[Shawn Marshall]

Hi:

Thanks for the reply. As I mentioned several times in my post I have tried animating the color in the alpha channel. An alpha with the value of 255,255,255 (white) creates a pure white, 100% alpha. An alpha with the value of 0,0,0 (black) makes most of the alpha zero, but some parts remain with 100% alpha, depending on the orientation to the camera.

Could you download the C4D file I posted and confirm what I’m getting, which is partial alpha on frame 0 and no alpha on frame 10, even though the alpha is set to 0,0,0 throughout?

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Hi Brian:

I think you’ve solved my problem, thanks so much for your reply.

Shawn

[Shawn Marshall]

It looks like part of the problem is the DVCProHD video, which seems to behave differently in CS3 and CS4, even when tagged as HDTV (Rec. 709) in both programs. The same video captured into an Avid via the HDSDI output of the deck (as opposed to a direct FW transfer) maintains the same gamma in both CS3 and CS4. I wonder if one of the programs is assigning some invisible tag somewhere.

Thanks.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Thanks for the reply.

I’ve spent most of the afternoon reading about these various project setting changes on Adobe’s help pages and some info Trish and Chris Meyer wrote. It explains the theory behind the scene-referred profiles, which is all well and good (and I’m not using that feature here), but it still boils down to which application to trust, CS3 or CS4?

It seems to me that if I import a DVCProHD Quicktime into a project with HDTV (Rec. 709) color settings and tag the QT as HDTV (Rec. 709) it should have the same visual appearance in both CS3 and CS4/CS5 on my calibrated NEC PA241W LCD monitor. It doesn’t. That same piece of video appears slightly brighter in CS4/CS5. Does that mean everything I’ve done in CS3 for the past few years will look overly bright on other systems because it was displaying the gamma incorrectly?

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

How about the Apple ProRes 4444 codec? Do you see that as a higher-quality (12-bit) alternative to the Animation codec?

Thanks.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Ah, the joy of the pun…

Thanks for the replies. I’ll float this approach by the producers.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Okee-dokey.

The bummer is I’ve saved a lot of these animations with these compressed audio formats over the last year. All in all it probably won’t be that big a deal since we edit our reels to music, so I don’t really need to edit in the original audio.

Thanks for the replies.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Hi:

Thanks for the reply.

I’m not so much worried about output from FCP; I want a compressed audio format that works well upon import into FCP.

What I’m doing is opening up these old animations in Quicktime Pro player (or Compressor) and exporting them to the ProRes codec. I’d like to use a compressed audio format to save space, but none of the compressed formats I listed above will play in FCP without rendering. That seems weird. FCP can play all sorts of video codecs real time without rendering, but it can’t play AAC or IMA audio without rendering?

I still think I’m doing something wrong.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

I’ve been using 6.0.5 for months now and this just started happening to me, too. I hide it, and then I can’t get it back no matter what I do, and I end up having to force quit the program. I don’t have Spaces activated because it didn’t work very well for me (OS 10.5.5)

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Hi:

Don’t know if I can be of help. All my old Igniter clips were compressed with the Aurora MJPEG-A codec; we didn’t have the uncompressed option. We can still open those clips thanks to the built-in Apple MJPEG-A codec. I don’t know if there are any current codecs on the Intel Macs that will open your uncompressed clips.

Your best bet might be to track down a G5 or G4 Mac, open the clips on that and encode them to another codec like the animation codec or 10-bit uncompressed or something.

Good luck.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics