[Martin Banks]

ok, so maybe my terminology isn’t up to scratch…..another explanation:

The original clips shot against blue screen.

Imported into AE and blue screen removed.

Rendered out of AE with the alpha channel (transparent background(?)) so that parts of the animation that are in 3D can move around the dancers.

I rendered them out so that whilst building the animation around the clips I would not have to wait for all the effects and keylight plugin to RAM preview as well.

So once they are into AE with the transparent background I animated all my bits and bobs, the 3D parts moving around them.

I did add a black solid to the lowest layer of the comp (behind all the dancer clips and animated layers) once the majority of the animation was done.

I have looked in the preferences menu and I only see an Open GL option for previewing, even though this has been off the whole time my previews still hang. I’m guessing the render option to turn if off comes up somewhere in the make movie window, I’ll have a search in a bit.

Just about to load the project on the G4.

Thanks again Dave,
Martin

[Martin Banks]

Well it appears as though my Open GL has been turned off the whole time anyway, and the adaptive resolution turned on, so it looks like I’m going to have to find my G4.

Doh!

Martin

[Martin Banks]

I will give turning off the Open GL a try and see what happens from there.

As far as the keying job goes, that is all good. I know you are supposed to get terrible results from keying DV, any maybe the results are a lot poorer than what I would have had if I had shot on something else. However keylight, plus some other bits and bobs have worked wonders. There are only a few fine points in the video where you notice a slight edge to one of the dancers. They are on a black background and there is a fair amount of animation going on so the eye is not focused on the dancers the whole time. Well, I am happy with it anyway and I tend to have high standards.

Thanks for all your help Dave. I’ll let you know if turning off the Open GL works. If not it looks like I’m going to have to dig out my old G4 laptop with 6.5 in and try and sort the final bits in that!

Martin

[Martin Banks]

Sorry if that was worded incorrectly, what I did originally was:

Shoot dancers against a bluescreen on DV.
Capture in DV clips using Final Cut Pro
Import clips into AE and use Keylight to remove bluescreen with good results.
Export the clips out of AE using the animation codec at 100% with Alpha.

No other effects were applied.

These clips were then imported into AECS3 to start animation on but they kept freezing and I couldn’t figure it out. During my testing to try and figure out why they froze up I imported them in to AE6.5 an it worked fine, so I used AE6.5 to build the animation. No problems with that, looking great and working fine. Then at the start of this week AE6.5 refuses to open, it just crashes even before the loading screen comes up. Tried deleting prefs, no joy, tried uninstalling and reinstalling, no joy. Had a look at a lot of forums too but I seem to have too many problems with the project to be able to let me brain focus on one this at a time.

So I open up the project in CS3 to see if I can fix the freezing, and that is as far as I have got. Still a minute or so of animation to complete and then to export the final clips, IF I can get this freezing to stop.

From the above, would it be advisable for me to export the alphad clips using a different compressor or should it work with the Animation one, or do I need to go further back to the original clips to stop this happening?

Why does technology fail me right when I need it most, or when I thought this week would be easy, just finish the animation in 6.5 and then have the rest of the week to render. Alas it was not to be so.

Thanks for your suggestions, I feel like I am at a total dead end and I’m not supposed to finish this project!

[Martin Banks]

I used the animation codec at 100% the first time I exported the original clips. They were blue screen dancers. So the files I imported into AE where .mov clips using the animation codec with an alpha background. These are the clips that are freezing in After Effects.

Before you replied to my last thread I had been through and exported the original clips with no compression instead of using the animation codec. This seemed to have worked when I first imported one of the uncompressed clips, so I went back and did all of them, and have just imported them all into AE.

However now the videos are just black, with the occasional frozen screen. I really don’t understand how I can correct this. It is proving to be a huge pain, especially as the deadline for the job is on Saturday!

Thanks again for your help,
Martin

[Martin Banks]

Please excuse my lack of knowledge as well, but would you be able to suggest a codec that doesn’t use temporal compression? As I am unaware of what that is, and I need to convert my original clips.

I find that quite a shock that Adobe would lead you to believe that it supports HDV, Open GL and mp3s when it actually doesn’t, is that not false marketing and if not that then just lies?

Thanks for your help,
Martin Banks

[Martin Banks]

Was the most efficient work around?

I went back to 6.5 and used that for the project, and now it’s almost done it is refusing to open, it just crashes straight away. I have tried deleting the preferences, and also uninstalling it and reinstalling but still the same.

So I am back to using CS3, and I’m still having the same problem with the video freezing. So it looks like I’ll have to re-compress the original movie clips that I then imported into the comp?

[Martin Banks]

Thanks for your comments, looks like I’ll have to stick with the longer export times for the moment as I don’t have time to pre-render sections.

Sorry for the confusion too, but I meant Make Movie when I said export, I always use the make movie way, just got my lingo mixed up form using other video editing software!

Thanks again,
Martin

[Martin Banks]

I solved the problem by just moving the camera closer.

[Martin Banks]

Thanks you so much for this! It seems to have solved the problem! I will read up on it after the deadline on Sat!

Thanks again!
Martin