[Mike Smith]

Standard cinema projection is at 24 frames per second. Or, as Jean-Luc Godard put it, “Cinema is truth 24 times per second.”

[Mike Smith]

Heavy compression, reduced image size is the order of the day I guess.

If you stick with Quicktime, maybe half of people browsing will have Quicktime Player – and a fair bit less than half if you go for the excellent quality-for-small-file H.264.

Mpeg 1 video is widely playable but not particularly good quality, nor small file sizes.

Flash video, especially in recent .flv file format and using the VP6 codec, gives pretty good quality for small files, and the Flash players is well supported in a high proportion of browsers.

Tough choices.

[Mike Smith]

Is there a reason not to import the native DV straight to AE and use its deinterlace / processing tools ..?

[Mike Smith]

Line up the inpoints so that there’s the same gap from inpoint to first waveform. It sounds like a scaling up / rounding effect – it’s not affecting the sync, right, you’re just talking about the visual rep on the timeline?

[Mike Smith]

Layer handling is very different in Painter, isn’t it. And with Painter movies how it works when you change from frame to frame seems to vary according to chosen brush, and its type of coverage.

I haven’t worked out how to make it predictable (though I guess there must be a way!), and try to keep everything on one layer, or at worst flatten each frame to a single layer before leaving – not really too big a limitation.

I find it sometimes helps to have an open, multiple layer image / composition to copy and paste out of, as a source to stick things into the frame stack.

[Mike Smith]

AE does this fine on Windows. Select Blackmagic output to get output to / from your Blackmagic card, or IEEE1394 output to get output fire your firewire connection, and plug up your monitor accordingly.

[Mike Smith]

AE project settings that exactly match what your incoming footage is and what you want your outgoing footage to be will give best results.

So if your footage is DV, set up your project and compositions using the appropriate PAL / NTSC DV frame rate and composition preset, watching for widescreen / standard pixel aspect ratio. If it’s something else, pick presets to match.

There should be no scaling issues.

AE will take in and spit out just what you ask it to. So long as your footage comes in, is interpreted correcly with source fields acknowledged and rendered as per perset with field rendering enabled at best quality, your source footage will only be affected by whatever effects or transforms you apply.

[Mike Smith]

The program Painter, yes. It’s a free-standing program, not any kind of plug-in, and sfaik there’s no way to use it inside AE. https://store.corel.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=10102&mpe_id=11368&jspStoreDir=CorelUK&intv_id=13061&partNumber=OL_PF09&evtype=CpgnClick&langId=-11&catalogId=10805&ddkey=ClickInfo&trkid=ukgrgopa2

BUT the brushes are fabulously powerful, there are superb liquid and distortion effects, and Painter has a couple of reaally good animation tools for short effects scenes.

It allows for frame by frame animation with onion skinning and output to mov / avi files at whatever size / scale / compression the host system allows. So you can make effects you won’t often see anywhere else.

And its scripting feature allows you to create a “painting” or graphic (using most of the Painter tools available, though you may have to be careful and what Paitner plug-ins you choose and use) and then “play back the whole creation process, ending up with the image creation as a recordable animation…

Worth exploring the demo, if you have time to get used to the quirky interface and want to be able to make distinctive work.

[Mike Smith]

Your question might be better in the AE Basics forum; it sounds like it’s not really a Vegas issue at all.

You don’t need a frameserver. You just need to render from After Effects at high quality and in appropriate settings for your (Vegas) project.

Export in After Effects offers less control and quality than Make Movie, which should be your default choice for outputting footage to edit later.

It sounds as if you’ve probably captured DV footage. When you use the AE render queue / Make Movie dialog, make sure that your settings are the appropriate PAL or NTSC DV presets, with field rendering turned on and the appropriate frame rate.

Speeding up: when you view preview footage in AE you ONLY get a actual -speed preview if you use the RAM preview option. Otherwise, AE renders out the frames as fast as your system allows – and with plugins in use that can be just a few frames a second. So make sure to RAM preview, or render a test file and check the rain speed …

[Mike Smith]

I should have added that a dynamic range processing effect / audio compressor may be a good choice of tool for you – either this works well at PPRo track level too.

In PPro you could play with the EQ, the Dynamics or the Multiband Compressor filters.

If you double-click on the effect name in the audio mixer window the effect controls window will open. You may just want to boost the quieter sections of the sound, leaving everything else “as is”. If your music features a voice and you want to pull that forward in the mix, the Multiband Compressor lets you pick out a frequency range and emphasise that one set of sounds …