[Steve Roberts]

You may want to render the footage separately between cuts to avoid weird warping at the cuts.

But aside from that, as you might guess, success depends on the content of the footage.
If AE doesn’t do it well, Twixtor might.

[Steve Roberts]

I hope you’re well-paid for your efforts!

[Steve Roberts]

Indeed.

And to test whether you’ve picked the right interpretation option, opt-double-click on the footage in the project window, then step through the footage with the PageDn key. If it jerks back and forth, pick the other interpretation option.

[Steve Roberts]

When using Remove Grain, it does a pretty good job at the default settings. However:

– try enabling temporal filtering
– by default, the effect samples noise from the first frame of the clip, then removes that noise from the rest of the clip. If you don’t want to sample that frame, change the frame under the sampling tab. Tp see the frame, select “noise samples” in the viewing mode.
– for most situations, the Noise Reduction setting is the only other thing I change.
– to quickly see the effect on/off, take a snapshot without it, then toggle viewing the snapshot as you mess with the effect settings.

It’s not a magic bullet, though. If the footage is too far gone, you may get softening.

[Steve Roberts]

It sounds as if you exported the clips from FCP as progressive, that is, not interlaced (no fields).

In AE when you interpret progressive clips as interlaced (with fields), they go wonky.

By the way, and I’m making an assumption here, when you export from FCP, without having done any effect rendering in FCP, just export in the same codec as the original clip, using original timeline settings. This way the clip will be unchanged when you export. Exporting to 10-bpc Uncompressed doesn’t make the clip any better, just bigger. 🙂

[Steve Roberts]

Hi Todd,

I was able to make do with AE 7 for the demo, though using it did elicit some snickers from the crowd. Good thing I didn’t launch 5.5.

If I really need to install CS3, I’ll take your advice and go to the Adobe user-to-user forum.

Thanks,
Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Indeed.

If you don’t have Illustrator, the height of an equilateral triangle is .866 times the base width.

Right, you math guys?

[Steve Roberts]

Thanks, Dave — yep, I have CS3 & 4 coexisting on another machine, but I installed them as CS3 first, CS4 second. On the laptop, I skipped CS3 and went straight from 7 to CS4.

Maybe seeing CS4 makes it think I have CS3.

[Steve Roberts]

You mean a tetrahedron? A tetragon is a quadrilateral. A regular tetragon is a square. 🙂

Here’s a pyramid tutorial:
https://aftereffects.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=99393

You can use the ideas therein to make a tetrahedron.

[Steve Roberts]

In AE, render to a QT codec (such as Animation) that supports alpha channels. Render with “straight alpha” — it’s a good habit to get into in case you need to give files to other editors more often.