[Kevin Camp]

i remember reading somewhere when ae7 came out, that if you have premiere (it may actually require purchase of the production studio suite) you can capture with ae thru the dynamic link feature with premiere.

you could use another nle to capture, but i’m not sure what advantage that would have over decklink.

you can also capture stills from your decklink card directly into photoshop from file>import>decklink capture. again i’m not sure that will help you much.

i’ve been trying to remember a plugin that i read about that allowed ae to bring in video (i thought i might have read a review here) but i can’t seem to find it…. but it was rather expensive and seemd clumsy.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

once all the vector elements that your want to separate are ungrouped (make sure you can select individual vectors with the black selection tool pointer). now select all of the vectors and then choose ‘release to layers (sequence)’ from the layer menu options (the little triangle on the layers palette.

all of the ungrouped vectors should now be on separate layers, but within a ‘parent’ layer, as seen in the layers palette. you will need to select all the layers that are under the parent layer and pull them out of the parent, and delete the parent.

save it as an illustrator file and then import it into ae as a composition. this should keep all your illustrator layers as layers in the ae composition.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i think it may be a data rate issue. if you render to an uncompressed or ‘lightly’ compressed codec you will create large files (large as in file size). this requires the disk to be able to read a large amount of data per second (the data rate). when your file exceeds the data rate that can be read by the disk, then your computer/software will usually do one of two things… play the clip slower (looks slo-mo, not realtime) or play at a lower framerate (plays every 5th frame or so, and looks choppy).

most users will render to uncompressed or losslessly compressed codecs as an intermediate codec, then convert those to their working codec when they import into another piece of software, like premiere pro. so, if you were editing dv in premiere, you would convert the uncompressed file to dv at import, to give you the realtime playback. however, depending on your needs and system, you can just render straight to the codec that you are editing in, like dv, etc. you have to be careful about compressing and recompressing your media, but you can save a lot of disk space this way.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i’ve done this before… but it would help if i new what part wasn’t working. ungrouping the eps art, separating the vector elements to layers or importing the layered illustrator file as a comp in ae.

is your eps entirely vector, or is there raster image data too? if your eps conatains a raster image, you will need to separate the raster image from the vector image and import that separately.

but lets say you have a u.s. flag eps, and all the stars and stripes are vector art. if you can open the eps in illustrator and ungroup the vectors (so you can select individual vectors, like a star or a stripe) then you shouldn’t have any problem selecting all those vectors and separating all them into layers as i outlined before.

what version of illustrator are you working in?

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i don’t think you will be able to import an eps with the separated elements as separate layers in ae.

you can however take the eps into illustrator, ungroup the vector elements, release those to layers (an option from the layers palette, note: you will need to pull the separate layers out of the empty ‘parent’ layer) and then import the illustrator file into ae as a comp with layers in tact.

[Kevin Camp]

you might check your capture settings and make sure they jive with your footage.

but, assuming you have the footage captured correctly, it’s not that uncommon for ae to misinterpret footage. set the interpret footage setting to the correct frames rate (29.97) and proper field dominace (probably lower, but this can vary) and see how that looks.

also, in your situtation, you can try not using timewarp and compare the results… since your are slowing 50%, you can set your interpret footage settings to separate fields (test with preserve edges on), but set the framerate to half of the final framerate (14.985, i think). now put that into a 29.97 comp, and you should have slowed your footage by half. try enabling frame blending and you sould get good results.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

make sure you have the latest drivers for the card.

however, if your previews are faster w/o opengl, don’t use opengl, use adaptive resoultion. there are actually only a few opengl accelerated effects in ae7. although there are several opengl accelerated features like blending modes and motion blur, most users prefer to disable opengl (it kind of a flakiness vs beneift scenario).

also, unless you use opengl for you final renders too (enable it in the render settings) your final render will actually look a little different than your preview due to the difference between how opengl calculate te render and for ae’s render engine calculates things.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i’m assuming this is in regards to the producer who wanted to shoot 50i to get 25p…?

i realy think he/she needs to decide what they want in the end. if they want the ‘filmy’ look of 25p in the end, they really should shoot 25p from the begining. the footage will look better…. any thing you do inpost to create 25p from 50i will involve interpolation, and interpolated pixels are never a good as a shot pixel.

other things happen when you try to doo this, too… you r shutter angle (or shutter speed) will look tighter, twice as tight as normal. if you said that normal shutter angle is 180, the 50i-25p will look 90 (shooting interlaced essentially shoots 2x shutter speed as progressive), so you will have less motion blur to your shot footage with converted 50i than you would have with real 25p, and its hard to get that back, even with frame blending and interpolating plugins liek reelsmart motion blur.

so here’s all the processing that the footage may have to go thru to get 25p out of 50i… first, generate (or interpolate) half the vertical resolution for each frame. second, use frame blending to composite the interploated frames from the other set of fields on to your first frames from you first set of fields. lastly, you’ll probably be adding some motion blur for a natural looking shutter speed with reelsmart motion blur, which will be interpolating the movement of pixels to generate your final frames. nearly all your pixels have now been interpolated, and they jsut can’t be as clean as the original pixels.

but, if they want the smoothness of 50i, leave it 50i. you’ll need to separate fields for effecting, but render back to fields in the end. it will take 2x longer (as you found) due to ae needing to calculate 2x the frame rate to get the extra field data, but everything will be very smoooth and clean.

to shoot interlaced to get progressive is just silly.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

it may depend on how realistic you want it and how much detail your rope/thread needs…

you can make flat ‘spool’ image and wrap it with the cc cylinder effect. if you need caps on that cylinder, you will need to make those out of solids with circular masks that you will place in 3d space. your spool will be very smooth, you won’t have bump detail as it wraps around the cylinder.

you will then need a rope/thread looking image that will animate along as the cylinder turns. and find a way to seemlessly composite the rope/thread to the coil/spool as they both animate.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i’ll give this a try, levels may be easier to work with then curves…

when you apply the levels effect, you should see a histogram… it is a graphical representation of the pixel information of the current frame. information on the left end of the graph is the amount of ‘shadow’ or dark detail, the right end is the ‘highlight’ detail and the center is the ‘midtone’ detail.

you can grab the center (gray) marker (called the gamma) and slide it to effect the lightness or darkness of the image. if you wanted to clip out some of the highlight detail, you can pull the right most (white) marker to the left, if you wanted to clip some of the shadow detail, pull the left most (black) marker to the right.

for the most part (for what you’re doing) you will want to play with clipping some of the shadow and highlight values, using the gamma for fine tuning. you may still need to use masks and such, but this technique should get you close, pretty quickly…. once you’ve done it a few times.

multiply (and other blending modes) may change the colors too… if your colors are getting too saturated, try adding another duplicate of teh original footage to the top and set the blending mode to color or hue…

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW