[Paul Carlin]

Also try benchmarking the hard drive speed to see if there’s anything unusual. Try defragmenting, or even better, reformat the drive. Try a different Firewire port. Try benchmarking a firewire drive using the same port to see if there’s a bottleneck in the firewire. Just some suggestions.

[Paul Carlin]

My two cents…

First… When you created the master at 59.94 from 23.976p material, you introduced inconsistent cadence. What this means is that the pulldown sequence changes from one shot to the next. It is impossible to remove this cadence after the fact due to the fact that there is a very good chance that you hit a split frame at the first or last frame of any particular edit. There are two split frames and three whole frames every five frames, so the odds of this happening are very high. Since the split frame contains only one field of the progressive frame, the resulting progressive frame will be an interpolated fuzzy image.

Second… When you made the decision to record standard pulldown, and not advanced, you also hit upon the reason that advanced pulldown was created to begin with. In any camera recording system, a high level of compression is used to record the images. In your case, this was DVCPRO HD at 100MBps. When a motion vector based codec encounters split frames the codec will behave differently that when it encounters a progressive frame. Without getting too technical (too late for that), the resulting pulldown removal process needs to reconstruct one out of every four frames from two separate split frames. This leads to a progressive sequence of three clear frames followed by one slightly fuzzy frame. Advanced pulldown (2:3:3:2) eliminates this problem by encoding four progressive frames and one split frame, which is actually ignored completely.

Third… When you copied all the MXF files into the Avid MediaFiles folder, you broke the folder structure of the original P2 cards and left the XML Metadata behind… and presumably thrown away. The XML metadata tells Raylight what media is on the P2 card… and without this you can only convert the MXFs individually… if at all. You will lose the ability to keep the audio and video together.

The solution…

If at all possible, find the original P2 cards with their native folder structure intact. Use Raylight to make 24p native media from these P2 cards. If you trashed the P2 cards, then first reflect on this and learn from the experience, next try to convert each MXF individually. If that fails, then you are in for a hell of a time. See below.

Next, export an EDL from the 59.94/29.97 project and convert it to a 23.976 EDL using a program like EDLmax, Autodesk Smoke, or even a program that came with Avid DS that I can’t remember. The sad thing is that Avid has absolutely no workflow for this. Even worse, the EDL Manager sucks so bad that getting a 23.976 EDL back into the Avid is a real chore and next to impossible.

If you are successful at getting the EDL converted to 23.976 and into the avid as a legitimate sequence, you should be able to relink to the 23.976p media and output a native 23.976 show. Don’t feel bad if you can’t accomplish this because you are not alone. I will reiterate that Avid has NO workflow and does not provide the proper tool set for this common task of converting a 30i project into a 24p project.

Should this fail. then another option is to export each individual clip from your sequence with 2 head and tail frames added, remove the pulldown and re-conform the sequence at 23.976 manually using a reference guide that your frame rate converted. This was eluded to by previous posters and far to complicated to explain in one sentence.

Last, you can pay lots of money and have someone else deal with it.

[Paul Carlin]

I too, am getting the same error with Zaxwerks Invigorator.

Just a guess, but it seems to occur when I have more than one 3D element in the scene at a time. I rendered each seperately and it worked… having to combine them all in the end (Use precomp proxies to make this easier on yourself).

Cofig: HP xw8400 Dual Quad Zeon 2.66 with 4GB RAM. /3GB switch with USERVA=2900 to allocate 2.8 GB RAM to AE. NVIDIA Quadro FX 5500.

[Paul Carlin]

Everytime I run into one of these limitations I realise how great a much more expensive tool like Smoke is. Smoke allows you to track individual vertices as well as the shape axis. It also gives you advanced gradient controls like your PV Feather plug-in. Once you are spoiled with having these tools, it’s hard to go without them.

[Paul Carlin]

Personally, I try to bid per job, not by the hour. Be sure to specify the number of revisions before additional charges apply in the contract. This is the sure fire way to get the client to stop making changes… when it will cost them.

To answer the question, I don’t think it would be good to put that as a line item on the invoice. Pad the regular hours to make up for any time you lost, and bill only for one thing… work.

To avoid the render hit in your situation, look into using PROXY images. You could resize the images to something reasonable (in Photoshop) and tell After Effects to SET PROXY to these smaller images. This saves you the time of re-scaling everything in the comps. Be sure to specify in the render settings to USE ALL PROXIES or the render will default back to the original images. You will also notice a dramatic improvement in your GUI interaction while working with proxies.

[Paul Carlin]

Artbeats has a fantanstic collection of fire elements that I’ve been using since the days of counterwieghts on a VPR-2B.

Artbeats “Fire”

Be sure to look at the ReelFire collections

[Paul Carlin]

What Scott means is that you create an expression for both the scale and position parameters of any 3D layers in your comp. For example, I will explain for novice users:

1) Create a solid that is 100×100 pixels.
2) Make it a 3D layer by checking the 3D Layer Checkbox.
3) Hit P and Shift-S to open the Position and Scale parameters.
4) Alt-Click the animation stopwatch for position to create an expression. Keep the default expression (which says that the value of the parameter is itself) and simply add a /100 (divide by 100) to the end of the existing expression. Type Right-arrow / 100 and Hit the numeric-keypad enter to finish. The expression should read “transform.position/100”
5) Do the same for Scale. “transform.scale/100”

Now whenever you drag the values for position and scale, the object will move 1/100th the distance that it did before, making the placement of objects more feasable. The value shown while dragging is the actual parameter value before the expression. Once you release the mouse button, the expression kicks in and the value turns red.

You can still animate and do everything you did before as usual.

My ideal solution to this problem would be a script that changes the camera parameters and null tracker positions to a more usuable “world” instead of this miniscule environment we live in now.

[Paul Carlin]

I would agree that the Algolith plug-ins are incredibly unstable. I feel like I’m walking on eggshells when working with them and constantly stressed that it will crash on me… again.

However, I too have experiemented with the numerous other techniques and rendered many tests to find out that Algolith’s frame rate conversion is the best, with the least amount of objectionable artifacts. You really need to play with the parameters though, which can be extremely painful given it’s nature to crash and long processing time.

I often re-launch AE, create only one project at a time and never move around the timeline. The pop-ups are extremely annoying and often wrong.

The problem I am having seems to be related to version 7 of AE where the SPEED of the timeline changes when this (and other similar) plug-ins are applied. This messes up the plug-in which expects a 100% speed clip. Why does AE Automatically (and silently) change a layers speed? Is there a way (Prefs file?) to disable this behaviour?

[Paul Carlin]

In QuickTime 7.1, hit Ctrl-J, go to the Presentation Tab and play with the “Conform Aperature to:” In typical fashion, they have all new and confusing terms for what is what.

See https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303928 for a definition of each setting.

Keep in mind that this in no way affects the actual content of the movie, only the presentation of it on your square pixel computer display.

[Paul Carlin]

Whew! I figured it out.

I will never questions my high school teachers again with questions like, “When will I ever need to know trigonometry in real life?”

I created a yellow line in Illustrator and imported it into AE. With a lot of help from Pythagoras of Samos I was able to calculate the angle between the points and the distance. Apply the angle to the line (offset with a zero anchor point on the x axis). Scale along the X axis using the distance times 100 over the lines width.

I realize this is all gibberish. So here is the comp