[Simon Tyler]

Thanks Simon, of course you’re right.

I’ve tried it again using just Track Points and it worked first time. I wasn’t initially sure that Motion would offer me two trackers to position, but it did, I applied the Write On behaviour afterwards and it’s fine. I have a few more of these to do and it will be a lot quicker than the first one! Thanks for helping out.

[Simon Tyler]

Thanks Simon for your advice. I now have a track and line that works! I deleted the old Bezier line and started again. I didn’t need to use keyframes, but used the Analyze Motion track points that I’d created for the rotating earth. So this was what I did:

1. Applied Analyse Motion to the rotating earth footage, placing the first tracker on the point where I wanted my bezier line to start, and a second tracker where I wanted it to finish. Clicked Analyze and got some good tracks.
2. At the right point on the timeline drew my bezier line with the first control point on the start location and the second on the end location. I used handles to give it a curve.
3. As you suggested, applied the Track Points behaviour to the bezier line. I made the Analyze Motion behaviour the Source and selected Mimic Source.

When I ran it this time, the curve on the bezier line didn’t flip around at all, but retained its shape, just what I needed!

[Simon Tyler]

Thanks Simon. Track Points doesn’t work for the rotating earth which is a graphic and has no control points. It doesn’t work on the bezier line because that’s not yet moving in the right way.

It almost works when I take the two tracks I made using Analyze Motion on the earth graphic and make those the source for the Track Points behaviour on the bezier line. But the bezier curve flips to a completely different shape after the first couple of frames and can’t be edited.

[Simon Tyler]

Thanks Peter. I’ve learned the hard way on this one!!

[Simon Tyler]

Thanks very much Peter. I tried out your Compressor droplets in the early stages of testing, but unfortunately didn’t stick with them. The end-to-end workflow I ended up using included a separate step to conform all the footage to 29.97fps, and at that time, I wasn’t sure of exactly how much of the conversion the droplets would take care of and how much other processing I needed to do.

I also tried out a Timestretch droplet on the entire edit yesterday, just to see what would happen. Of course it didn’t sync up with the audio, so yes you’re right, I would need to go back to the original files and start again to sort it.

Simon

[Simon Tyler]

Thanks very much Dave for your advice – I’ll check out the posts on Compressor.

I certainly never think any of this stuff is simple and I realise that transcoding to 1440×1080 was a bad idea. I followed the only neatly presented step-by-step workflow I could find on the web. At least I still have the original 5D files in case I need to do a second edit.

Simon

[Simon Tyler]

Thanks Gary. No the edit won’t be broadcast, I’m making a Quicktime file of four edits I want to loop at an event for marketing. I’ll be playing them on a 23-inch screen, so they need to run smoothly.

I’d like to use Compressor or MPEG Streamclip as you suggest, and I need to convert the pixels from rectangular back into square pixels. I’ve exported direct from FCP using Quicktime Conversion to a ProRes file, and the image is nice but it judders. Perhaps the conversion from 29.97 fps to 25fps is causing this.

Thanks for the advice about Natress – I’ll give that a look.

Simon