[Richard Herd]

We call it TRACK TETRIS and it’s quite the debate in the Final Cut or Not Debate Forum. Ask your question over there.

[Richard Herd]

Select them and move them all together. Or you can turn on and off the correct tracks (by highlighting them or not on the left hand side) and then SHIFT-DELETE

[Richard Herd]

Once it’s in the timeline, right click, unlink, select audio, delete.

[Richard Herd]

Oh man what a nightmare!

How many layers and elements do you have?

[Richard Herd]

After Effects is not an editing program. It is a compositing and motion graphics program. As Dave says, you gotta think like that in AE.

Two other short cuts to help you : i will display the first frame of a layer and o will display the last frame of the layer.

Select a layer by hitting the number pad number, 1 (will choose layer 1).
i will display the first frame
2 will select layer 2
Option-[ will “cut” layer two so it’s first frame will display exactly where the playhead is, and since you chose 1 and i, layer 1 and layer 2 will line up.

now, for the last frames:
1
o
2
Option-]

Also: this is worth the $10 https://aescripts.com/pt_shiftlayers/

2 seconds @ 25 fps is 50 frames, but frame 1 is actually frame 0, so your time line is 0-49 (in fames). And it gets more ridiculous in North America where we have fractions of frames. Video electronics are signals measured in Megahertz and we use frames as a convenience — your audio is also measure in samples.

[Richard Herd]

[Eric Chard] “blending mode”

Is my suggestion.

And there is always rotoscoping!

[Richard Herd]

[John Cuevas] “I’d choke the layer & precomp it. Place a solid below that chocked layer and set it’s track matte to “Alpha Inverted”. Then in the final comp use the precomp as the silhouette layer.”

Also applying a fast blur smooths sharp edges.

[Richard Herd]

rotoscoping is a giant pain in the ass for a reason.

The rotoscope tool used RGB values to determine if a pixel is part of the image or not. If the background is similar to the rotoscope, then it gets tough. If the background is choppy (like a tree), again, the tool gets confused.

There are two other techniques:

1. Use the mask tool.
2. Use Mocha.

These are all difficult pain staking-ly tedious tasks, so be sure to charge real money!

[Richard Herd]

[Mayka Mack] “perfect my workflow”

There is no such thing as a perfect workflow haha!

Just to be sure we are not mixing a terms, let’s clear up some details first 🙂 Video codecs are measured in five general ways:
1. Raster Size (also called Image Size)
2. Codec
3 Aliasing
4. bit depth
5. frame rate

We say “raster” and not image size because in graphics applications like AE, we can use vector objects also. Those raster images can be displayed in the image size determined by the display. I won’t belabor that issue anymore, but it’s worth looking into.

Codec is the compression/decompression of the image, but there are two basic kinds: intraframe and long Group of Pictures (GOP). H.264 is usually long gop, when you pop it into AE and it renders an effect, it will render to an I-MPEG format anyway, so transcoding doesn’t necessarily save you time or space — although you can set your preferences so AE and PP share those files and that saves time. Uncompressed footage is so friggin huge, there is no good way to deal with it unless you buy some beefy computers and drive space.

Aliasing is the ratio of luminance to chrominance in the analog video (YCbCr) signal that will be digitized into RGB.

Bit depth is how many bits are in each RGB color channel.

Frame rate.

And now we sound ridiculous when we talk about video: 1920×1080 APR422 LT 4:2:0 8-bit 23.976. or 1920×1080 H.264 4:2:2 10-bit 29.97…and so on.

WORKFLOW

[Mayka Mack] “So my question is thus: for my use case, is encoding my H.264 files to ProRes in AME before importing them into AE the way to go, or is there a better codec to use? Also, is the difference between 422 and 422 HQ here basically negligible, or could it actually make a slight difference in quality? I want to keep the file as lossless as possible, but I don’t want to take up extra storage space completely unnecessarily either.
“

Since you are ripping h.264 (which is probably 4:2:0 at 8-bit), you gain nothing by using apr because you are asking the computer to interpolate any missing information, and moving from 1920×1080 h.264 4:2:0 long gop 8-bit to 1920×1080 apr 4:2:2 i-frame 8-bit means nothing.

Be sure your frame rates are all the same.

In other workflows, where the camera YCbCr (the analog video being digitized) is captured/digitized in 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 then using a different flavor of APR will add noticeable quality.

[Richard Herd]

[Daniel Waldron] “telling a chef his food is really good, then asking what kind of pots and pans he used”

That should be a short film, super funny.