[Shawn Marshall]

Yes, render out of AE with the field order that your video hardware uses. Most NTSC hardware is lower field first. Use the codec that’s appropriate for your hardware.

You can’t frame render something in After Effects and magically convert it to fields in another program; the information isn’t there. When you field render in AE, you’re creating 59.94 fields per second, roughly 60 time slices per second. When you frame render (progressive), you get 29.97 full frames per second, roughly 30 time slices per second. The frame render has half the time slices of the field render, and the field render will look smoother when played back through NTSC hardware onto an NTSC monitor or VTR.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

I, too, have been long hoping that Adobe would add the ability for a single matte layer to cut out multiple layers below it (but not every layer below it.) I think Flash can do this. You designate your matte layer, then you can select multiple layers below it to be cut out by the matte.

Yes, you can precompose, or open up multiple windows, but sometimes it would be easier to just do everything in one comp.

The Set Matte plugin might work in some instances, but not for all. Say you have a comp with 30 layers, and three of those layers are photos that you want to animate and dissolve between, and you want the three photos matted by a rectangle that travels across the screen. If you create a solid rectangle and animate it, set matte doesn’t see the movement. It’s just looking at the alpha of the raw layer and ignores any masks or animations. You could precompose your matte layer, but that defeats the purpose.

The obvious solution is to precompose the three photos with their moves and dissolves, then track matte that precomp with the rectangle matte, but there have been times when I’ve had trouble syncing up the precomp moves with the main comp, so it’d be nice to be able to do it all in the main comp.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Jeremy:

Where do FCP plugins reside? After Effects has a folder called Plug-ins that lives in its application folder.

I found a Plugins folder in the Final Cut Pro System Support folder in the Application Support folder in the Library folder on my system drive. There are a handful of things in there like Text Scrambler.bundle and Title 3D.bundle. Not much else.

Thanks.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Jeremy:

Thanks again for your suggestions. I’ll examine the clips I’m using to see if I can isolate the problem.

I’m not using any plugins of any kind in this project. I’ve never installed any third-party plugins that I know of. Will installed plugins cause problems if they’re not being used?

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Hi:

Thanks for your suggestions.

As a test, I set an IN mark at the start of the sequence and and OUT mark about halfway through (1 minute in). FCP quit about 50% into the export. So then I set the OUT mark at 40 seconds in, but that crashed too. Then I tried setting the IN mark at about 1 minute and the OUT mark at the end, around 2 minutes, and it crashed immediately.

The weird thing is, some of the sequences, which are using the same type of MJPEG-A video, will export okay. I guess I can go in an start removing clips from the uncooperative sequences.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Thanks for the reply, Jeremy. I appreciate it.

I should have mentioned that I did try deleting the render files, with no success. I deleted the render files out of my primary scratch disc, but it still crashed. When I trashed the preferences, the scratch disc defaulted to my startup disc, so I tried using that, and it still crashed. I switched back to my original scratch disc: crash-o-rama.

Fudge.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

What you want to do is scale down your photos in Photoshop so that when they’re scaled to their largest size in After Effects they’re around 100-110%.

Say that there’s a face in the photo you want to zoom into. When you zoom into that face the scaling should be around 100%. If you’ve zoomed into that face and the photo is scaled to around 20% that means your photos are more high resolution than they need to be, and that might be slowing down your renders.

Unfortunately, if you scale down your photos in Photoshop you’ll have to redo your keyframes in AE. You should do a “Save as” on the scaled photos so you can keep your original composition as a reference.

As to why a 20 second movie is 20GB, that shouldn’t be. Are you working in NTSC or HD or what? A 20 second HD Quicktime, uncompressed, might be 3GB, NTSC would be, maybe, 700MB uncompressed.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Thanks for the replies.

Jeremy: The PDF to which you’ve linked is the one I referenced in my original post. The PDF says “We have code in our M-JPEGA support to allow playback of 720×286 SD Upper Field Dominant (“Even”) clips-such as those captured by Aurora.

So, my question is, how do they define “playback?” If they mean smooth, full motion NTSC playback I’m not getting that. If they just mean I can get choppy video out to my NTSC monitor, I’m getting that, but that’s not ideal.

John: My hope was that I could play these Igniter MJPEG-A clips through the Io box smoothly and without rendering. I think you can pretty much play anything through anything if you render it. I’m using a preset for my Igniter clips (720×496, Upper First, Aurora MJPEG-A codec) with the video playback set to ProIO-NTSC US-Component YPbPr SMPTE N10-8-bit 422 (720×486). The clips do play through the Io on my NTSC monitor, but they’re very strobey. I don’t think it’s dropping frames, but it’s hard to tell.

Maybe I should send this to Io support.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Matthias:

It sounds like you want to set up an animation in LW (3D plane model flies by, etc.) render it out and bring it into AE to composite the plane onto real clouds or whatever. This is very easy to do. When you’re ready to render, go to the Render Options panel in LW and select Save RGB. Doing this will bring up a file requester to name and save an image sequence. You should probably make a folder to hold the sequence. When you’ve done this, select Photoshop32 or Targa32 or some other that has 32 in at (as opposed to 24). Selecting a file format with 32 means you’re saving the RGB info (24 bits total) plus an alpha channel (an additional 8 bits=32 bits total). This is like selecting RGB+Alpha when rendering in After Effects.

Render your sequence. Once rendered, import the sequence into After Effects by selecting a frame of the sequence and specify Photoshop (or whatever) sequence.

Your previous posts talk about putting blue in the background of Lightwave and keying that out in After Effects. This is a very crude and unnecessary way to composite your animated object. Just render it out with an alpha channel and it should automatically key perfectly in AE.

I used to render Quicktimes in Lightwave but I now generally render image sequences. I network render a lot of animations now, so I have to render individual frames, but even if you don’t network render, rendering as a sequence would allow you to start and stop a render if you needed to, or it would be easier to resume if the render crashed.

Good luck.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Dan:

Once again, thank you for your help.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics