin

[Justin Vaillancourt]

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but AE takes care of most pixel aspect issues automatically. And YES there will always be jaggy distortions when you have pixel aspect ratio turned on.

I think what you described your comp size as is 1080p? 1920×1080 square pixels is full 1080p resolution. If you take 1440×1.3333333 you get 1920. So the 1440×1080 (1.33)HDV footage is an anamorphic 1920×1080. If you don’t want to work with pixel aspect ratios, you can just use a 1920×1080 sq. pixel comp to design all your graphics. When you drop that comp into your footage comp, the aspect should be correct.