[Steve Roberts]

Search the COW for “judder”, then get back to us.

[Steve Roberts]

Field Render settings are in the Render Settings in the Queue, not the Output Module.

… just to be technical about it. 🙂

[Steve Roberts]

1. It’s Comp settings, not Sequence settings, by the way.

2. When you Make Movie, look at your Render Settings in the Render Queue. This is where fields are made or not.

3. Sorry, but it’s “field order”, not “dominance”. They are two different things.

4. How do you know your rendered movie is Upper Field First? How are you viewing it? In which app?

5. Where is field order set to off? In which dialog?

[Steve Roberts]

Adding to David & Dave’s advice:

a) Don’t bother. If they can’t pay you, their company name would probably be meaningless on a reel. Just make up a graphic animation that looks good enough to pay for, and there’s no need to include a company name. Look at the reels on motionographer and elsewhere — not all of them show client names.

b) It should be made up of the best stuff you’ve got, whether it’s all client, all self-directed, or a mix. If your client work sucks (or you don’t have any), don’t show it. Above all, the reel has to hold the viewer’s interest. If it doesn’t do that (too many clips from the same job, clips too long, dull clips), then you need a new reel. If you can’t hold somebody’s interest with your stuff, learn how … or learn to accept a role as an operator, not a designer.

[Steve Roberts]

Heh — no worries on the precise thing. 🙂

So you used AE to render an HDV clip which you then dropped into FCP?

Try importing the “bad” AE clip and a “good” clip back into AE and check their settings. Tell me if they match. I suspect that the AE-rendered clip may have the right frame size and rate, but not the right codec. Let us know what you get — do the clip characteristics match exactly?

(and I didn’t mean that RAM was an issue — I meant that the hard drive might not be fast enough to play back a high-res non-HDV-compressed 1080 PAL clip)

[Steve Roberts]

Until somebody else (like Todd) answers, I’ll have to do: leave them as sequences. Generally, getting frames from disk, whether stills or movies, is not the biggest part of a multi-layer render. The biggest part is the number of calculations required to render each frame of the final piece. It’s the same for a RAM preview.

But … if you have time to spare, don’t take my word for it. Do a render test with the Render Details visible. After it’s done, add the time it took to make the QT movie, then compare.
(Make sure the QT movie is neither MPEG nor HDV.)

[Steve Roberts]

Do the files that you rendered in AE match the settings of your sequence in FCP?
What are the settings of the rendered files, and the sequence? (include codec)
What do you mean by “not play back properly”?

(If the files stutter on playback, maybe your drives are too slow to play back the files)

[Steve Roberts]

Oh, yes. No character. What do you expect for a quickie?
(that long? Yes, I know …)

The cam doesn’t have to move, you could parent everything to the head (or body) and move that, and yes, it would be the way to do it for a scene. Yes, sliding everything with no rotation can work as well, but takes move time, but if sliding parts around just to get a 3D perspective is the plan, it can be done more consistently by actually placing things in 3D space. Then you can slide them around if you still want to do that.

But yes, if the movement is done by hand with no 3D-space help, it looks more handcrafted, and looser. And fun.

[Steve Roberts]

How’s this? AE and shape layers, in 3D space with 3D camera.

[Steve Roberts]

I think that they’re all flat layers, composited in 3D space. You could do this with Illustrator and AE, as you’ve surmised.

Moving away from the camera, we have:
1. eyes & nose, also eyebrows and possibly mouth
2. head & hat & hair
3. ears

… all layers can be parented to a null or the head, which is then moved and/or rotated. Maybe the camera moves, but there’s no need for that unless you want to do it. By the way, note how the layers don’t actually change shape when they move. Maybe the eyes & mouth are Motion equivalents of a precomp, whose contents change to change expression.

Those are my thoughts, anyway.