Scott Hathaway
Forum Replies Created
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Here’s what I do using After Effects 6.5 Pro on a PC:
I first open the render queue under Window>render Queue and drag my comp into it. Then I click on the blue text that says “loseless” and to first change the movie format to “quicktime” and then to click on the video output “format options” and change to a codec that renders out with an alpha channel. You’ll know it has an alpha channel by clicking the “channels” pulldown and observing if “RGB+Aplha” is an option. Some codecs with the “RGB+Alpha” option in my version of After Effects are: animation, Intel Indeo Video44, Jpeg2000, none, planar rgb, png, tga, and tiff. I most commonly use the png setting when I want to make lower thirds of a reasonable size with little loss in quality, though the animation codec will get me my lossless video. Then, when I drag my new quicktime onto my Premiere 2.0 or Final Cut 5.1 timeline it overlays nicely. I have never tried it with an Avid.
And that’s how I move After Effects videos with alpha channels to my NLE.
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Thanks to Aharon’s tutorial on scaling z-space you can easily do this by clicking the photo’s 3D switch and adjusting the photo’s z-anchor point. Then mess with x,y,z rotation and watch it orbit! The other methods mentioned before work, too.
-scott
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Pete’s plugins has a halftone effect as well as a multitude of other useful effects. I also like smear.
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If you’re curious to know how to match frame rates in After Effects, Andrew Kramer just posted a nifty tutorial on how to use one of his designed effects to convert one frame rate to another and back again.
It’s not “wow” impressive like he said, but it’s geeky and effective!
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Nice post on the Firestore.
I have actually seen one of them in action before. A friend of mine who had completely tricked out his XL-1 had a 40G hard drive attached to his Firestore and was doing tapeless captures two years ago. He had a problem navigating the Firestore’s menu systems to review his shots though because he had it set up somehow so that his shots were bookmarked by blocks of time instead of individual shots, meaning he was moving around at random. And he actually lost a block of time, for when he went back to check some shots, they weren’t there. It could have been an operator error, but he was pretty sure he pushed the appropriate buttons. It’s a nifty thought, but an expensive tradeoff for a few hours saved a month. 25 hours a month as referenced on the dvinfo site, and at a minimum going rate of $50 an hour for editing, that’s only $1250 saved. If you buy their whole package with battery, mounts, charger and then buy your external hard drives, it would take about three months of steady work to pay off that badboy. And in the meantime you could have been paid for that time if you used tape. Hehe.
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Yeah, when I said uncompressed firewire I meant dv. Hmm… I don’t think I will suggest the Panasonic P2 cards until they’re a few years old. All this new HD technology that is becoming outdated so quickly frightens me. I don’t want to be sinking money into the next polavision. I will be working with Canon XL-1 and XL-2 for a while. I wish the XL-1 and 2 had a port to send uncompressed video straight from the camera CCD’s to a hard drive and bypass the dv tape completely. Does anybody know if this has been done?
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I think you’ll have enough trouble dealing with frame rate and flicker. Project on a screen in a dark room. Use a tripod, obviously. How do you plan on doing sound? Do your client’s films have an optical sound track? Keep an eye on the film to make sure it won’t seize up in the projector and the lamp won’t burn a nice hole in one of the frames.
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You can use a Canon XL-1 and purchase a lens that is fully manual.
I have seen the Fujinon 14x in action and it creates very noticeable depth of field.
Are there any other digital camcorders that allow interchangable lenses with as much selection at the Canon line, without having to buy an adapter and aren’t in the tens of thousands of dollars?
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I prefer this video.
https://www.stubbings.ch/motion/eardismov.html
It seems to me his work is very polished but only has one style. Watch all his clips and count how many times you see the same thing used over and over. Same splatters, same scribbled text, same animated camera motions, same photoshop design, same gaussian blur effect, even the same style of textures. He uses track mattes very nicely and has a mastery of trapcode products, but his work isn’t conceptually phenomenal. This may sound very high minded but I don’t think he is any better than many of the other animators I’ve seen posting here at creativecow.net.
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Bummer.