[Michael Szalapski]

Good suggestion Dave and thanks for the spelling fix too.
Another thing that might be worth checking is the aspect ratio correction button.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

It’s funny. I only found this feature yesterday. AE is a crazy little thing ain’t she?

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Are you doing these previews by pressing the 0 key on the number pad or by pressing spacebar?
Do you have an AJA card in your computer? (or installed any AJA software?)

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

I’m in complete agreement with those who have posted before me. AE is not an editing program. At all.
Also, assuming you’re shooting HDV, you couldn’t use AE to edit, even if you wanted to.

Dave’s Stock Answer #1:

If the footage you imported into AE is any kind of the following — footage in an HDV acquisition codec, MPEG1, MPEG2, mp4, m2t, H.261 or H.264 — you need to convert it to a different codec.

These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They have keyframes at regular intervals, containing complete frame information. However, the frames in between do NOT have complete information. Interframe codecs toss out duplicated information.

In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide variety of problems.

So even if you were some kind of masochist and wanted to edit in AE, you would be even more screwed by the footage issues.

Yes, Premiere is great for the sort of thing you’re looking to do. When I lived in England I was at a five day event and I had to edit 4 days of footage down to about 15 minutes and it had to be ready to show (WITH GRAPHICS) by the fifth day’s morning session. I was the only crew. Camera, capture, edit, graphics, output…all me.
I used AE for the graphics only, I captured and edited in Premiere.

I made my deadline and everyone loved me. May the same happen for you.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Here’s an AE quick tip (COW video tutorial) that might help you. It works with transparency, not luminance, but it does let you use more than one layer for your transparency control.

If you want more info, or can’t watch the video, here’s the AE help page on the feature Aharon is discussing.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

I agree with Dave, just do it in the codec you use for Premiere.

Also, side note; get more RAM. If you’ve got 8 cores, you need at least 16 gigs to get decent use out of multiprocessing.
Here’s great post explaining that.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

[Dave LaRonde] “You might be tempted to get more RAM….”

Definitely, or at the very least tell AE to only use 4 or 5 cores.

Read what Dave linked all the way through.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

If it’s supposed to be live action, I would think using AE would be considered cheating…

Anyway, to answer your questions, most of what you’re asking is very easy to do in AE.

However, before I start I have another caveat. Getting it done easily does require knowing the program for it to go quickly or smoothly. Understand that AE is not a piece of software like iMovie or Movie Maker that can be figured out within a couple of hours (or days). There is a reason people in the motion graphics industry get paid like we do. It’s not just our design sense; we know how to wrangle this complex program to get it to do what we want and under tight deadlines.

To be perfectly honest, I think you should work in Photoshop, not After Effects, simply because it’ll be a lot more like stop-motion that way. Since you won’t be getting the animation exactly right on each frame it’ll have that lovely, jumpy, analog quality of a real stop-motion piece. It’ll be less cheating and you already know the program. You can even get video files into Photoshop!

However, if you’re determined to do it in AE, here we go:

To get graphics to move behind a person is going to require either filming on a chroma key screen (green screen or blue screen) or rotoscoping. You’re doing what is supposed to be a stop-motion animation so I’m assuming you’ll have much less than 30 frames per second to be working with, so if you do end up having to rotoscope, it won’t be as painful as it otherwise would be.

You mention getting paint droplets to act as a transition. You can either use them as a track matte or simply animate their position.

You also mention something about droplets rising and spinning around to form an image. I haven’t seen the music video you referenced, so I’m just guessing at what that might look like. There are two options:
1. The droplets are somewhat like the metal in Terminator 2 that is very 3d looking and forms the shape of a person in 3d and eventually morphs into being the person.
2. The drops just work in 2d.
If it’s the 2nd option, grand! AE can do that easily with my previously mentioned tip.
If it’s the 1st option…AE can possibly be coerced into doing it, but it will require quite a bit of work.

You can use the puppet tool (as well as other distortion effects such as Reshape) to animate paint splatters to move and change shape. If you just want them to grow on the screen, you could start with a picture of a paint splatter then use a mask to reveal it over time. You might want to take a look at this tutorial about growing design elements.

As far as color blends and things like that go, AE is a lot like Photoshop. There are blending modes, etc.

I would highly suggest trying to learn the basics of the program before you count on using AE for your actual project. A great place to start is the AE manual. You can either read the file that comes bundled with the software or you can read the online version (which gets updated with new info and has great links to tutorials and other resources on the web). Another great resource is the AE Basic Training available for free at VideoCopilot.net. There are also lots of good books out there – such as the ones by Chris and Trish Meyer and some amazingly good DVD’s – such as the ones from Total Training. Also, don’t forget the great tutorials here at the COW.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

I’m not quite sure I’m following your problem, but how about render comp 2 out then import it into AE and tell it to interpret the footage at 24p?

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

You have 0 choice on what resolution you will get from a DVD. I don’t care if you’ve designed your footage at 4k film resolution so it can play in a cinema, DVDs are stuck at NTSC or PAL standard definition resolutions (720×576 in PAL’s case). Both of them will look crappy on an HD screen (unless you’re using an upconverting DVD player, but even then it’s not going to look nearly as good as your original animation).

Besides being much smaller resolution for DVD, MPEG-2 is a compressed (lossy) format. Now, with a video as short as you’ve got, the compression won’t do too much to it, but that much smaller file size is to be expected.

Now, if you want your video to play as you’ve designed it, in HD, you have two options:
1. Make a Blu-Ray disc instead of a DVD
2. Create an HD Quicktime or Windows Media file and play it off a computer that’s plugged into the screen.

If, however, neither of those options are workeable for you, you’re going ot have to deal with an SD
As Jon mentions, it would be better to downsize your video to standard definition in After Effects and render out the SD QT from there rather than having Encore downsize it.

Speaking of Encore, Encore can easily be used without menus. Just set your video’s timeline in Encore to be the first play option and set its end action to be itself. Then it will play as soon as the DVD player reads it and it will keep looping. (Look in Encore’s help for first play or end action for how to do these things if you need to.)

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.