[Kevin Camp]

i was giving my 2 cents as your were replying…

but in response to keying, one of the big problems you’ll encounter is when you choke your key. choking will tighten your key in all direction, not just horizontally, and will generally choke away your feilds on the edges of what you are keying and effect the smoothness of motion of that clip.

you will mostlikely have problems later, when you edit and print to video. when you go back to video, you will need to go back to 29.97… and your incorrectly interpretted or exported footage will give you even more grief, especially if you edit it with other 24p footage. at that point, much of what you’ve done probably won’t be usable, and you’ll be going back an recapturing your original greens.

since you have the tapes, it would try to talk to the guys who captured you footage, and see if you could work something out… if you told them there were problems with their conversion to 24p and asked that a straight capture of your footage in 29.97, single clip, that you’ll split and convert (or interpret in ae) to 24p, they may give you a break.

[Kevin Camp]

you said you shot the footage, right… i hope you still have the tapes. i think dave’s right, recapture. recapture each clip separately and export each separately.

you can have your nle remove the pulldown and often the duplicate frames associated with removing the pulldown. or you can just bring the clip into ae and have it remove the pulldown (ae usually guesses the correct pulldown, if the pulldown is consitent, ie. the interlaced 24p hadn’t been editted, as dave described). you can also determine the cadence by looking at the first 5 frames, and the order of interlaced and progressive frames, and set that in the pulldown setting of interpret footage in ae (ie swwws, etc).

i think that if ae is automaticly interpretting the file as 23.98 fps, then you’ll need to recapture from dv… you may be able to save portions of the clip if it had been editted, like dave said, 1 in 5 chance that the pulldown was correct, so 1 out of 5 edits may be ok.

the only thing that could save you is if the footage is really 29.97, and ae is interpretting the footage at 23.98 with an incorrect pulldown.

[Kevin Camp]

the foam effect may allow you to do whoat you are looking for… it will create bubbles and allow you to ‘form’ the flow based on a ‘flow map’ (just another solid or comp in the poject, usually grey scale, the white areas are the flow path).

[Kevin Camp]

if you blow up interlaced footage, your scan lines will be larger than an actual scan line. this usually produces unfortunate results. you can try a render without de-interlacing, but i don’t think you’ll be happy.

note: ae ram previews are not interlaced, so you’ll need to do a full render.

[Kevin Camp]

enlarging and key framing should work, however, if you want to blow your footage up, make sure to deinterlace any interlaced foortage.

better would be to get the footage prior to letterboxing so you don’t have to scale up the footage, assuming the original was scaled down to fit 4×3 screen.

[Kevin Camp]

the cc lens effect will create distortion similar to what you’d see with a fisheye lens, if you want to just distort existing footage or a comp.

i would think that creating a 3d cam with a wide angle (15mm or less) should create a fairly good fisheye like lens look if you have created a 3d scene in ae.

[Kevin Camp]

there is an old plugin called retrodots, i’m pretty sure its still free, i found it here:
https://www.philipp-spoeth.de/aftereffects/retrodots.php

i think you will need to use it to create a bw matte, and then use the matte as a track matte for you footage (or take your matte in to an nle and use it there as a transition).

[Kevin Camp]

if fcp can convert y the clip to rgb and then import a rgb file and convert it to yuv, then i would let all the conversions happen in fcp.

i work with avid editors mostly, and i usually ask them to export their footage using an option they have to convert it to rgb. then i effect it as normal and render our as normal, to rgb. and then when they import it the just check a box that says rgb color space, and avid then converts it.

the reason i recommend the nle do the work (if it can) is i honestly don’t know exactly what the expand luma level check box does. so if i try to scale my effect clip back to 601 using an adjustment layer with levels output settings set to blk: 16; wht: 235, i don’t know if that is the exact reverse of you ae made the adjustment to rgb. or, if i send them rgb and they tdo the conversion, i don’t know if it will be the same as what ae did.

but if the conversions are done in the same nle software, i think there is a better chance that the conversion will be the same.

does that make sense? it’s not to offload work or responsibility, it just to try as hard as possible to maintain consistency, or at least the best chances of consistency.

[Kevin Camp]

i assume you are looking to have an object or clip melt/drip on to or off the screen y the examples you’ve shown. i’ve seen a tutorial that where text “melted” on as a reveal. it wasn’t as paint like as the examples you showed, but it did look similar to what i saw on the electrocolor site.

here’s the link: https://www.ayatoweb.com/ae_tips_e/ae21_e.html

it uses just the standard ae pro effects (actually ae 5.5 ‘production bundle’). its rather old, but good.

[Kevin Camp]

like jimmybee said, if your time controls (panel) frame rate is set to the correct frame rate and skip is set to 1, you should see you ram preview play back in realtime (after it renders the preview, of course) even on the lowliest pc.

you are hitting zero on the numeric keypad to start the ram preview render, correct? if you are hitting the space bar the movie is being rendered to disk and playing from there, so that could cause a slow down if you’re working at a high respolution or high frame rate.