[Steve Roberts]

If it were me, I’d shoot the spot with the dancers wearing some shiny black clothing, some not-so-shiny black clothing, and hit ’em with some light from the side to show reflections in the shiny clothing.

Many post-production problems are are solved in pre-production. 🙂

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Use the pen tool to draw the doodle on a new solid. Add the doodle points in the order in which you would like them to draw onscreen.
Next apply effect>render>stroke, set to “all masks”.
Use keyframes to animate the end point of the stroke from 0 to 100. This will make the stroke appear to draw itself on.

For other methods, search the COW using the search term “signature”. Search the archives as well.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

AE can’t add a layer to the comp when the PSD is revised within PS. You need to import the revised PSD as a comp, then replace layers (in the old comp) manually within AE.

Yes, that would be a nice feature. 🙂

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

You should precomp your displacement map layer.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Studio Artist might be the thing for you:
https://www.synthetik.com/

… or you could apply effect>stylize>roughen edges, possibly reducing the border and scale parameters, then saving as a preset that you name “chalk” or whatever.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

“Can AE and Premiere handle it without slowing the machine down?”

Not sure what you mean by “slowing it down”. Slowing which process down? Photo-JPEG is commonly used for stock footage, so it’s often brought into AE and non-linear editors in that format. However, if your non-linear editor’s timeline is not set to Photo-JPEG, yes, your editor will have to render each Photo-JPEG frame, and that will slow down the editing process. If the timeline is set to Photo-JPEG, then it should not have to render. PJPEG is used as an offline “quick” format by editors many times.

“Is there another good codec for dvd that makes no codec installation necessary?”

Be careful what you say. By “for DVD”, one might assume that you mean for DVD viewing and final distribution on set-top players and computers. Like a movie rented at Blockbuster. I think that isn’t what you mean. You’re probably talking about using DVD-R or DVD+R media, or “data DVD”. If that’s the case, there’s no relation between DVD and codecs. You just want a codec that, for a given running time, will bring your total file size to maybe 4.6 GB or so.

“In my case 40 minutes of video shoul fit on 1 or 2 dvds a 4,7 GB.”

At 89% quality (or so), I have a PJPEG D1 movie at 4.3 MB/sec. 40 minutes of video at that rate would be about 40x60x4.3MB = 10 GB. Reducing the quality slider value will reduce the file size.

You could also try the Motion-JPEG-B codec.

Do some short tests.

But for any of this, Quicktime has to be installed on the machine of the person making the videos and reading the videos. See if you can still install the Quicktime 6 codec — I hear 7 is a little buggy for some people.

Hope that helps,
Steve

[Steve Roberts]

When you use the Continuously Rasterize (CR) button, the vector mask is turned into a raster (pixel) image at every frame, hence, “continuous”. This is good, especially when scaling up the mask layer.

However, when the Stroke effect is applied to that path, the stroke width stays the same even though the mask is being scaled up.

If you try switching on CR for a 3D layer and dolly into it, the mask gets bigger, but the stroke stays just where it is. Odd.

If you leave CR off and scale up or dolly into the image, the stroke gets fuzzy, because the stroke is being applied at the masks’s original size, then the stroke is being scaled up. The stroke effect is a raster (bitmap) effect, which means when it gets scaled up, it gets fuzzy or pixellated.

The best solution is to draw the figure (already stroked) in Illustrator, then save it. Import that AI file into AE, then apply CR.

My 2 cents,
Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Try setting the effect’s “match colors” parameter to “using hue”, not “using RGB”.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

I’m not sure we’re in the right forum here, since we’re out of AE territory.

I think you should check out the Compression Techniques forum on the COW, since you need to look at your Sorenson Squeeze settings.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Is your comp window at 100% and full res?

Steve