[Steve Roberts]

Have you tried taking the Quicktime movie in QT Player, then exporting as “movie to iPod” using the default setting? That plays on my iPod touch.

[Steve Roberts]

Try searching the COW for “hit by a car” (no quotes).

[Steve Roberts]

Are you looking for the “kid stays in the picture” effect? Try searching the COW for that.

[Steve Roberts]

Once you have a mask, try this:
https://www.motionworks.com.au/?p=163

[Steve Roberts]

Make the beer can as big as possible, maybe fill it with sand or something to dampen the bounce, shoot on an evenly lit green backdrop, and try to shoot high speed to get slo-mo.

Actually, they might have used a 3D CG can (Lightwave, MAX, Maya, SoftImage?) to control the situation better. Maybe. I haven’t seen the spot.

[Steve Roberts]

Your AE setup is fine. The issue lies in your DVD Authoring program. Have you posted in the DVD Authoring COW?

[Steve Roberts]

Just in case, you’re saving to new files incrementally, to avoid losing work, right?

Sometimes, with heavy work, AE has been known to do odd stuff. Did you save/quit/relaunch, and go out for a coffee with the computer off? Or trash the AE preferences file after saving your render settings and output module templates?

[Steve Roberts]

When AE separates fields in 25 fps footage, it displays 25 frames per second. To make up those frames, in high quality mode, the fields are interpolated, and in draft mode, the fields are doubled.

When you choose to render interlaced, AE accesses the frames that it did not display (they were *not* discarded) and uses them to render the footage as interlaced again.

Here’s a doc:
https://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/8.0/help.html?content=WS3878526689cb91655866c1103906c6dea-7f37.html

Why don’t you just do a short test? Take some interlaced footage, do nothing, separate, don’t separate, move it around, blur it … do a number of combinations .. and render as interlaced. If you want to check the field lines on rendered test footage, re-interpret its field sep as “off”. Ideally, you should also view the result on an interlaced monitor.

[Steve Roberts]

[Bret Williams] “Don’t know what you guys mean by separate. But you must always have AE interpret your footage correctly as either interlaced or field rendered.”

“Correctly” is a matter of, er, interpretation. Sometimes, if you are doing nothing to background footage, and AE has separated fields automatically (by interpreting the footage as interlaced), the footage is softened slightly in the render. In that case it would be “correct” to override AE’s separation and set separate fields to “off” for the footage.

“Interlaced” is the same as “field rendered”, by the way.

Regarding “separating fields”, that is often done automatically when AE interprets on import. In general, we just need to make sure that AE has done its job. However, depending on the format and the interpretationsrules.txt file, AE might not separate fields automatically. In that case, we would need to select file>interpret footage>main and separate fields manually.

“Moving your interlaced video up one pixel won’t hurt anything.”

Moving interlaced video up or down one pixel would switch field order, which would not be a good thing. You might want to do some more research on the subject.

[Steve Roberts]

Regarding separating fields, I’d add that you need to separate fields in **all** situations except:

– when you do nothing to the footage at all
– when you change colors, color-correct or change levels/curves

Basically, any time the original pixels or groups of pixels change shape or position in the frame, you need to separate fields. This includes the times when you are blurring or distorting the footage.

Of course, if you want to render progressive, you need to separate fields even if you’re doing nothing to the footage or just color-correcting, etc.