Roman Flute
Forum Replies Created
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Your on the right track. Take a look for the transition points – There are several – first one is a tree, and then the next is a road sign. That could take you from one long pre-comp to another. Very flash looking – but the softness is like Photoshop. But you could use several landscape comps to animate and then marry them together… I get that type of look a lot of times with Illustrator elements – and then play with them a lot in AE. You can get some interesting art…
RF
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Most of your 3D apps should be able to do that for you. Takes a little bit of work to make everything nice and clean. The texture (the rough edges) will be just that – a texture. A simple plane with a texture that has an alpha.
The flash end – most likly is importing as an FLV. You gotta keep it short – because your load times go insane. You then shift to a still after that. But just a simple and nice incorporation of several elements…
RF
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Shooting the stuff gets some real cool options. If you can’t then there are some options – similar in look. Several years back I did a water like deal – what I did was make some illustrator elements – like branches of a tree – did them in off colors fading to lighter colors at the ends. I used a color key to control the growth – allowing in more lighter color – the tips and outsides were the lightest so it grows like water spreading. Then had a blur over it. Applied it as a mask on some other footage. Real trippy looking. Very watery in nature. Also did a little bit of displacement as well. Just a thought… Have fun with it…
RF
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If you want further below seconds then you can use the old “numbers” plug in – you will find it with the old text in the menu. You can animate it by value and have decimal places if you want – whatever. If not something smaller that a second – why not just a piece of text every second?
RF
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Not really understanding your precomp method. I usually find something to track before the subject enters the screen and then move to track the subject once it can be locked onto good. And then vice versa on leaving. There is cleanup and depending upon the contrast (nice trackpoints have contrast so it is easy for the software to maintain a point of ref) of your subject – it can get kinda messy. But I usually still modify most my tracks – sometimes the motion is a little jagged – so it is an automated help if you will. But AE does pretty good for most my stuff – go to bigger packages for real 3D tracks – but your sign replacement shouldn’t be that hard even at an angle.
RF
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What is your output? If it is mpeg2 – you might have some non NTSC legal stuff going on. If your video is to hot – you get pink and green pixels around the edges. Just scope it and make sure it isn’t out of whack. Just a thought… Haven’t ever really seen it with other outputs.
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Fields are fun! Wait until you get to play with pulldown!!!
Seriously,
Video is based on fields and will be in the future since the main HD concepts are interlaced as well. If you don’t pull the field out – they are still there because your imported video is exactly what it was before you imported it and it can cause all sorts of interesting effects. You need to deinterlace the footage. That way you can put it with other elements and it will play nicely. Every thing I render out has fields – if I am staying on the computer I just rip them out in the compression stage.
DVD elements. Everything is video. That is all a DVD is. Your still frames are converted to a MPEG video element. There is such a thing as progressive – but we will stick with the interlaced right now. The MPEG encoders are looking for video with fields when they convert. That is what everything is based upon. I tend to use motion menus on all my DVDs so a rarely use a still frame – but if I do use a still frame I make sure that all the elements are video friendly – no thin lines and such. That will cause jitter. Small text with serifs. Stuff like that will cause you headaches – looks great in QT but horrible in video.
Your AE work going out with fields will look fine. It is original so it has never had fields. Your video you are adding – you have ripped the fields out so it merges fine. Render out with fields. Lower Field is the more typically used order = DV, etc… You are just accomidating how a TV builds the image on the screen. The DVD player is acually converting back an MPEG file to an NTSC signal – so it is putting the fields back in. An MPEG is not a 29.97 video but rather a sampling of that video arranged in a “Group of Pictures.” If you want more on that – the term is GOP. To much info… it will give you complete brain fade.
Check out your Encode settings as well and make sure they are lower field. Also – check the setting and turn of the field option and encode what you have and see if it is liveable. There are all sorts of places you can shoot yourself in the foot. Once you have the process down – you won’t have a problem. I just built it into my workflow.
Have fun! Hope that helps a little. It is complicated – but it isn’t. Just something we have to deal with.
Roman
Roman Flute
FMEDIA -
I have had to reset my prefs before – ae would lose all the import dialogues and such and some menus wouldn’t work.
The pref folder should be at C:\Documents and Settings\(username)\Application Data\Adobe\After Effects\Prefs\
should be a txt file named AEPrefs.txt
Move it out of there to your desktop and start AE again. See what happens.
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Also you need to make sure you output in the same res they need. Was worse with the older avids – and they are still out there with some smaller houses. But mainly you are making your editors happy. If you give them an AVID codec – the AVID is happy and imports right in. If it has to convert it – they gotta run and get some coffee and may take longer than that. But ask them what they are working in – if they are rough cutting I give them that version first – then give them the final in whatever flavor. Sometimes I have 2:1 for corporate work and uncompressed for commerical and so on.
Roman