[Robert Dodson]

Hmm, thanks for the suggestion. I actually downloaded the Twixtor trial last week but the impression I got from working with it was that it doesn’t look even remotely as good as the Pixel Motion in Timewarp, and it doesn’t have nearly as many fine-tuning controls. I didn’t try generating the motion vectors separately and feeding them into other effects though; that might be good to look into. I’m sure the trial hasn’t expired yet.

[Robert Dodson]

Huh, I had never heard of datamoshing before. The mechanics behind the effect he discusses there are conceptually very similar to what I was thinking, but I’m not looking to make something characterized by compression artifacts and rainbow colors.

I’d be working with clips with small controlled movements; my intent is for a gradual warping of the target clip without mixing in any colors from the source clip; the end result would be only an effect on a single clip, not a way to blend or transition between multiple ones.

I believe it would be possible to accomplish what I’m thinking with Pixel Motion, if it is possible to induce the same motion vectors in a different clip, but if not, messing around with compression encoding is more hassle than I want to put into it.

Edit: Is “Warp Layer” in Timewarp supposed to accomplish what I’m thinking? The official description is a bit too vague for me to make sense of, it doesn’t seem to come up in tutorials, and I can’t make sense of it by just messing around with it.

[Robert Dodson]

Unfortunately the new .mov file still skips. Any other ideas?

[Robert Dodson]

Hi Angelo,

At the beginning of the output I was getting a couple errors:
“Using MS style audio codec tag, the file may be unplayable!”
“[mov @ 00000000057A77E0] track 1: codec frame size is not set”

This was followed by Metadata, including chapters, and then
“Could not write header for output file #0 (incorrect codec parameters?)”

I tried disabling the audio stream with -an and used -vcodec to only copy the video stream. This worked correctly, but CS5.5 still won’t import the new file, calling it “unsupported format or damaged file”. CS4 wouldn’t import the new file until I changed the extension to .avi. I threw it onto the timeline and checked it quickly and it hasn’t skipped yet, but I’m too caught up in other work to do anything comprehensive at the moment. I’ll check back later.

[Robert Dodson]

Will that fix skipping? My understanding (I forgot to say this) was that h264 skips because it is not frame-accurate and therefore is no good for editing?; however during my research on this problem I discovered some HD video cameras record in MP4 natively, and it sounded like PPCS5.5 supports these files.

Anyway, I’ll try rewrapping with FFMPEG, thanks.

[Robert Dodson]

Alan,

Thanks. Yes, if for example you set the in point to 3:00 into the effect, it has to preprocess 3 minutes of particle effect just to know where all the particles will be for the first frame.

[Robert Dodson]

I figured out the solution to this problem! I was making new adjustment layers, which filled the whole timeline, and then arbitrarily trimming the clip towards the middle. It turns out the later in the clip you put the playhead the more processing it has to do, as it basically processes the entire effect up to that point (even if the clip was trimmed) to determine the positions for the particles. So if anyone else has this problem, make sure you only trim off the END of the clip and have it start from its original start point.