Kevin Camp
Forum Replies Created
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yep, dv and dv25 are the same… the number following the dv basicly identifies the the data rate… dv25 has a data rate of 25 megabits/sec, dv50 is 50mbps. the higher the data rate the more information is contained in the stream. in dv50 the extra information is extra color data, it has twice the amount of chroma and saturation. and, of couse, chroma and saturation are important for chroma keying, making dv50 a better choice, if you have it.
as far as settings for compressor for mpeg2, it should be pretty straight forward. if you are rendering as progressive, make sure that compressor is set to keep it progressive, that may only apply to 24p to avoid compressor from putting in a pulldown… but check for that.
one other thing, since the destination is 16:9, is your camera capable of shooting 16:9 sd? if so you would like to shoot that way, and mpeg2 supports 16:9 sd with the correct resolution and pixel aspect ratio, so on a widescreen tv it will fill the screen without having to do a zoom or stretch the picture.
for the record widescreen (16:9) sd is 720×480 with a pixel aspect ratio of 1.33.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
dv is not the first choice for keying, but you can do it. the most important thing for getting a good key is really the lighting, not the encoding… search the forum and the tutorials for some tips for keying dv, it has been discused a lot… if you can shoot dv50, it will make your keying better, but dv25 will work.
as far as the banding issue, it may be due the recompression of already highly compressed dv25 to mpeg2. adding a little noise over the footage may help. also, if you can, try rendering out of ae to a lossless or uncompressed codec or image sequence, then take that to a compression application to create the mpeg2. i almost always get better quality compression from a external compression utility like compressor (mac only, but there are many others)
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
the way nucleo and cs3 work is to create multiple render engines (similar to a network render farm, but for each processor in your machine), allowing each renderer to use 2gb of ram. so if you have 4 processors you can utilize 8gb of ram for rendering in ae.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
yeah, hd has set the effects computing world back a ways.. but we’re probably only about 2 years away from a 32-core machine sporting 256gb of ram 🙂
but if you can get your hdv to an uncompressed (or un-temporally-compressed) format, like lossless animation or an image sequence, your ae work will go faster. you’ll just eat up more disk space.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
rumage thru myspace… people are blowing things up on myspace every day.
also try searching for free explosion clip (maybe sample)… stock sites often feature a freebie of the week, you may get lucky and find an explosion.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
you could also download a demo of nucleo pro and cs3, and take them on a test drive to see which one would render fastest on some of your prevous projects.
for really large projects, if you have the disk space, using footage that is not temporally compressed (like the vast majority of realtime playback codecs, dv, mpeg, h264, etc) can speed things up considerably. if you can’t work with lossless or uncompressed formats, how about photo jpeg…
ae really labors with temporal (interframe) compression codecs.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
yep, i think i need some visuals for that one 🙂
… actually i came from a the land of cinema 4d xl.. all we had was parent-child hierarchies. so i just brought those to ae. you can achieve some pretty complicated relationship moves this way, but i’m glad dave pointed out a simple way, one that would work quite often.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
you’ll probably end up needing to keyframe some of the values for error threshold, block size and some of the smoothing properties in the troublesome areas. it’s hard to find a one-size-fits-all setting with pixel motion, and it’s largely a trail and error thing with lots of short ram prevews.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
dave and his easy way one step ways… makes me sick
🙂
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
enabling disk cache has usually helped me when i get that error. except when i use ae7 on a mac pro, particuarly with cc effects (although the error message is a little different, just a image buffer error). to fix that i usually have to restart ae7.
you could also try edit>purge>all…
what version, platform and effects are you using?
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW