[Lars Fuchs]

[Tony Silva] “you could add a trackmatte alpha to the the layers rising up, give it a little noise where it hits the ground plane to simulate the effect.”

that’s an excellent idea! Thanks. I’m going to try that!

[Lars Fuchs]

Thanks for telling me about the depth of field setting! It doesnt do what I was thinking about, but it DOES make the effect look a lot cooler.

Particular and FreeForm both look awesome. I’m glad you told me about them, but I cant afford 6 Grants (each!) for this project. I’ll probably check out the trial versions; maybe I can find someone who has them to render it out for me…

[Lars Fuchs]

Just watched the example clip you posted. Very nice indeed!

[Lars Fuchs]

[Todd Morgan] “I stopped using movie file formats in AE and will always convert these sources to tif uncompressed sequences when dealing with any effect work.”

What are you finding the best workflow for this process? Do you export a still-image sequence from the NLE directly or do you convert them in after effects?

Do you find the benefit is just the improved picture quality, or do you find that the time saved while working is worth the hit upfront to convert your source clips?

Thanks,
LF

[Lars Fuchs]

I’m pretty sure that ⌘-[ ⌘-] (cmd-left and right brackets) are the timeline zoom keys. I’m not at an avid now, so I cant be 100% sure.

[Lars Fuchs]

I have a powermate as well. I do use it occassionally in FCP. Mostly I use a Nostromo N52 speedpad, which also has a scroll-wheel. I have set that scroll-wheel to zoom in and out (‘cmd +’ and ‘cmd -‘). As a result, I can’t use it to scroll in the browser, etc. So for that I use the powermate.

You have to install the PowerMate preference pane, which you can download from their support page.

Once that’s done, you can assign keystrokes to the powermate’s actions: wheel-left, wheel-right, click; also wheel-left-while-pushed-down, wheel-right-while-pushed-down, and long click.

You could for example assign the arrow keys to the left and right wheel, giving you a jog-wheel function.

[Lars Fuchs]

November 9, 2009 issue of VARIETY:

Crix Scream over “LoRez Lov”,first indie dramedy shot entirely on iPhone. Studio exex from majors battle to ink tyro helmer for multi-pic deal. “LowRez” scribbler pitches horror chopsocky script, attracting boffo bids. Apple sues over use of ‘jailbroken’ iPhones.

[Lars Fuchs]

Well, one way is to insert exactly one frame of silence at the very beginning of the track; that will shift everything down one. Note that you can insert silence simply by disabling the source-side track selectors. Alternately you could use the red segment mode and select everything in the track and press ‘>’ to move everything down one frame. If you like this method, you can lock all the other tracks to make it easier to select everything in the track you want to move. There are other ways, for example using trim mode.

It gets trickier if you only want to move certain sections. To make it easier to see what you’re doing, you might want to set the sections you want to move to a different color in the timeline using the local color option. Even better might be to move all the audio that needs to be shifted into a new track using the red segment mode, and then sliding just that track down one frame (using the aforementioned methods).

[Lars Fuchs]

You should also check out Pond5. Very reasonable prices, which are set by the artist, not Pond5. It works like a marketplace, where you can sell footage you’ve shot as well as buy footage online.

[Lars Fuchs]

As far as I know, Avid will always stop at a timecode break. What ‘Capture across timecode breaks’ does is tell Avid to automatically continue capturing the footage after the break as a new clip, as opposed to stopping digitizing completely. The idea is that you can start an unattended digitize of a whole tape, go away and come back and its all done, 1 clip per unbroken stretch of timecode. If the option is unselected, you’ll come back and only there will only be one clip digitized.

I think the only way to achieve what you want – perhaps someone else can correct me – is to turn OFF the TC button in the track selector panel at the top of the digitize window. The digitized footage will not have the tc off tape; instead it will have tc that Avid automatically added, usually time of day. But I’m pretty sure it will ignore any tc breaks and load the whole tape. I’m not sure about control-track breaks; they’ll probably still abort a digitize.

The tc issue may not be a problem for you, since it could be problematic for a clip to have discontinuous timecode anyway.