[Mike Konstan]

I tried it again but the only way I could apply a preset from within Bridge was to select my layer in AE, then right-click on the preset in Bridge and choose “Place in After Effects.” Just clicking on the presets themselves in Bridge or dragging them to the active layer in AE would not work. And the same went for the Favorites I recently made in Bridge. And yes, they are definitely scripts with the .ffx extension.

My usual workflow is the one you guys both use– to save animation presets I either create myself or effects I modify from within After Effects itself. I, too, then access them via “Animation Presets” from within the “Effects & Presets” window in AE.

In this case of this project though, I had hoped to simply be able to quickly browse thru the full list of stock presets visually and to save favorites that I would later test out within the project.

As far as I know, other than accessing Bridge, there really is no other way to do that exclusively from within AE other than to go thru each preset one by one and apply it, undo and then try another. Adobe use to have a handy link to all the text presets looping on one page, so you could easily see the animation for each. But that link no longer works and now it just takes you to a page from the “manual” describing all the effects in text form.

I really thought I had been able to click or drag and drop from Bridge in the past– maybe this is something Adobe did away with on later versions for some reason, replacing it with the “Place in After Effects” command instead.

Thank you for your help with this– I had meant for it to be a shortcut to browse thru effects quickly though instead it has now become a small project in itself! 😉

Mike Konstan
MAK Digital Media, Inc.
Orlando, Florida

[Mike Konstan]

Thanks for the help, guys– this is a rental system that only has P2CMS loaded but I’d rather use ShotPut Pro like you said. I’m already into the 3rd and final day of this project without any errors or major problems so far. And all the media has come in to the Avid fine. So I think for now, I will continue with the workflow I have been using, which ended up just using P2CMS as a way to view/confirm the P2 clips at each newly copied destination, just before ingest into the Avid.

I will keep these suggestions in mind for next time– thank you so much for the help!

P.S. Shane, I haven’t yet read your blog, but I loved the podcasts you used to do. Any chance you’ll ever start doing those again?

Thanks!

– Mike

Mike Konstan
MAK Digital Media, Inc.
Orlando, Florida

[Mike Konstan]

Wow! There are quite a few different options between the Jobo, Wolverine and Nexto Di brands of devices. And I can see where your suggestion of just buying extra cards may be the better option considering the prices of some of these. There is a Digital Foci Photo Safe II 250gb storage unit that is going for a mere $99 that has had quite a few reviews, but I don’t think I’d want to put my faith in something so cheap. Prices overall seem to range between just a few hundred dollars to $2799 for field units.

Thanks for the info, guys!

– Mike

Mike Konstan
MAK Digital Media, Inc.
Orlando, Florida

[Mike Konstan]

FYI: The Cinema Tools conform option only seems to work with progressive footage, not interlaced. I have some 1080p25 footage in the Avid DNxHD codec and Cinema Tools will let me conform the file to 30, 29.97, 25, 24 or 23.98, however, it will not allow me to conform interlaced footage that is XDCAM 1080i50 at 25fps. Could be because of the codec or because it is interlaced versus progressive.

Mike Konstan
MAK Digital Media, Inc.
Orlando, Florida

[Mike Konstan]

Actually I had asked the animation company if I could send them final Quicktimes in ProRes but they supposedly can’t work with them. When I mentioned ProRes in my post I was thinking of an intermediate codec I could use to cut with in Final Cut… I would give them a different codec for final output.

As for the footage, there is about 2 hours total so I want to make sure of a few things before I set off an incredibly long render. I was also experimenting with the Nattress Standards Conversion plugin in FCP which seemed to work fairly well. I know it can be done in AE as well, though I don’t have Automatic Duck on this system so it will be more time consuming to send my clips out of FCP to AE to do the framerate conversion. Just considering my options. I have to get a few elements out to the animation company today so they have some assets to work with for the larger project– I’m also going to call them to ask for more specifics…

Thanks!

[Mike Konstan]

Thanks– it wasn’t so bad once I figured out the workaround. The downside is having to change the native field dominance on each clip one at a time…

[Mike Konstan]

Okay, thanks for the advice guys– the last few DVCPro HD 720p60 projects I cut were as 29.97 sequences, so I just wanted to make sure I was still okay with this 59.94 edit. And besides the DVD, I was concerned about the higher framerate for the web, too. Thanks for the help…

– Mike

MAK Digital Media, Inc.
Orlando, Florida

[Mike Konstan]

Had the exact same error message each time with After Effects CS3 on Snow Leopard. Project shortcuts could never locate the last project file opened, and I could not import anything into the project without getting that message. I did solve the problem by shortening the name of the RAID where my files for the AE project were located. The drive’s name was very long with a hyphen in it. Once I simplified the name, AE seems to be working fine now.

– Mike

MAK Digital Media, Inc.
Orlando, Florida

[Mike Konstan]

I was wondering the same thing. Avid has the “Find Bin” command which I used all the time and is very handy in big projects with lots of clips and bins. Sometimes you want to find similar shots or alternate takes that might be located within the same bin. Simply match-framing isn’t enough– I need to know exactly where to find the bin that particular clip came from.

My work-around has been the following:

1) Click on the tab with the project’s name in the browser to select it. This will enable you
to search the entire project.

2) Search the entire project by invoking the “Find” command in the “Edit” menu
and pasting in the name of the current clip.

3) Click on “Find All”

4) When the search results window appears, select the file you had searched for and click on
the “Show In Browser” button at the bottom of the find results window.

It’ll take you right to the clip’s location in the bin. Be sure to use “Find All” instead of “Find Next”– Find Next only works if the bin the clip is contained in already happens to be open.

I have my Find command mapped to Shift+F1 so it is easy to search for clips quickly. But it’s nowhere near as fast as Avid’s “Find Bin” command, which you can map to a key and find the correct bin in an instant!

-Mike

MAK Digital Media, Inc.
Orlando, Florida

[Mike Konstan]

They tried re-encoding the file using ProCoder on the PC, and got rid of the problem. Of course, they just cranked up the bit rate super high and that’s apparently what did the trick.

My file was encoded at around 1000 kbps because they originally wanted to keep the quality up but the file size small since there were many videos to include in the presentation. The settings I used seemed to be the best compromise, it’s just that we started getting the blockiness on the edge on that particular PC. That file was also difficult to do since it involved slowly sweeping lighting effects that revealed product features in black limbo.

I checked their re-encoded file and the bit rate was all the way up to 16,000kbps! The guys just used the “High Quality VBR” setting in ProCoder and cranked up the Quality setting to 100% as well. So the resulting file looked great, the bit rate is super high and the file size nearly doubled to about 52 mb.

I think they could have increased the quality without taking the bit rate up quite so high– seems like overkill on the data rate. But it works for them…

Thanks again for your help with decyphering these issues, Daniel!

-Mike