Kevin Camp
Forum Replies Created
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unfortuantely, no… not unless you (or the client) consider upgrading to cs3 a workaround… you could take screen shots of every comp timeline with keyframes visible and every effect control panel, and the various keyfame values… 🙁
you’d think it would be possible to have a conversion utility… some things may not translate, but even if 75% of it did it would be useful, it could just give you error log of effects that couldn’t be converted.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
if you use the expression for your credit roll in the post linked to by dave, i updated the expression a few months ago to allow for keyframing start and end positions and field friendly check box… you can download the preset here, its the one called flickerfree credit roll.
it does require version 7 and up, just because i haven’t got around to digging up an older version to create a version 5.5 preset (i know i still have it somewhere).
if you just want that expression, search the expression forum, i had been troubleshooting it there about 2 months ago… you’ll need to add the check box control and name it ‘field friendly’
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
here is a soccer ball texture creation tutorial for illustrator. it shows how to create a decent flat soccer ball texture and use fisheye lens (newer versions would use the spherize filter) to give the appearance of 3d. omit the offset step, you want top down.
you’ll need to make the bottom half based on the tutorial above, but making a white six sided shape the center and build out from there.
if you take those ‘3d’ soccer ball textures to a photoshop file that is 2x wider than tall and then use polar coordinates to ‘unwrap’ the texture from spherical to rectangular, that will give you the top half of the spherical texture. scale that vertically to half the size. then repeat the steps for to create the bottom, flipping it at the end and possibly making some line up adjustments.
you’ll probably need to clean up the seams/edges. for the verticval edges, use the offset filter to offset the image horizontally for touchup.
if this works (i’ve actually never tried it, but i have made many spherical textures for 3d apps in a similar way) you’ll end up with a texture that is 2x as wide as high, which should work perfect in cc sphere.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
in addition, you’ll want to make sure your broadcast monitor is calibrated. you can do a pretty good job visually using smpte-c bars and the blue only switch on the monitor… google ntsc calibration and you’ll find several instruction sets. you’d prefer to calibrate the bars that play thru the computer (via your capture card) versus from a vtr or other source, since you are trying to match what you see on the computer monitor to what you see thru your capture card on the broadcsat monitor. also, try to find good bars (not compressed jpegs from the web), nle software usually packages smpte-c bars with the software, tyr those.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
when you key you would like to de-interlace the footage (remove the field lines). ae usually does this on its own, when it knows the footage is interlaced, but sometimes you need to tell it the footage is interlaced. if you can see the interlace lines in ae’s preview window, select the footage in the project window and choos file>interpret footage>main. from the interpret footage settings, select separate fields and the propper field dominance (lower for dv) and hit ok.
now, the footage should not show the interlace lines. if you want to get the interlacing back at render time, from the render settings (click where it says ‘lossless’), choose render fields, setting it back the correct dominance.
a little chroma smoothing can often help, there is also a effect preset that can make it easy, called ‘remove dv blockiness.’ you can apply on the footage prior to the keying effects. in the effects palette entry field, just type ‘dv block’… it should show up.
if you can export to lossless or uncompressed, ae will work a little better than with dv footage, plus you’ll avoid any recompression of the footage prior to keying. if you can’t afford the disk space for lossless/ucompressed files, try pulling the dv straight from the capture scratch folder (fcp, but ppro should have a similar folder) to avoid any further compression.
rendering out of ae, i would render to lossless animation or uncompressed and let the nle convert it to dv… i think ae (or maybe it’s quicktime) does a lousy dv compression. if disk space is really tight and you don’t need to export an alpha channel (your keyed footage is already composited on a background in ae), photojpeg is a good option, it would be a selection from the render queue in the output module, click format options and select photojpg from the pulldown.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
also, in photosop, filters like dust and scratches, remove noise and surface blur may help. and if you have some areas that are realy giving you problems, create a comp with the image, duplicate the image and blur one of the layers until the bad parts look better, then use masks to reveal the unblured areas that weren’t a probelm on the other layer. you could do this in photoshop if you would rather, using duplicate layers and layer masks.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
what’s the resolution of the images?
if they are pretty high rez, you can scale them to the size you need them in photoshop first, then if needed add some blur. or, you can scale them in ae in separate comps, then work with those comps in your main comp adding some blur if needed (this should work unless you need to turn on the colapse transformation/continuous rasterization option).
if you are seeing field flicker from interlace interference (you would notice this on horizonatl lines/edges on a tv/broadcast monitor), adding a little blur vertically can help. also, a photoshop action called deflickerator from adobeevangelists.com will selectively blur areas of you image that cause interlace flicker, or judder. you would place the action in you photoshop actions folder, then load that via the photoshop actions palette, then apply it to an image.. note, for best results, the image should be the resolution that you will be using in ae.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
actually, if all your footage is keyed, you wouldn’t need to shoot widescreen, as long as the sides of the shot were keyed out. then the keyed video cound be taken to a widescreen comp for compositing, making that fill the 16:9 hd set…. i forgot you were keying…
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
23.976 is the frame rate for 24p video in ntsc. so that would be the frame rate to work in.
for the web, 24p (23.976) should be fine, and i don’t think you’ll encounter any issues encoding or streaming or anything. search the cow for you tube compression. i think i read they use flash encoding, and there are some ‘native’ you tube settings that you can use to avoid you tube recompressing you files.
for dvd, you should check the dvdsp forum for specifics, but the workflow would be to render 23.976, 720×480 non-interlaced, lossless animation codec. take to compressor to convert to mpeg2, make sure that compressor is set to leave framerate at 23.976 progressive. take that to dvdsp, make sure dvdsp is set to burn a progressive dvd.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
oh, and in response to the noise effect question, yes the noise effect in ae… i’ve often use a setting of about 3-5, mono chromatic noise, when i’ve started to see banding due to limitations of 8 bit/channel color blending… a little different then what you’re getting, but it might be a place to start.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW