Steve Johnson
Forum Replies Created
-
I didn’t think about a motion control setup. I’ve seen one of those in use before. Really cool stuff. I think that’s the only way they could have done that commercial effectively. A chroma key’d actor would be a very poor way of duplicating the effect I’m thinking of. The talent in the shot could in both takes come through the same door, for all practical purposes, at different times. I suppose you could rotoscope some footage over an original plate, but the depth of field and angles of your shots would not be the same with a handheld rig between takes. and the talent would be all over the place unless you figured some way to properly stabilize the chroma’s position on the background. I’ll bet they used some sort of computer controlled camera, then did a difference matte or a careful matte process to overlay one take on the other.
CS3 – Mac
C4D -
Do you have the sound layer enabled? (speaker box beside layer name on the left) If so, do you have audio export enabled in your render settings? If you get sound in your ram preview, then you should focus your efforts on the render settings. Audio is not enabled by default for the render queue. Goto output settings and make sure Audio is checked.
CS3 – Mac
C4D -
Like Kevin said, internal scsi/sata/sas drives are much faster than firewire/usb. In practice there is much lower latency on the internal PCIe bus. Going through USB is like going through a shared medium, so it is definitely not good for AE. Firewire is better, since it’s a host to host based protocol, but you have the overhead of firewire commands on top of sata/ide/scsi protocols, depending on your drive. This makes all drives on FW or USB slower than native. If you are using a FW drive as part of your composting process, it will definitely slow you down and I suggest you target your external drives as your rendering target or offline storage. it will save you much time and program sluggishness.
CS3 – Mac
C4D -
David’s suggestion is good. I would do very similar, but instead of animating the POI for the camera, which could lead to camera angle issues, just aim the camera down at the 8k map and set it a fair Z-distance above the map. I would do a simple expression pickwhip of the camera’s X & Y positions to the arrow’s X & Y position. This way, if you move the arrow, the active camera always stays on top of the arrow.
Or, align the camera over the arrow layer. Parent the arrow layer and the camera to a null layer and animate the x/y of the null.
CS3 – Mac
C4D -
I’ve had the same issue on a few occasions in the past. If you are exporting a comp that has audio sync exactly like you like within AE, chances are it’s being exported properly. Try exporting 1/4 resolution, a lower bitrate audio and a compressed codec like mpeg2. The resulting media should be very small. When you play this back, it should be easy for the workstation to play this media file. You should have sync. If the sync goes awry when you export in your chosen codec combination, it’s simply a decompression issue in your media player. I’ve never had an issue where After Effects exported out of sync. It always turned into a problem with my media player trying to play the file as exported. Must have been too big, or too high bitrate, etc.
You can also try to export normally, import that file into FCP or Premier, then render out into DVD or .mov. That will probably have sync as expected, proving that your original media was fine.
As a last bit of troubleshooting, something I’ve had to do on occasion is put in a frame-counter effect bottom frame. Find a few spots on the timeline that audio peaks or something of note happens. mark the frame number/timecode displayed. Insert a few frames of 12dB tone or something notable at that moment on the audio track. Then export. Goto that frame on the exported movie, and click play. Should hear the beep when you hit play, which means the audio is exactly in sync, but wanders off when playing.
CS3 – Mac
C4D -
What is your export process? Are you exporting with a codec that supports alpha? If so, perhaps you should ensure you are exporting with a straight channel, and not premult, if you are going to be matting against wide range of background colors.
Also, double check that when you enable the transparency grid in your comp what you see as transparent is what you want.
CS3 – Mac
C4D -
So all was fine under view. BUT, I did the refresh, and heard a click and thought for sure that would fix it It didn’t. But your comment about selecting the output mode made me click NONE as the mode, then go back and click 720p 59.97. This going from none to 720 10bit, and re-enabling all frames brought it up.
Much better! Thanks for the help. I am constantly amazed at how helpful people on this forum are. Much appreciated. I never would have thought to disable and re-enable w/o your suggestion.
CS3 – Mac
C4D -
Ahh.. that’s a little better.. 🙂 Thanks.
CS3 – Mac
C4D -
Nesting was a feature I was not seeing. It’s not well spelled out in the user guide either. Luckily, the Avid handbook 4th edition will arrive today.
I think my .png image sequence is taking so long because it has 3 passes at the sequence which includes an alpha, which is interpreted inversly as compared to Adobe. That was a bit of a stumbling block…. 🙂 But I’m finding that image sequence import is not working well. It does not have the edges of alpha clearly defined like premier does on image import. I need to get source in a video file for some reason. Perhaps compressing to this Avid DNxHD codec… From what I can tell, it is supposed to be lossless compression. Good enough for my purposes anyway, I think. Will experiment there. I’m not 100% sure if it supports alpha.
Thanks for the info. By proxy it clears a lot of things up. I have a chroma project that I’m going to pretty much throw myself into the fire with Avid. But I have the luxury of some extra time, so worse case I’ll just redo in Premier. But I think I’m getting the hang of basic editing. I will say that it is 10x more stable than my premier seems to be. I don’t find myself always drawn to save every 30 seconds because a crash might happen.
CS3 – Mac
C4D -
I was wondering why the tracks were all pink. I do have an outpoint set on the timeline. It’s there because I wanted to export only that range of my timeline to a .mov. But I guess using 3point editing rules, I have to change that a bit once I’m done with that. I’ll try removing the outpoint on the timeline and click the insert(v key) and make my first edit.
This makes a lot of sense. So far, I’m liking Avid MC. I can tell it’s more powerful than Premier, and the effects are 10x better than what I can do in Adobe. But the GUI is just a bit laborious. I’m used to the snap-to in Adobe, makes lining up beginning and ends of clips easy. Haven’t seen that yet in MC, but I’ll find it I’m sure.
I bought an Avid MC keyboard cover, so I’m going to start trying to use it. The whole “try not to drag/drop” is like loosing a limb for me, so I’m going to need some help! I’ve been a mac user for ages and in Mac world, you drag/drop! I’ve got a few Avid books coming from amazon, and watching the online training at Lynda. So hopefully I can get up to speed soon!
Thanks for the help! I think I’m going to get to know you guys in this forum pretty well…. >:) I’m still working on getting keyframing audio/video and effects basics..
-steve
CS3 – Mac
C4D