Matthew Keane
Forum Replies Created
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Just a couple of thoughts: Have you tried using a solid layer with the Ramp effect instead of the shape gradient? And have you tried the Compound Blur effect, to see if that shows the same problems as the Lens Blur effect?
I know that may not be the solution you’re looking for, but it might help identify the source of the problem.
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Hi,
I’m using the CS4 version of AME, so not sure whether this applies in CS5. I chose the generic ‘MPEG2’ under the format pulldown and then, in the settings window was able to choose 60fps (for a 25fps source, so it doesn’t seem picky about what source footage it will use). Profile is set to ‘Main’ and Level to ‘High’ (with other Level settings, there are fewer frame rates available to choose from).
I haven’t actually tried an encoding test at 60fps though, much less tried to play back a 60fps file!
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Hi,
If you don’t have, or want to buy, a plug-in for this, I wonder if you could achieve this using just standard AE stuff. I haven’t tried any of this – it’s just of the top of my head, but…
If you precomp your video clip and animate the slit with a thin mask moving from top to bottom, you now have an animation with, in each frame, a different slice of your video revealed.
Now, two ideas: First, if you drop your precomp into another comp, the echo effect should allow you to reveal previous/next frames of your slitscan anim. Although I seem to remember the echo effect is pretty slow to render, so maybe not a great idea.
Secondly, if you’re up for a bit of scripting, you could create enough copies of your precomp to have enough slices to fill the screen vertically, then use a script to offset the layers in time.
Oh wait, what about the time displacement effect? If you create a grayscale ramp, you might be able to achieve the effect without making lots of duplicate layers.
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Hi,
It was having to compress 1080p30 clips that made me finally ditch Compressor (at least the FCS2 version) in favour of Adobe Media Encoder. I just checked and, with AME, you can encode MPEG2 at up to 60fps and even, apparantly, push the data rate as high as 80Mbps! Not that I’ve ever tried playing anything like that back, but it looks like, if you have the hardware to deal with it, AME will let you encode it.
Normally, based on the recommendations of the local Dataton dealer, I stick to around 20-25Mbps for 1080p30, which is fairly conservative, but pretty much guaranteed to play smoothly. For 60fps you’ll probably want to push the data rate a bit higher and, as Walter suggests, maybe encode at a few different data rates so you have some options.
Matthew
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Hi Walter,
Yeah, I forgot to say that we split the large renders into files for each display, so our largest files were 1080p30. Since each display has to display 2 layers of HD (3D background plus an effects layer, kept separate for flexibility) plus some other smaller elements (720p30 and some 640px), it was decided not to risk trying 60fps renders, although the hardware should probably have been capable of playing it.
Matthew
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Hi,
As Walter says, contact the company supplying the player PCs and find out about the specs and, if possible, try and get hold of one or more of the players for testing. Depending on the number of video layers and the complexity of the project (blend modes, effects), you can’t necessarily rely on the specs alone as a guarantee of fluid playback.
As to your original question – I just worked on a project where, with the 60fps playback in mind – we encoded the assets at 30fps rather than the usual 25fps. This has the advantage of smoother playback but without the overhead of 60fps files. This was for large assets (4380x1920px) though, so for smaller elements, you might not have any problems encoding at 60fps.
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Is the Z position irrelevant to your animation? If so, maybe you could use an expression on each layer to set the Z position according to the layer order (layer.index, I think), so each layer in the stack would be slightly further away from the camera, and sort in the ‘correct’ order. If you use a small increment on the Z axis, the change in scale might not be apparent (or maybe you could also adjust the scale in the expression?). Just a thought…
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Turning on that scripts preference worked for me too, on a Mac Pro with CS4 (AE 9.0.3.2) – Thanks for the tip!
Matthew
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Hi Dave,
I was never too clear about the difference between those two plugins, so I just had a look. Card Wipe has a handy Transition slider, which makes it probably an easier choice than Card Dance, which seems to be all driven by gradient maps (although you can use gradient maps in Card Wipe as well).
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Hi Dave,
Ah yes, Card Wipe was the one I was thinking of – sorry about the confusion.