[Levon H]

hahah.. i missed that… im used to using the stroke effect in the layer effects. thanks mate 🙂

[Levon H]

I have used the animation codec in the past, and it works great, excusing the file size. with the HDV codec , you will have compresion and it will be a mpeg2- GOP format, which i think does make things slower in after effects.

my band http://www.myspace.com/counterfeittraitor

[Levon H]

here in australia… it deppends on the method of transfer to the stations. ive gone through 2 companies who will transfer it to the TV stations, dubsat, and adstream. adstream require 20second clapper, 10 second countdown(inc 2 secs of black) the comercial, then 5 seconds of black afterwards.
havent used dubsat in a while, but if i remember corectly they required 10 seconds of black, 10 second clapper, countdown, comercial then 10 seconds of black. or something like that.

so best check with the people who will be transfering it for you. tey will probably have guidelines they can email you.

the same goes with audio.. both places wanted the audio at different levels, dubsat were -3db and adstream at -7.

also if your ad fades from black, you have to have a 15x15px or larger white square in the top right corner in the frame before the first frame of the comercial. and same if it fades out on black.

,Levon

my band http://www.myspace.com/counterfeittraitor

[Levon H]

my guess would be tracking markers, motion tracked, and then the claws would have been done in 3d (probably maya)

Colin Strause who runs Hydraulx often posts over at CGtalk, but i cant remember what his name is overthere. maybe have a look round there.

,Levon

my band http://www.myspace.com/counterfeittraitor

[Levon H]

if your going to do it frame by frame, check out the colour replacement tool in Photoshop CS1 and CS2. ive used it on hair before, but like andrew said, black is black.. and there isnt alot of luma range like you would get in blonde hair.

my band http://www.myspace.com/counterfeittraitor

[Levon H]

you will need images at least the size of your format, PAL is 720×576 and one of the HD standards is 1920×1080. and if you want to zoom in even higher then that.

[Levon H]

over TGA, PNG suports lossless compression as well as RGBA. its what i use for rendering 3d sequences to load into after effects.

my band http://www.myspace.com/counterfeittraitor

[Levon H]

Live type can have some horrific render times, last year i had a 3 minute long simple scrolling credits that someone else was doing in live type, said it was going to take well over 20 hours… then i used the normal FCP text crawl and it was only like 40 mins that was in HDV though

my band http://www.myspace.com/counterfeittraitor

[Levon H]

i use QT files on a PC from a mac in after effects no problem, just make sure both computers have current versions of QT7. but i guess it deppends what are the programs you run on the PCs.

my band http://www.myspace.com/counterfeittraitor

[Levon H]

when i render out of AE7 into FCP 5, i use the losless with alpha preset, which is realy just the quicktime animation codec with millions of colours+ selected.

my band http://www.myspace.com/counterfeittraitor