[Marco Salsiccia]

What file formats are your sound clips? If you are using MP3’s, you’ll usually get audio ‘snapping’ on the rendered output.

—
Marco Salsiccia
Engineer of Insurrection
Digital Anarchy

[Marco Salsiccia]

Here you go:

https://www.trapcode.com/products_3dstroke.html

—
Marco Salsiccia
Engineer of Insurrection
Digital Anarchy

[Marco Salsiccia]

You could always make two separate tracks in your sequence, each with FCP’s Scrolling Text generator applied to it.

Set one of them to Right Justify, the other to Left justify, then go into their Motion tabs and offset them. Try having the right justified one offset by -300 pixels and the left justified one offset by 300.

Put the appropriate text into each text generator and you should be good to go.

—
Marco Salsiccia
Engineer of Insurrection
Digital Anarchy

[Marco Salsiccia]

Disregard the previous error. I had to reseat the card in the PCI slot. Is it just me or does the new Mac Pro card seating bar leave the top slot relatively loose after being screwed in?

—
Marco Salsiccia
Engineer of Insurrection
Digital Anarchy

[Marco Salsiccia]

There are really only two good ways to have 4:3 video exist in a 16:9 composition. One is to have it pillar-boxed, meaning leave black bars to the right and left sides of the footage; just import the clip into the composition and leave it be, really.

The other is to scale it all the way up to meet the left and right edges of the frame, filling the entire screen but cropping the top and bottom of the frame. Doing it this way through the host app can cause the image to soften since you are scaling the pixels without a scaling algorithm.

You won’t gain anything from stretching the image to fit the 16:9 aspect ratio, you’ll just end up getting a severely distorted image.

If you are going from NTSC D1 or DV to NTSC D1 or DV Widescreen, you can leave the clip as is in the composition, or scale it up by a factor of 133.33% to fill the frame and crop the top and bottom. The 133.33% also works for going from PAL to PAL widescreen.

—
Marco Salsiccia
Engineer of Insurrection
Digital Anarchy

[Marco Salsiccia]

You are probably best off using our Text Anarchy plug-ins for AE 6.0. Specifically the Type On plug-in:

https://digitalanarchy.com/text/text_typeon.html

—
Marco Salsiccia
Engineer of Insurrection
Digital Anarchy

[Marco Salsiccia]

You can run AE 7 on a MacBook Pro, but it’ll run a lot slower than if you were using it on a PowerPC Mac. Non-universal applications have to run through Rosetta, the PowerPC emulation layer of OS X, and that tends to be quite slow when compared to Intel native/Universal applications.

Try reinstalling AE 7. Sometimes it takes a long time for AE to boot up when running in Rosetta, especially for the first time.

—
Marco Salsiccia
Engineer of Insurrection
Digital Anarchy

[Marco Salsiccia]

Watch the Aspect Ratio when you create the 1440×1080 composition. It’s going to stretch your pixels to the non-square 1.33 ratio as you saw when you brought the slug into AE.

Just make a 1920×1080 sequence in FCP and set the Pixel Aspect Ratio to square instead of leaving it at the 1440x1080HD preset.

—
Marco Salsiccia
Engineer of Insurrection
Digital Anarchy

[Marco Salsiccia]

Exporting via a Quicktime Conversion using the Still Image format shouldn’t be squashing your final image, you should be getting exactly what your Sequence is set to. When you click on it in the Finder, do the dimensions say 1440×1080?

1440×1080 is initially squashed horizontally unless viewed at a Square Pixel resolution. Try setting your sequence Pixel Aspect Ratio to Square and then try exporting Still Images.

—
Marco Salsiccia
Engineer of Insurrection
Digital Anarchy

[Marco Salsiccia]

You can also RAM preview your footage and then hit the keypad asterisk key in order to generate a marker while it’s playing. This is very useful for tapping out markers based on a rhythm or beat.

You won’t see them made until you stop the RAM preview playback, but just play the footage, tap away at the asterisk key at the beats where you want things to be animated, and you’ll have automatically generated markers exactly where you want things to go.

—
Marco Salsiccia
Engineer of Insurrection
Digital Anarchy