Matthew Daday
Forum Replies Created
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Hi,
If you work in a 4:3 composition and play it back on a widescreen monitor/tv it will either look stretched out horizontally or it will have black bars on the sides depending on the settings of the monitor. The best thing to do is set up a composition at 864X486 SQUARE pixels and do all of your designing. Then drop it into a 720X486 NON Square (0.9) and render to whatever codec you normally use. This is in effect making your animation “anamorphic widescreen”. This means it will look squished to your eye, but when it hits a 16:9 monitor it will look accurate.
Hope this helps you out
Matt -
I use Sythetic Aperture’s Test Gear. The plugin is reasonably priced, and works very well.
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What does the credits page look like? Is it white text on black or is there some kind of gradient to the background? I have seen subtle gradients band up that way. Not sure why it does that, something to do with the color saturation it seems.
Matt -
Just a thought… how big is the type? Sometimes with small font and rendering with a field the type can get lost. I would try and render out the credits with the animation codec, which is lossless. You could even try rendering the movie out without a field order. The other alternative would be to render to the codec of your capture board. To work in FCP uncompressed you must have some kind of board installed that I bet has it’s own codec to render to.
Matt -
Trapcode lux will allow you to render “visable” light from AE’s point and spotlights in a comp. Check out their website http://www.trapcode.com for some visual examples. To get the lights to be “smoky” you could try and animate some fractal noise, and play with the transfer modes to get a cool effect. Trapcode also makes another fantastic plugin called Particular which has many canned and easily customizable particle effects, many of them some pretty realistic smoke. They have demos for all of their software so you can try them before you buy them. Take a look.
Matt -
It does come with AE… and currently only supports RAM previewing, not actual rendering. At least to my knowledge.
Matt -
It does come with AE… and currently only supports RAM previewing, not actual rendering. At least to my knowledge.
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Make your comp size 864X486. This is a square pixel environment for widescreen. Work as you normally would. What you see here is what it will look like when you see it on the 16X9 plasma. When it comes time to render your work, in the output module choose to render with a stretch, and “squish” it to 720X486 (This is a preset size in the dropdown menu). Some people like to put the 864X486 comp into a new comp that is 720X486 and non-uniform scale it to fit. That works too, then just render it.
Matt -
Seeing as you are working in square pixels anyways, you are going to need to squish your graphics in one way or another before going to a non-square NLE. So I would finish your comp at 640X480 square, and the drop that comp into a 720X480 non-square comp and it should fit perfectly but look a little squished. It will look fine in the editing system however. When I work in square pixels, I work at 720X540 and squish it down to a non square 720X486.
Good luck
Matt -
Yes it can be done in After Effects. Under the window menu in AE you will find the tracker controls palette. Choose stabilize or track in this palette. This will open your layer in the footage window. This is where you set your track. You can do a few different types of tracks, search the forums for tracking, or consult the manual to decide what type of tracking you might want to do for your project.
Matt