Michiel
Forum Replies Created
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Well if after all you find yourself prepared to spend at least some money, you simply cannot go wrong with the book “Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects” by Trish and Chris Meyer
I think most people will agree that this is one of, if not THE best intro to AE (and actually still very handy as a resource when you’ve become a pro at it)
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btw it’s definitely possible to simply pick-whip the source text property to that of another text layer. If you want to link colour (or other properties) as well, you can use the text animators. Just add an animator for fill colour, now you have an animatable fill colour property that you can use the pickwhip on to create an expression.
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you could also precomp just the text and use the precomp for all the 50 instances you’re gonna use. The if you change the text in the precomp it will obviously change in all the instance of that comp.
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you cannot usually play animation codec in realtime unless you have a very fast computer. When you say uncompressed do you mean something like Blackmagic Uncompressed (10bit) codec? What kind of video hardware are you using? Are your sequence settings corresponding to the material? You can set the correct field order for FCP by ctrl-clicking on a clip in the bin, then item properties – format. If you exported lower field from AE, it should say lower field in FCP as well and your sequence should be lower field too obviously.
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DV is lower field first while Digibeta is upper field so yes you have to keep this in mind. Personally I would first cut the dv, simply export that as dv (without recompressing) from FCP, import that into AE and make sure it is interpreted as lower field first. Then do the graphics and composite in AE and render the whole thing out 10 bit upper field, ready to import into FCP and digi.
Personally I have had some bad experiences combining progressive graphics with interlaced video. If you want to do progressive graphics I’d try and deinterlace the video as well (although without using specialised plugins this will cost you in image quality)
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also, when you’re copying paths from photoshop or illustrator into AE, be sure to paste them into square-pixel comps, otherwise the masks will not line up.
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benefit of QT over avi on a pc? probably none really, unless you have to be compatible with mac. Otherwise I’d stick with avi
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thank you 🙂
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first of all, Quicktime and Avi are just “containers” as such, with the ability to contain video footage compressed with different codecs at different data rates.
If you’re on a pc you’ll probably want to stick to using .avi (unless you have to move the files to a mac) and if you’re on a mac you have no choice other than using quicktime. Both formats can use the same codecs though. So it’s not a question of whether the avi or the quicktime is better for a specific task, it’s the codec that matters. You can make avi’s with the animation codec as well. That is a very common option for moving files between After Effects and an editor like Premiere because the image doesn’t lose quality. At the very end of your production you can then compress it to a lower quality format for playback on DV tape (dv codec), DVD (mpeg 2 codec) or internet (various possible codecs like sorenson or H.264) -
or you could render out from AE as animation and then let FCP render to DV. This way you’ll always have a high quality, uncompressed master file to use if you ever need to compress it to a different format. (like mpeg 2 for dvd)