[Steve Roberts]

Stock footage is usually film shot at 24fps then telecine’d to run at 29.97 fps for NTSC or 25 fps for PAL. If you intend to leave the footage alone (no moving, blurring, rotating, scaling or distorting) you can leave it that way. If NTSC, the footage will have some interlacing. The way to tell if footage is interlaced is to interpret it with field separation “off”, then double-click on it to view it and look for the interlacing.

If you want to move/scale/blur/rotate/distort the footage, you have to separate fields if the footage is interlaced, and you have to remove pulldown if the footage came from film and you’re in NTSC. Check the Help if you don’t know about pulldown. To confirm that you’ve removed the pulldown correctly, alt-double-click on the interpreted footage and step through it with the pageDn key. You should see no interlacing. If you see interlacing, remove pulldown using a different WWWSS (etc.) cadence.

Your graphic may be jumping if you chose the wrong field order (not “field dominance”, by the way) when rendering: upper field first or lower field first. Try the other one.

If the fine lines in your photo are flickering, apply a slight directional blur (vertical, or both horizontal/vertical if necessary) to the image, maybe 1 pixel if the image is scaled at 100%. If you shrunk the image, use a large value: 2 pixels if the image was scaled 50%, 4 if it was scaled 25%, and so on. The goal is to get a blur of 1 pixel as seen in the comp, so the thin lines soften a bit as to not conflict with the interlacing.

Does that help?

[Steve Roberts]

Try importing the troublesome project into a new, empty project.

[Steve Roberts]

1. There are different kinds of flicker. Are you using any interlaced footage? Are you rendering interlaced? Are you using photos with thin lines?

2. awaiting answer to 1.

3. You have to choose a codec that supports alpha channels. That would be the Animation codec.

4. Try Creating Motion Graphics (get ’em all) by Chris and Trish Meyer.

Anyway, please answer the questions in #1.

[Steve Roberts]

I think that AE and FCP have to be on the same box. Now, once AE opens the Duck data, that project can go to a PC, since there’s no more link to FCP and AE projects are cross-platform, assuming other plugs and fonts are there.

Aside from that, I’d recommend posting in the Duck COW forum or writing Wes Plate directly from the Duck website. He’s a straight-up guy.

[Steve Roberts]

Hmm … off the top of my head, if you could make a null follow (pickwhip position expression) the motion sketch, then pickwhip that position to the point of interest of the camera … but then you’d have to … oh, I’m tired. Anyway, if the point of interest moves around, the camera will swing to follow it. How it turns into a banking motion, hopefully you can fill in for me.

Anybody else?

[Steve Roberts]

By the way:

.8 x 30fps = 24fps
.8 x 29.97fps = 23.976fps

FCP’s 23.98 is a round-off — it really means 23.976. Don’t ever enter the value “23.98” into AE, because it will take you at your (inaccurate) word, and won’t think “he really means 23.976”. It will give you a 23.98fps timeline, which is wrong.

Oh, and when FCP says “field dominance” it really means “field order”, which is the correct term. Just had to get that in. 🙂 The difference between the two is left as an exercise for the student.

[Steve Roberts]

Hmm … interesting.

To my mind, this should have been the workflow for the team:
1. capture the telecine’d video at 29.97 fps into FCP or whatever NLE.
2. import that 29.97 footage into AE, removing pulldown in the interpretation. This will allow you to work with 23.976 footage in a 23.976 comp, which is 24P.

[Steve Roberts]

Googling “crash” “after effects” “Open GL” “3D” led to:

https://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb402244&sliceId=1

[Steve Roberts]

You can pick white in the effect settings, no? (use Hue)

[Steve Roberts]

http://www.motionographer.com