[Michael Szalapski]

Do the people and cars in the shot cross behind or in front of your main talent? If so, you’re in for a fun time! You’ll want to read up on how to do rotoscoping in After Effects.

Basically you’ll need to have your non-moving talent on one layer and your fast moving video on one (or more) other layers.

If nothing crosses your main talent, then you could do a really rough mask around them, but otherwise you’re gonna be rotoscoping.

I did this once for a dream sequence in a short film. The talent was running on a pedestrian bridge in slow motion while the traffic and everything below him was flying along at very high speed. We had planned this shot ahead of time so that all we had to do was put the bottom part of the mask along the bottom of the pedestrian bridge so it looked like a seamless shot.

Planning your shot ahead is going to be key. For example, if you’re going to have cars behind your talent and people walking in front of them, you might want to shoot three different passes.
One of your talent with a green screen held behind them.
One of the cars and other background movement.
One of the people who will be walking in front of your talent in front of a green screen.
That way, you won’t have to do too much rotoscoping; you’ll just have to do key out the green screen. (However, if you’re shooting on DV or HDV you’ll run into the famous color resolution issue of keying with those formats.)

– 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]

When you saycit “doesn’t work” what do you mean? Will it not burn? Will it not play back? Does it play back choppy?
Also, why are you not creating an avi out of AE? It can make them. I wouldn’t make a WMV with AE, but .mov and .avi are the two things I do output with it.

– 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]

Well, you can create an hour long composition. Use your favorite particle program of choice and make snow.

Or you can create a 6 minute composition of snow, add that composition to a five minute comp. Split it in the middle (ctrl+shift+d on a pc) then move the first half to the end and the second half to the beginning and then keyframe the opacity of the top layer so that it crossfades. You can try a whole minute or just a couple of seconds and see which one you like. That should give you a pretty seamless loop. Note; the numbers I chose are arbitrary, so long as the snow comp is longer than the final comp you should be good.

I hope that made sense.
Do you need help with the actual creation of the snow?

– 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]

Do you mean something like animation presets?

– 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]

From Dave LaRonde

Dave’s Stock Answer #3:

Don’t use AE to compress files for final delivery. The various compressors are there only to make quick ‘n dirty files showing a project’s progress to producers, clients, the kids, etc. AE is incapable of doing multipass encoding, a crucial feature that greatly improves the image quality of H.264 and MPEG-type files in particular.

Render a high-quality file from AE, and use a different application to do the compression. Popular ones are Adobe Media Encoder, Sorenson Squeeze and Apple’s Compressor, which comes bundled with Final Cut Suite. Even compressing in Quicktime Pro is better than compressing in AE.

Making good-looking compressed files is almost as much an art as it is a science. It is NOT straightforward at all. I recommend asking a few questions at the COW’s Compression Techniques forum.

I would suggest rendering a high quality/lossless AVI or Quicktime out of AE and use the Adobe Media Encoder or something else to encode the FLV.

– 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 watching the finished product on an SD television?
If you’re watching it on an HDTV or on a computer screen, it’s going to look soft and terrible. All DVDs do.

– 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 might want to be more specific on what sort of work you’re planning to do with it. Outdoor, indoor, travel, interview, ambience, action, dialogue, etc.
Also, there is an audio professionals forum that might be a better place of assistance. Cinematography tends more towards the lights and lenses folk.

– 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 can’t answer your questions as I haven’t tried any of this myself. (Although, the company I work for just asked me to start looking into DSLR video.) But I wanted to mention that the COW has a brand new forum specifically for DSLR shooting. It’s got a lot of interesting/useful information and is relatively active for a new forum.

– 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]

No problem; thanks for letting us know we solved it for you. A lot of people get advice and just run away; we appreciate knowing it worked. You can mark my post as a solution to your answer, it tags it with a green mark so people know your question’s been resolved. It’s a very underused feature of these forums; I, personally, would like them to be more frequently utilized.
Anyway, glad we could help.

– 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. A good track of the pupil would be good. If you apply the track to a null object, you could tie the center of a bulge effect to the null and it would probably look pretty good.

I also agree that learning to crawl before you walk is a good idea. AE is a very powerful and complicated program, it takes a while before you’ll feel comfortable in it.

– 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.