[Miranda Yousef]

Hi CharlieX2,

I have a follow-up question about something you wrote:

“They look at me stunned when I tell them a frame grab from Digibeta will only yield about a 1.5″ print in 300dpi…. and that it really will looks like massive crap when you try and make an 8×10 page ad out of it…”

I have been trying to find out if there is a way to grab a 300dpi still from video–I have a film that lives on 35mm, HDCAM SR and DigiBeta as its final formats. If possible, I’d like to avoid going back through my film negative or workprint. I have heard that if you grab a frame from DigiBeta (or even from the HDCAM SR), it will be 72dpi no matter what. Is that true?

If not, how can I get a high-enough resolution still?

Thanks in advance for your help.
– Miranda

[Miranda Yousef]

Hi all,

I’m at my wit’s end–I’ve been trying to render my
comp for almost 3 weeks now and I can’t get it to
work!! I’m coming up on a deadline very soon and I
really need help.

The Project:
I’m creating an opening title animation sequence for a
35mm film. I used LARGE Photoshop files (ca. 7200 x
5500 or thereabouts), imported as layers into AE so I
could animate the layers. The end result needs to be
at 2048 x 1556, so I set up a new comp at those
dimensions and fit each pre-comped segment (there are
4) into the smaller comp to maintain resolution
(sometimes I zoom in on things, etc.).

The System:
Power Mac G5 Quad (PowerPC), running AE 7.0
Professional on OS X (10.4.10). When I first started
I had 512 MB of RAM, quickly realized I needed more,
and upgraded to a current total of 4.5 GB. (Yesterday
I ordered even more so as to max out my RAM–I can go
up to 16 GB on this computer–but then found out that
maybe AE won’t recognize beyond a certain amount of
RAM anyway. Is that true?)

The Problem:
I need to export a series of DPX files at 2048 x 1556.
After I installed my new RAM, I broke up the export
into 4 segments. 3 of the 4 have been able to export
without a problem and are complete. The fourth simply
refuses to export even a single frame. Keeps giving
me the image buffer error.

I probably should also mention that at the same time
as I installed the new RAM, I hooked my computer up to
a so-called “battery backup” which failed in the
middle of the night. Up to that point, the export had
been going fine. I don’t know if the sudden power
loss to the computer screwed anything up.

The Tragic Attempts:
I tried resizing my original PSD’s, but when I
connected them to the AE comp everything went
crazy–layer positions were off, child-parent
relationships seemed to create problems, etc. I don’t
know if there’s a way to maintain RELATIVE positions
instead of ABSOLUTE ones when you resize the source
doc, but I didn’t feel up to tweaking everything all
over again.

I looked at the following website about this error, and re-assigning RAM usage etc.
(https://generalspecialist.com/2006/11/avoiding-after-effects-error-could-not.asp)
…Did not work for me. (I am unable to split up my PSD images because I use all the layers.)

I also tried really lowering RAM cache and memory
usage as per the following:
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_thread.cgi?forumid=2&postid=891369&univpostid=891369

…but I don’t have an Intel processor, and it hasn’t
solved my problems.

I trashed my prefs and restarted. No luck. I tried
exporting 2 single frames. It wouldn’t even do one.

Somewhere in here my error message started to appear
with a sheep’s bleat. This seems fitting in an
existential, God-is-laughing-at-me kind of sense.

Sorry for the long e-mail, but I really need to figure
this out. I have to deliver this right after Labor
Day, and I have limited time to work on this.

Please help!!!

Thanks,
– Miranda
Power Mac G5 Quad/PowerPC
4.5 GB RAM
AE 7.0 Pro

[Miranda Yousef]

I’m having the same problems as Beau. I’m cutting a feature shot on DVCPro HD 720p/24, and last night my assistant and I stayed late trying to get the damn deck to digitize at the proper frame rate (as indicated in the FCP Browser window). We found that SOME clips captured correctly and others did not, and it was completely hit or miss.

We had used Compressor to try to convert clips that had imported at 59.94, and it worked on some of them, but the 8 clips we worked on last night didn’t come out right in Compressor (hence the recapture attempt).

We’ve had problems using the Panasonic Frame Rate Converter plug-in… not sure why.

Any new developments in the last 4 days?

Thanks.
– Miranda