[Mike Cantor]

Thanks Dan! After writing the post I found a plug-in that writes the expression for you as well as gives you some other options:

https://aescripts.com/the-loopmaker/

-mike

[Mike Cantor]

Thanks so much! I’ll take a look at both of those options. FYI I found a script that scale recursively. Don’t know how well it works.

https://aescripts.com/recursive-scale-comp/

[Mike Cantor]

Thanks again, Dave. What would you suggest as search terms to look it up by?

-mc

[Mike Cantor]

Thanks Dave!

My question was more about the render result, not the time of rendering. Here is my I actual issue

I have a comp (call it “CompA”) at 720 that contains footage that is scaled down to about 25%, which has a million tiny adjustments in the form of position changes, paint corrections, etc.

I want to recreate this comp at 1080. Of course the easiest thing to do would be to drop CompA into another comp and scale it up. But will I lose resolution this way? If the rendering engine sees footage that is scaled to 25% in one comp and then rescaled by %150 when that comp is nested in another comp, is it smart enough to do one scaling operation, or will do the 25% scale first (losing all that resolution) and then do the second scale?

Thats really the question I am asking for each of those three scenarios.

-mike

[Mike Cantor]

Ahh – Precomposing and using Refine Matte on the resulting comp that does have alpha info. That should work. Thanks!

-mike

[Mike Cantor]

I think you just answered the question yourself of why it doesn’t work. Neither the layer being used as the matte nor the layer being matted have anything in the alpha channel. They are both completely opaque. That’s why Refine Matte as an Effect applied to either layer individually does nothing.

-mike

[Mike Cantor]

That doesn’t work. Applying Refine Matte on a Track Matter layer looks for a Mask *on the track matte* layer. Since there is no mask it doesn’t do anything.

Applying Refine Matte to the layer that’s being masked also doesn’t do anything — I guess it’s looking for a “Mask” within the layer and doesn’t apply to affect to a matte mask.

-mike

[Mike Cantor]

Forgot to mention: it looks fine on the computers dvd player

[Mike Cantor]

Thanks again,

The piece is stop-motion — it’s build from stills that I imported and set at 30fps.

I followed Walters instructions — dropping the comp into a 720 x 480 d1 composition but the resulting video is cropped on the sides on three dvd players I tested it with!!! For authoring I am using Adobe Encore. I tried using both the 720 x 480 d1 and the original 1280x916sq as input and the video was cropped the same way in both cases.

I am tearing my hair out trying to figure this out as the deadline for the SF indie film festival is today! What can I do?

Thanks again,
-mike

[Mike Cantor]

Thank you so much Walter!

I did exactly that and I’m rendering away. My original comp was actually exactly 30 fps. I hope I don’t get any wierdness from importing it into a 29.7 fps comp. If I’m not happy with the quality I will try Resizer.

I also tried Dave LaRonde’s suggestion here:
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/974010

on setting the output white to 234 and output black to 16.

cheers,
-mik