[Sam Freeman]

Yep. That would be a better way to write that…

:0)

[Sam Freeman]

One other way would be to precomp your master composition and then do a time-remap on that composition to the desired length. This should adjust everything across the board without having to worry about layers cutting off once the keyframes have moved.

However – it will do a speedramp on any footage in that comp. If you have footage in that comp you either use the methods outlined in the other posts, or work out the maths involved with making your time-remapped composition 50% slower speed and your footage 50% faster to compensate (think that’s the right way round…) This gets confusing though!

I always thought it would be a cool function in After Effects to be able to select a segment of a composition and stretch/squash it preserving relationships between all keyframes and in/out points. Could be a really useful tool…?

Cheers
Sam

[Sam Freeman]

Hi Walter,

Thanks for that excellent (and very clear) explanation of what is going on. The bottom frame is exactly what I was hoping for.

So that’s bringing the 32bit TIFFs I’ve rendered into After Effects – which is great. So if I wanted to avoid the step of rendering out 32bit TIFF’s and reimporting the sequence I can still retain the look of the ProPhoto RGB colour space by rendering out from AFX but specifying the Colour space to export to?

So I could render a 16bit TIFF sequence – as long as I assign a colour profile such as Rec.709 in the colour management dialogue? Is my understanding accurate? (I’m rendering so I can’t check it out, but I will asap).

Thanks for your time – this is really helping!

[Sam Freeman]

I’ve uploaded some example stills of what I’ve got going on.

5258_pictureassets.zip

There are 3 stills and a screengrab of my settings

Item 1: My output from a linearized colour space.What I want!
Item 2: A 16bit convert in photoshop and the colour space not embedded on save. What I want!
Item 3: An output from after effects with preserve RGB selected What I don’t want!
Item 4: Screengrab of settings when using colour management

I find if I bring the 32bit stills into AFX and export 16bit I get the result of item 3. If I go via photoshop I get Item 2.

[Sam Freeman]

Thanks for all you input guys. I have been playing around with the various output settings and I do find that After Effects seems to somehow mash the picture – really crushing the black channel down and removing a lot of the colour hue. Whilst photoshop leaves the image reasonably the same. It’s like After Effects is being really smart, but doing more than I need it to…

I’ll keep trying various options in the colour output dialog and let you know if I see a way through.

Cheers
Sam

[Sam Freeman]

I guess my main questions is how can I help retain the look on an output – I know it’s probably not possible to do it entirely accurately, but the benefits of working at this high depth seem vast in terms of how things look. So it would be great to try and use it more often – and that means getting it out of the program.

I know ProRes is only 10bit, but at least my offsite director can see that… :0) And it would be great to avoid working through photoshop to resample them to 16bit then ProResing them, but After Effects always seems to overcomplicate things!

Maybe I’m asking for the best of both worlds. But they are both so nice…

[Sam Freeman]

Ok, so I’ve got the TIFFs and they look great. I’ve found a workaround in that I go into photoshop, run a batch file convert on the TIFF to convert them into 16bit and remove the colour profile.

I can then turn these TIFFs into a ProRes file to show the client using FCP and it retains the majority of my look.

But surely this can’t be right? Seems a bit cluncky.

[Sam Freeman]

Thanks Vishesh, I’m rendering another test now (using TIFFs) so I can’t check now, but I’ll look at that in a bit. Surely if it’s set to current then it should be automatically in 32bit (as that’s what I’m working in).

The Tiffs are looking good, but my concern now is turning those TIFFs into a deliverable format… I need to show this to the director and then deliver to the edit…

[Sam Freeman]

Aha – I’ve found it. If you go to your preferences>General there is a tick box that says ‘Pen shortcut toggles between Pen and Mask Feather tools’. Untick this and your ‘G’ key will toggle through all the pen tools.

[Sam Freeman]

I never actually found a solution for this – I’ve put it down to another small glitch in CS6 which I have to put up with. The benefits of CS6 do generally outweigh the downsides, but I find this so very frustrating. Nothing I do seems to make a difference…

Let me know if you find anything!

Thanks
Sam