Mike Jackson
Forum Replies Created
-
Great to finally have an answer for this! Thanks!
-
Well, the first shot with a particular effect is always the trickiest… and (at least for me) often unpredicatable. But once you’ve gotten a good track, set up your compositions for keys, mattes, video screens, etc.,you should be able to bang most of them out using the same pipeline. Depending on how good the motion track was, and how complex the videoscreen graphics were, I could see it taking as little as a few hours or as much as a couple of days to get that first one working perfectly… assuming the rolling shutter doesn’t throw you a curve ball.
But once all the screens were positioned in 3D space, it would be a lot easier to use that information (even just as a mental guide) to crank out the rest.
As far as Boujou goes, I’m not sure of its current availablity, or if there are demos. I got my copy many years ago, and it still outperforms anything else I’ve tried for this kind of shot, 70% of the time. Plus it lets you input your lens values in mm, rather than AE’s awkward ‘angle of view’.
-
I’ve done a lot of shots like this… and you certainly have your work cut out for you.
Some people here may have other opinions, but I don’t think this is a good job for Mocha. If I were doing these shots I’d use the 3D Camera tracker (added in CS 6 I believe?). Or better yet, if you can get ahold of a copy I’d use Boujou. Either way it’s a problem best solved with a full 3D solution, so you’re effectively mapping out all your monitor locations in 3D space, and thus having them move in and out of visibilty is much less of an issue.
That said, you’re still looking at a lot of finessing. It looks like the camera this was shot on has a rolling shutter – Not as bad as on a 7D, but the jello-cam effect will definitely affect how well each screen stays where it’s supposed to be. Not a lethal problem, but you’ll probably have adjust the positions of all the screens subtly during pans and zooms.
Do you have camera focal length data from the production?
-
Sorry guys, I never found a solution (or even a response from anyone, as you can see from the empty thread). My current work-around is to import everything into AE CS 5.5 (which I still have on my system), which works correctly. Then I save and re-open the project in CS6 and proceed from there…
-
Cool, good to know. As someone who’s running a business, it’s a delicate balance for what makes a good update frequency – I want things to keep improving and adapt to changing technologies, but a certain level of stability is *also* mandatory.
So, solve the problem with access to old projects, using software that I will have effectively already paid money for, and I can happily roll with the rest. 😉
Unless every other company adopts this model too, and suddenly I’m facing a $1000 monthly bill just to keep working…
-
I don’t post often, but I just have to weigh in here too. Not a day has gone by in the last 15 years that I haven’t used some Adobe product, and I have a lot of the same concerns as others here. With the downturn in the industry in Vancouver, I’ve had more than one month in the last couple of years when I would NOT have been able to make a $50 payment. I buy my software and hardware upgrades when a big job comes along, with a nice fat paycheck.
But my other two issues are:
VERSIONING – Sometimes something just stops working in an upgrade, and it’s not uncommon for me to have to go back to an older version of AE to get something done. Keep in mind that plug-ins get out-dated too, and more frequent updates might make it a lot harder (and/or more expensive) to keep your plug-ins functional and up to date. And I sure wouldn’t like to have to face the monthly bills if ALL my software goes this route. Yowch.
CONTENT OWNERSHIP – I am *incredibly* unhappy with the idea that Adobe can lock me out of my old projects unless I cough up some dough. That’s just not cool. As unlikely as it may seem right now, I need to know that if Adobe goes belly-up, or pulls a Final Cut X and changes the software to something I don’t want to use anymore, I can still access my back catalogue of projects, no strings attached. That’s a deal-breaker for me.
I’ll throw out an idea though Dennis – that second issue could be solved for me if after paying for an entire year (or even 2) of Creative Cloud, I got permanent usage of whatever version I’m currently on. Make it rent-to-own, and I’m onboard.
-
Wow, a bit disconcerted that no one’s said anything yet. Has no one else had this problem?
Further testing shows that this issue is specific to AE CS 6. Went back to 5.5, end everything performed correctly. No pre-comped clips, speed changes all came through.
Is there some blindingly obvious toggle in CS6 I’m missing?
-
Addendum – I’m working with 24p DPX sequences on this current project (though I’ve had this happen in every file format I’ve tried). But every precomp sequence for all my 24p footage is being created by AE at 23.976. That is BAD.
-
The project that’s giving me the most trouble was largely shot on the RED Scarlet, and so I did originally start with that, using 1/2 res playback to check my dailies and organize the footage. It worked great, and it was only when I started actually cutting that everything fell apart. So I moved to ProRes transcodes, but things didn’t get much better.
In this particular case though, 1/2 (or lower) res isn’t an option. We shot this music video with a lot of wides and no guide track, so I have to sync everything by eye. Which I’m normally very good at… but I need to see the singer’s lips clearly 😉
And of course, add stuttering playback and audio drift, and I’m just pulling my hair out…
-
Ahhhhh, thank you. You’ve given me a piece of information I needed in order to understand what’s going on, and why seemingly simpler tasks perform worse. Of COURSE, if Premiere is transcoding everything in realtime into 4:4:4 32-bit float, that’s going to take a HELL of a lot of horsepower!
Even when I have mis-matched codecs in FCP, it usually only has to transcode into 4:2:2, 8-bit or 16-bit, which is all I need while cutting. I save 32-bit float for when I hit color correction (or occasionaly VFX rendering).
It does make me wonder though, if Premiere might benefit from being able to set a per-sequence preference for how high-quality that realtime transcoding is. Or is that what the sequence settings for ‘maximum bit-depth’ and ‘maximum quality’ are all about? I had assumed that referred to the quality of preview renders, not general playback…?
Mind you, turning those off doesn’t seem to bring my performance back to life once ‘the wall’ gets hit. Overtax the RAM once, and Premiere is dead until a relaunch…