Nathan Walters
Forum Replies Created
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RedGiant has a plugin called Instant4k that allows you to upscale images and it does a good job at sharpening lines and dealing with aliasing, in order to improve the quality of the upscaling. You should download the trial of it and see if it helps you get the results you’re looking for.
Nathan Walters
Halo Union Productions
https://www.HaloUnion.com -
I’m self taught in After Effects. I never really read any books. I basically watched every tutorial on VideoCopilot 3 times. Every tutorial on CreativeCow about twice. And RedGiantTV has many great tutorials as well. And misc others. Then did vfx/motion graphics on misc indie projects or for small businesses. Still, I would say it took 3 years before I had the skill set to create anything really valuable and original in After Effects. But well worth it though, as I find it significantly easier to find paid After Effects jobs than anything else in the post production world. Mainly because so many people are so terrified of it. And most of my biggest clients have come from doing After Effects work as well.
I would say at first I watched the tutorials and followed them step by step. But later on, I just watched them, for the sake of getting through them quicker, for better or for worse. I would probably recommend a healthy mix of both. A lot of tutorials don’t offer you the necessary footage, so those you can hardly follow along with anyways.
I’d put in as many hours as I could afford. If I had a ton of other work that day, I may work a couple hours on tutorials in the morning. If I had an open day, I’d do tutorials for a whopping 9-12 hours, until literally my eyes would start twitching. Basically treating it like a full time job.
Nathan Walters
Halo Union Productions
https://www.HaloUnion.com -
I know the differences now but there was definitely a time when it was all too confusing. I definitely think it’s a differentiation a lot of people would find helpful to have a better understanding of.
Nathan Walters
Halo Union Productions
https://www.HaloUnion.com -
That’s odd that it starts out fine and then slows down to a halt. Are there any effects/plug-ins you’re using that could be problematic? The render isn’t uniform and can easily slow down and take longer as it approaches things like motion blur, depth of field, or effects that take a lot of processing power. So not sure what you’re exporting though. Do you have other programs open eating up your RAM?
Nathan Walters
Halo Union Productions
https://www.HaloUnion.com -
I think Jeff hit the nail on the head there. That should fix it I’d imagine.
Also, here are the recommended encoding settings. Although from what I can tell, your settings seem right. It would be a good thing to reference though.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en
Nathan Walters
Halo Union Productions
https://www.HaloUnion.com -
Also, I’ll add:
Depending on how close up the shot is to the face, it’s sometimes beneficial to use a luma matte so that an adjustment layer isn’t affecting all the pixels evenly but is affecting certain parts of the face more than others (the lighter parts). Which, depending on where the fireworks are in relation to the rest of the lighting, could be more realistic or less realistic. But primarily it makes things look not so perfect and even which can help sell realism. It’s worth looking into.
I do a lot of similar things for muzzle flashes and what not. Basically I use an adjustment layer with a mask and a relatively high amount of feather. And just have to look and think what all surfaces would be affected by the fireworks light. Probably more than just faces.
Hope that helps in some way! 🙂
Nathan Walters
Halo Union Productions
https://www.HaloUnion.com -
That is very odd indeed?
Are you using H264 the wrapper or H264 the codec?
What is your graphics card? I’ve had problems encoding out of After Effects because certain effects weren’t supported by my card. So may want to look into that.
If you can only export 7 minute chunks, is it possible to export it in 7 minute chunks, and then re-piece them together for another export with the different chunks connected? That way it’s maybe less cuts and more compressed, and would require less processing power.
I’m definitely no expert but will help if possible!
Nathan Walters
Halo Union Productions
https://www.HaloUnion.com -
I couldn’t agree more. This has been a heavily requested feature for a long time and it’s disappointing to hear that they haven’t fixed this. I was using Resolve yesterday and had the exact same issue. Especially when applying power grades, nodes can be everywhere and it’s really a pain to manage.
I’m no expert but it seems like a fairly simple feature. But I guess all we can do as of now is cross our fingers.
Nathan Walters
Halo Union Productions
https://www.HaloUnion.com -
I haven’t done it since CS6. But used to you would open the video in the source monitor, set an “in” point for your sync point. Then open the audio file into the source monitor. Set an “in” point for your sync point there. Then when you go to “Merge Clips,” there’s an option to sync them according to the “in” points. That merges them correctly.
Nathan Walters
Halo Union Productions
https://www.HaloUnion.com -
What settings are you choosing when going through the “merge clips” process?
Nathan Walters
Halo Union Productions
https://www.HaloUnion.com